Sara Sheehan’s guest in this episode is Sri Chellappa, Co-Founder and CEO of Engagedly and host of the People Strategy Leaders Podcast. Sri Chellappa talks about Engagedly and the purpose behind its development while highlighting the importance of employee engagement and the right kind of performance management. Developing and maintaining talent requires a transparent and interactive approach which Sri elaborates on for Sara.
In his previous work in IT consulting, Sri discovered that many employees were not feeling appreciated or recognized for the right roles in advancement, and many of them didn’t understand where their organization was headed. Engagedly was created to fill that gap: to assist organizations in delivering better engagement at every level of employee and management. While software alone cannot solve the problem, it can provide a platform and guidance from which organizations can become more employee-centric. And that is what Sri believes is the necessary future of workplaces.
In this episode, Sara Sheehan and Sri Chellappa discuss what transparency means within an organization, how true transparency builds trust with employees, the pros and cons of performance evaluations, and why they both believe mentoring and coaching are necessary components to success. Sri has a lot of practical insight into employee-centric thinking and how to best use performance reviews for employee improvement and relations with the company overall. He sees the trends in Engagedly and also talks about what businesses are facing on his podcast. The wisdom shared here is invaluable to moving a company towards more meaningful engagement at all levels of the organization.
About Sri Chellappa:
Sri Chellappa is the CEO/President and Co-Founder of Engagedly, an AI-enabled people strategy platform software that redefines performance appraisals by simplifying and incorporating elements of employee engagement and development into the performance review process.
A passionate entrepreneur and leader in building high-performance organizations that care about their people, Sri brings over 20 years of experience in leading organizations in software development and consulting in the U.S to his current role. Having developed an extensive amount of experience from managing teams in his previous roles at EY and Capgemini, Sri understands the value of investing in employees and the overall impact it not only has on their individual performance but the success of the company. As a result, he continues to use his leadership skills to make influential decisions that will impact employees, helping them to stay engaged and develop the talent that they need to succeed and advance in their careers.
With a unique background in technology, people management, health IT and film writing, directing, and production, Sri brings a diverse set of experiences across industries and specialties to build highly engaged organizations.
Career Highlights:
- Author of the book: “The Black Book of Agile Project Delivery with Distributed Teams”
- Writer/Director/Producer of 6 Feature Films distributed theatrically and via Netflix, NBCUniversal, Fox International, Showtime, Amazon Prime, Sky, and various international channels.
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Resources discussed in this episode:
- “The Performance Management Revolution” by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis, from HBR October 2016
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Contact Sri Chellappa:
- Website: Engagedly.com
- Podcast: People Strategy Leaders Podcast
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:02] Hi there, I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I am talking with my friend Sri Chellappa about his focus on talent development, employee engagement, and performance management and finally coaching in all that he does as co-founder, president and CEO of Engagedly and so Sri, I would love to hear a little bit about the backstory that led to you creating Engagedly.
Sri Chellappa: [00:00:39] Yeah. Thanks, Sara, for having me on your show. Really looking forward to having this discussion. It’s been a few times we’ve chatted and it’s been a good conversation so far. Regarding Engagedly, you know, my background actually led me to Engagedly in many ways. My background was in technology consulting. I helped organizations with developing and deploying, you know, different automation approaches to their processes, as part of my role as consultant with Big Five back in the day. And then I ran a IT consulting firm with other partners as well. But we did a lot of work with healthcare companies in that as well. And one thing I noticed a lot during my experience, and I’ve done this consulting work between the two experiences, about 18 years at that point, and what I learned a lot was that many of these organizations that we worked with, or at least tried to work with in some cases, had situations where the employees didn’t feel like they were being appreciated, they didn’t feel like they were getting the right roles or getting the right responsibility, or the management was listening to them or didn’t have clarity on what the organization was going so there’s a lot of uncertainty that was giving them frustration. And I think that was very pervasive back then. It’s gotten better over the years because we have gotten a lot more employee-centric in the last few years.
Sri Chellappa: [00:02:11] But Engagedly was born out of that gap we saw in the market that organizations could use a platform to drive better engagement within their organizations and build better teams and more engaged people that will ultimately perform better for them in the long run. You know, with those investments. And obviously, it’s not just the software that can solve the problem. There are a lot of cultural changes they have to make, management approaches that have they’ll have to change. So that was the initial impetus for starting Engagedly, because the name itself, as it implies, is to, you know, have more engaged employees in the organization. So we started that about nine years ago and over the years we’ve realized that engagement is not just about having, you know, just a badge given to somebody or an award or a plaque or foosball tables and, you know, free lunches and things like that. It’s about every part of the touchpoint an employee has in their journey within the organization, starting with the recruitment process on the way to onboarding and then training, then their experiences with their manager, the kind of psychological safety they have within the organization, their performance discussions and performance reviews, all of that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:03:26] Absolutely.
Sri Chellappa: [00:03:27] So Engagedly became obviously more than just a platform that was driving engagement through rewards and recognition and social connections. We became a lot more than that.
Sara Sheehan: [00:03:37] Excellent. And as you look at how the world of work has changed in the last few years, which it’s changed quite a bit following the pandemic, what do you think is critical for employers to get right in the workplace to attract and retain talent?
Sri Chellappa: [00:03:53] I think the two biggest elements that the management has to do better, and I’m seeing some directional movement in the positive direction there, is build better transparency and trust with the organizations. And I know there are very loaded generic words, seem like platitude, but they really are extremely important. And what that transparency means is not just saying, you know, we’re a transparent organization, you can come and talk to me any time, and things like that, but it’s actually saying we as an organization stand for this. We as an organization have this goal and we as an organization have these challenges, being transparent about the problems and challenges, being also celebrating successes along the way, and then keeping an open, almost like an open book for the employees to participate in and look at. And that’s the transparency, right? Which is saying, this is how we did last quarter. Here’s where we lost a few customers. We lost a few employees. We screwed up here. We didn’t do a good job. But then also here are things we are that are going well and being transparent about it and not trying to, you know, throw it under the rug. The trust part comes from having the culture where you are allowed to have dissenting voices, because some of the best progress comes from disagreements that teams have within, so they can have an open disagreement, agree to disagree and move on. Right? So Jeff Bezos actually talks about this in many of his podcasts is you can agree to disagree. But then you can disagree and commit.
Sara Sheehan: [00:05:39] Mhm. Absolutely. And on the transparency side I would even offer that there are quite a few companies that have started getting extremely transparent about pay practices, where it’s part of the actual recruiting process, where they say, hey, we have really specific pay prescribed for a particular role at a particular level. That’s very open and transparent to employees as they come in that no matter what gender you are, you would get paid the same. Or your level of experience. And so I do think those kinds of things that employers can do make a huge difference. The comments that you have on trust are just tremendous, because I think that employees have gotten to the point where they definitely lack trust in the employer. And so anything that a leader can do to be more trustworthy, to build more meaningful relationships and staff, I believe it will bode well not only for the company’s performance, but for individual performance too.
Sri Chellappa: [00:06:58] Yeah, and trust is built through actions, right? Your words must translate to actions. So if you are saying we are a transparent organization, but you then don’t share any data or you–
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:14] — that’s right.
Sri Chellappa: [00:07:14] — try to build an organization where there’s backstabbing and you tolerate that, or you tolerate toxic environment just because somebody is extremely good at delivering results but is causing a lot of frustration within team members. And you live with it because you’re like, well, I can’t let this person go or move this person to a different role because it’s going to affect our results overall. But it is affecting your results because you’re losing people and their trust in the organization. So trust–
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:45] — that’s right.
Sri Chellappa: [00:07:46] — go together in many ways, to be honest.
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:49] I couldn’t agree with that more. Couldn’t agree with that more.
Sri Chellappa: [00:07:52] You know, the one other aspect I would say about trust is, you know, when you say we care about our employees, how do you show that? Like we are employee-centric, okay, how does that reflect? We are a, you know, diverse organization. We support DEI initiatives. How are you reflecting that within your organization? Are you taking specific actions to do that, you know, and that’s how you build trust, by backing your words with actual actions.
Sara Sheehan: [00:08:20] Most, most definitely, tracking your words with actions and having some sort of a KPI or a measure to demonstrate it from a data perspective that you can share later, which I think, Sri, you even mentioned in an earlier comment as well. So that is absolutely right on. I think talent-based data and analytics are critical to develop that trust and transparency. Moving on, in terms of performance management, because I know Engagedly does have performance management functionality, the process of performance management has had mixed results in the workplace over the years, and many companies have opted even to remove the process from its previous incarnations. So I would be really interested to hear how it is working for you, how that functionality is working for you. I know that there are companies that have removed performance evaluations and end of project evaluations, as well as end of performance year evaluations, which seems like a lot to remove just to get out of the almost, it’s almost causing a brain response that’s negative in the person that’s receiving the feedback. So what’s your perspective on continuous performance management these days?
Sri Chellappa: [00:10:00] Well, let me actually back up that a little bit. There was an article that was written in HBR in 2016, I believe it was written by Anna Tavis and Peter Cappelli, if I remember right, around the case to, I can’t remember the exact title of the article, but it was a case to do away with performance reviews or change the performance reviews to some effect like that. That article actually got a widespread read everywhere. People started talking about it in big, and that drove a lot of changes, because what the authors, Anna Tavis – who’s been on my podcast as well, she’s phenomenal, she’s a professor at NYU – what she said is that, if I remember, is that the annual performance reviews are useless, and they’re actually having the opposite effect of what they should be having. And in most cases, that is actually true. That started the whole revolution of people wanting to not do annual reviews or doing away with annual reviews. You know, Adobe started a big trend around that, and then Deloitte followed, and then there were a few other companies that started doing that. And then that has kind of come a full circle to some extent, where more and more companies did that and then they started doing reviews again. And I think the problem was not necessarily whether you should do or not do annual reviews, it is what you do in the middle. That’s the big one. And that’s where the continuous performance review concept comes into play. If you remove the performance review process and you don’t do anything else, that doesn’t solve the problem. It actually makes it worse as well.
Sri Chellappa: [00:11:32] If you only do performance reviews, what you’re doing is you are looking at having a performance conversation only once a year. And we know that in, at least most humans, including myself, have short term memories better than long term memories. So we remember more of the stuff that happened in the last few weeks versus the thing that happened all year long.
Sara Sheehan: [00:11:54] Right.
Sri Chellappa: [00:11:54] And some of the things that we should have had conversations with them about months ago are not happening now because we probably forgot about it, you know, or there’s only so much time you can have a discussion about it. So annual performance reviews without having ongoing performance reviews is a very bad practice in general, because you are missing out on having ongoing discussions throughout the year. I think my personal philosophy is that you kind of need to do both. The annual review is really recapping your entire performance year’s discussions. It is not a discussion that should be generally be a surprise. You know, I was talking to–
Sara Sheehan: [00:12:30] — exactly.
Sri Chellappa: [00:12:31] Yeah. So I was talking to somebody else earlier today, a CHRO of one of the manufacturing companies, and she was saying that in her first role when she got a performance review, she had to rate herself, and she was completely surprised when she heard what the manager rated her after the discussion. And that should generally not be the case if you’ve been having ongoing conversations, right?
Sara Sheehan: [00:12:55] If you’re in tune with the person you’re working with. Yes.
Sri Chellappa: [00:12:58] Yeah. So I’m a big fan of obviously ongoing conversations, ongoing performance reviews, but they have to be meaningful and they have to be some, and evidence-based to some extent, you know, so that’s why we have the whole concept of real-time feedback in our system. You have concepts of goals and OKRs that have check-ins on a weekly basis, or you review them every quarter and you’re staying keeping tracks of that. We have a tool in our system called meetings, where you can generate and schedule one-on-one meetings with a standing agenda, with an employee and a manager. Those are all different avenues of having these performance conversations with your people, and they should be driven by the data. So this is what we planned on doing for this quarter or this month or this week. How did we do? Where are the obstacles? What challenges are you facing? And then give them coaching on where they might be struggling with, and those kind of discussions, if they happen more frequently, at the end of the year when you’re having annual review, you can, you basically have all this history that you can bring to the table and say, hey, over the last year this is what happened. And we both know about it because it’s, also it’s in the system now. So, you know, it’s not based on some notes we took on a notepad somewhere. A lot more effective performance conversations.
Sara Sheehan: [00:14:08] And I think that is very compelling and interesting. And are you finding that many of your active clients are utilizing the functionality?
Sri Chellappa: [00:14:18] Yeah. So if I look at our customers, we have about 450, almost 500 customers at this point, I believe.
Sara Sheehan: [00:14:25] That’s impressive.
Sri Chellappa: [00:14:26] Thank you. What we have seen is that almost all of them do some sort of an annual or a bi-annual, or some of them do quarterly reviews as well. So they do do that. And about 60 to 70% of them do goal-setting and do goal check-ins and goal discussions. So there’s, and then there’s also concept of check-ins where they can do a check-in with their employees, so they’re doing that as well. So I’m seeing it’s fairly common at this point with our client base.
Sara Sheehan: [00:14:55] That’s fantastic. It’s good to see a little balance coming back into the equation. You know, where people see value in keeping the conversation moving forward. And ideally, if they’re really thinking about providing feedback, that can be constructive and helpful.
Sri Chellappa: [00:15:13] Yeah, I think the balance is important because annual performance reviews got a bad rap because you are not doing the other things in the middle. The answer is not to do away with it, and by the way, you can do away with it as well. I’m not arguing one way or the other, but you. But what I am arguing for that those ongoing conversations throughout the year, that you cannot do away with, that you need to still do, whether you do annual reviews or not. Some organizations want to do annual reviews because that’s the way they can draw a line in the sand and say this, we are closing out the year, this is a review so we know who to promote, who to, you know, give a raise to, and then who we keep in the organization, who we don’t keep in the organization, things of this nature. Right? So they have some kind of a process that is driven by this performance review. So some organizations do it for that purpose. Some organizations do it because that’s the way to also say we close out this performance year, let’s start the new year. And that’s a clean way of doing that. But the best organizations that do it is the ones that use that as a mechanism to say, let’s recap the year. Let’s look at the growth areas based on the last year and your, and your aspirations, where you want to go, and let us talk about that. So using that performance review.
Sara Sheehan: [00:16:22] That’s very powerful.
Sri Chellappa: [00:16:23] Yeah. Using the performance review conversations and turning that into a more effective looking forward conversations, I think that’s what the effective organizations have.
Sara Sheehan: [00:16:33] That is definitely a step change in performance management that I would love to see take hold. And so, Sri, I know that you’re a strong supporter of executive coaching and you’ve developed part of your platform for mentoring and coaching. What kind of results are your clients experiencing that use that?
Sri Chellappa: [00:16:56] So there is mentoring and there’s coaching, though I will make a slight differentiation between the two, although the lines do blur. So coaching is really focused on performance of that individual. So if you are a manager, you can be a coach to that employee to coach them to do better in their role. But it’ll be hard for you to be a mentor because you cannot dissociate the employee’s performance and their reporting relationship from you because that is real. A mentor usually is somebody who does not directly manage you and is not focused on your individual work performance and on specific KPIs. They are focused on your growth as an individual, growth within the organization, growth even in your personal life as well. So for both of these things, we actually have tools for that. Now you can use the same tool for either one of them, really depending on the relationship between the two people, the mentoring is typically done in for multiple use cases. In some organizations, they use it to get somebody who’s joined new in the organization, get them to get used to and acclimatize the culture, really a way for them to imbibe that culture, understand the different power centers in the organization, because you need to know that, you know, as a new employee, you need to know how to understand and play nicely within that organization.
Sri Chellappa: [00:18:17] So a mentor really helps them guide that. You can, so we have a lot of clients using that for mentoring. Executive mentoring obviously is slightly different. That’s more around how do I be a better manager, be a better leader, be a better organization builder, things of this nature. In those cases, the mentor is somebody typically outside the organization who doesn’t have a bias of the organization. And you can openly talk about your challenges and it gets lonely on the top, as you are, you’re aware as well, right? Because you may have a lot of frustrations and challenges and even doubts in your own abilities for sometimes, and you can’t go and share that with the employees all the time. You know, you will de-motivate them.
Sara Sheehan: [00:19:03] Oh definitely not.
Sri Chellappa: [00:19:04] But potentially even lose trust in the process.
Sara Sheehan: [00:19:06] Right.
Sri Chellappa: [00:19:07] So you kind of need an external coach, external mentor to help you bounce those ideas, even talk about things that you would never say out loud with your people in your organization, because things that you might be thinking about that could be so out of the realms of reality that you can talk through those ideas and see what what might work for you. So from a results perspective, you know, to your question, you know, people who have, everybody should have mentors. In fact, I was talking to somebody last week who runs mentoring programs for different organizations in the UK, and he was talking about, which I agree with as well, is that not only should you have one mentor, but you should have multiple mentors for different reasons.
Sara Sheehan: [00:19:49] Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with that more.
Sri Chellappa: [00:19:51] And from a results perspective, it is proven by data in our case, as well as in our customers case, as well as in research studies, that people who have mentors and coaches perform better, they stay in the organization longer, and they get promoted more frequently than the other ones do.
Sara Sheehan: [00:20:08] That’s right. That’s right. I feel like executive coaching is very similar in results, because you have a structured process that allows you to ideate and collaborate in a safe place. And allows you that opportunity to be creative and think of new solutions that you may not in any other type of situation. Do you have any case studies or client success stories that you that you could share that demonstrate the results and transformation that Engagedly is delivering for clients?
Sri Chellappa: [00:20:52] Oh, there are several. You know, there are, we did a research study, it’s been a little over a year so we need to rerun that research study again. We saw that over 60% of our customers, 60% of the time, or 60% more I should say, customers saw increase in engagement in their organization.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:15] Excellent.
Sri Chellappa: [00:21:16] There was a massive lift in manager/employee communications and recognition across the organization. And those two elements, for example, and there are more, are directly correlated to company performance through all the research. Right? So there’s been immense, now you have to do it right. You know, you could use our tool and just do annual reviews and do it the wrong way and get the wrong results. But if you follow what we believe is the right approach, which we’ve been talking about, the results are quite impressive, actually. You know, with those little, just those little tweaks.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:55] It is mind boggling to me that having the structure of a platform like yours, along with some solid guidance on how to employ it in real conversations with employees, can make such a difference. So I do applaud you, Sri, for all that you are delivering–
Sri Chellappa: [00:22:16] — thank you–
Sara Sheehan: [00:22:17] — to help your clients transform and engage their employees more. You, Sri, mentioned earlier in our conversation that of course you have an established podcast, People Strategy Leaders podcast. Besides AI, what are the most interesting emerging trends in the workplace that we need to solve for that you are hearing about through business or your podcast?
Sri Chellappa: [00:22:46] That’s a good one. So AI obviously has a huge impact in many ways. The other one that I’m hearing a lot about, not hearing, but I’m seeing also, is that because of the whole move to work from home for a lot of organizations, the organizations have become a lot more distributed because people have moved from bigger cities, in many cases are not coming back. People have started working with other people in other countries because if like, if I can work with somebody in New York or, you know, Chicago or wherever the other person is, I can do the same thing with people working in Mexico or India or Middle East or wherever the other people are, or Europe. So that has created a little bit of a challenge where now you have teams where a part of the team is in the same location and the other part is distributed across the world. So now managing that distributed hybrid structure is a challenge for a lot of managers and a lot of leaders, because they’re not used to it. Sure, there are organizations and people who are used to it. If you were in consulting, for example, you’re quite used to it because you’re used to traveling and working remotely and working with your managers remotely. Your team was always distributed, you saw them maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks in an office because they’re always on the client side.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:02] Right.
Sri Chellappa: [00:24:02] But if you were a company that for years worked together and you didn’t have necessarily a formal processes because you could just go and tap on somebody’s shoulder and ask a question, that doesn’t always work anymore when you have teams distributed.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:17] Right, that’s a big change.
Sri Chellappa: [00:24:18] And I think that’s a huge change for, at least for knowledge workers, you know. The knowledge worker services, professional services, things of this nature, huge change. And managers have to be trained on how to manage teams like that. Because what can happen is that there is another thing called proximity bias, where you start biasing towards people who are close to you and you’ll promote them more. You will give them a raise more, you’ll give them more responsibility and more important projects. But the person who’s sitting, you know, two time zones away from you may not get the same level of attention and focus, and they might get disengaged in the process. So there are challenges that they have to manage. You know, if you’re on a conference call together as a team and three of you are in the room, the other three are on a Zoom call somewhere else, you know, the interactions you’re going to have are going to be different. The body language you pick up are going to be different, you know? And so those are some of the challenges that organizations have to face. And how do you run an unbiased environment where everybody gets equal opportunity and equal attention to some extent, you know?
Sara Sheehan: [00:25:24] For sure. I definitely think proximity bias is real, having worked with so many distributed teams in my career, and I think one of the biggest success factors that I experienced in working with a distributed team is making sure that I get to know all of the team members, no matter where they are. Spending time with them and getting to know them does make a huge difference.
Sri Chellappa: [00:25:50] Yeah, yeah. And some people can’t adjust. They just can’t. And some people adjust really well. And some people are used to that environment. So there are, you know, there are changes and the people have to be trained to do that. I think that’s a big one. Apart from that, you know, the other, the other big one I think is driving, this is something I was very interested, interesting data that I saw. You know, the unemployment rate is still pretty low, you know, despite all the attempts by the Fed to increase it so that we can have lower inflation. But if you actually look beneath the data, the unemployment rate is low in many of the roles where you don’t think of them as critical or think of them as hard to get, right, which are more frontline workers and things like that. Manufacturing. But if you look at technology roles, the unemployment rate is not that great. You know, it is a little bit higher there. It is harder to find a job in many of those high skill knowledge worker space to some extent. And I think that’s because of, part of it is because of AI is displacing a lot of jobs, I think it is already started doing that, and a part of it is also because we have, organizations have become, especially technology organizations have become a lot more efficient because they hire too much in 2021 and 2022, and 2023, they started laying off people, as you saw with massive layoffs at Tesla and Google and Facebook and Microsoft and all the big ones, literally Amazon. Everybody laid off people and they’re still doing it. There’s another round of layoffs at Tesla going on. There’s another round that’s coming out at Google and Amazon, so.
Sara Sheehan: [00:27:40] Peloton’s laid a lot of people off, I’ve heard. There are quite a few, quite a few additional layoffs going on in the Big Four world. So it’s still a big issue.
Sri Chellappa: [00:27:51] Still a big issue. I think that’s gonna rattle a lot of tech workers, especially if you’re in the tech side of things, I think that’s a big change, at least from a specific industry perspective, that we are seeing. There’s one generational issue that we are facing is that we just have fewer workers in America.
Sara Sheehan: [00:28:07] That’s exactly right. I was actually going to ask you because I was sensing that part of it, part of the low unemployment number, is based on the fact that we have such a large workforce that is retiring right now, and we do not have as many people joining the workforce based on age.
Sri Chellappa: [00:28:29] Yes. You know, I’m looking at the data here. So we’ve lost like 3% of workforce just last year.
Sara Sheehan: [00:28:39] It’s just vaporized.
Sri Chellappa: [00:28:40] Less people working now than they did three years ago. And that translates to several million, by the way. So it sounds like 3 million, but that’s several million people that are just not available to work. So now you have to figure out how to do more with less, but also means that you can’t deliver services as effectively.
Sara Sheehan: [00:28:59] Mhm. Well it might mean you have to think differently about what you do, what your offerings are and how you interact with your client to deliver an excellent experience. It might look a little different.
Sri Chellappa: [00:29:11] Yeah. And the ones you do hire you have to now really pay attention to how do you keep them.
Sara Sheehan: [00:29:16] Yes, absolutely. To retain and promote talent.
Sri Chellappa: [00:29:22] Yeah.
Sara Sheehan: [00:29:22] And so, Sri, just to double click on the People Strategy Leaders podcast, could you characterize some of the things that you’ve learned and all of the conversations you’ve had so far, because you’ve talked to quite a few people at this point.
Sri Chellappa: [00:29:37] I think the common theme I’m hearing a lot more these days than before, which I have been talking about for a while, but I thought it was was just mainly me but it’s not, is the fact that we need to support and empower and develop more middle managers. They are the pillars of your organization. And if you don’t, you can have great leaders, you can have really good frontline workers or people on the individual contributor levels, but if you don’t have a strong cadre of middle level managers, your first line manager, second line managers, and third line managers in some cases, your organization cannot thrive.
Sara Sheehan: [00:30:19] I couldn’t agree with that more.
Sri Chellappa: [00:30:21] Because they are the ones implementing your strategy. Leaders are talking about it, but they are the ones implementing it.
Sara Sheehan: [00:30:27] That’s right.
Sri Chellappa: [00:30:28] If you don’t figure out a way to develop them and make sure they are the best managers you can build and get in your organization, you’re kind of in trouble as an organization. You can’t scale because that’s how you–
Sara Sheehan: [00:30:41] Well, you’re not heading in the right direction, that’s for sure. We’re seeing in a lot of services that are selling successfully that leadership development is on the rise as a positive, good experience to provide your middle managers especially so that you can grow more leaders at more levels of your organization. So in 23 and 24, we have started seeing an uptick in those kinds of services sales. And those clients are experiencing significant improvement in performance.
Sri Chellappa: [00:31:23] Yes, yes.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:25] So very interesting and compelling comments from you there, Sri. What are your big aspirational goals? What would you love to be able to accomplish or achieve?
Sri Chellappa: [00:31:41] As an individual or as a leader?
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:44] As a president, co-founder, and CEO of your company, what would you like to be able to achieve?
Sri Chellappa: [00:31:53] So the, as a leader, I think one of the big things I would like to grow personally into is how do I be a better communicator to the organization? To me, I can have all the great ideas, but if I cannot communicate and implement those, and that comes through largely through communication, to that first level, second level, third level of management, if I can’t do that effectively, then all my ideas as a leader won’t come to fruition. So I need to, I need to continue to develop myself to do a better job at that. You know, there is no lack of great ideas. You can read them, you can Google them and read them and get all the ideas you want through listening to podcasts like these and or listening to, you know, Ted talks and YouTube and reading HBR articles and books. Ideas are all out there and they’re free. The most successful leaders are the ones who are figuring out how to use, pick the best ones that will work for them and their organization, and then drive the implementation to its logical, you know, direction and conclusion. And I think that’s a big area of growth that I have been focusing on personally. As an organization, you know, we want to build a platform that helps organizations connect their people strategy to employee aspirations, because when they both get aligned better, people find fulfillment in their work and organizations achieve their business goals. And that’s what we want to do as a platform.
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:24] Absolutely. And so how would you answer that question from a personal perspective? Do you have any personal aspirations that you are developing goals around right now?
Sri Chellappa: [00:33:34] Yeah. So our personal goal is to, with our organization, is to get and build a platform that actually delivers a lot of insights so that we can build better middle managers for our clients. We can build better HR processes that delivers on the promise that HR makes to their organization, or the organization makes to their people, and have a platform that can actually implement their strategy. I think if more effectively, using AI, using workflow automation, using better user experience and delivering on that. So basically it becomes like an enablement platform for their strategy.
Sara Sheehan: [00:34:17] Well, Sri, I am so impressed with you and the Engagedly organization and the value that you’re delivering for clients. I know that the best is yet to come, and you’ll keep refining your offerings and your solution and make it even more valuable for clients.
Sri Chellappa: [00:34:34] Well, thank you, Sara. I appreciate your kind words.
Sara Sheehan: [00:34:37] Absolutely. Is there anything else that you’d like to share? Is there anything on your mind today as you think about current challenges in the business world?
Sri Chellappa: [00:34:47] I think we have to become, live the words we speak when we say we are a people leaders, we are people-centric, we care about our people, you know, if you heard all these words, we have to live true to those words. I think leaders, managers, directors, VPs, everybody has to live those words. And that requires people to build organizations that are more transparent and trust because we cannot, we moved away from the paradigm of tell me what to do and I’ll do it, is to let us work on this together, I want your ideas, and your ideas are as valuable as my ideas. Let the best idea win. I think that model, moving to that model, will have better outcome and you’ll have better organizations.
Sara Sheehan: [00:35:40] I definitely believe that collaboration and innovation will bring tremendous results and growth. I’m one of those people that lives in this space of growth and comfort do not coexist.
Sri Chellappa: [00:35:59] No, no, I actually wrote that in one of the internal memos that I write some occasionally to my people. I said growth happens at the edge of discomfort. So if you’re comfortable, you’re probably not growing. And that’s true if you’re working out, you know, that’s what resistance training is, right?
Sara Sheehan: [00:36:19] Absolutely.
Sri Chellappa: [00:36:20] You’re uncomfortable.
Sara Sheehan: [00:36:21] You have to find a way to make yourself uncomfortable so that you can grow and get stronger. And so Sri, tell me, how can our listeners find you? What’s the best way for them to find you and reach out to you?
Sri Chellappa: [00:36:36] I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. Sri – S R I – Chellappa I believe is the handle. Or if you type in Srikanth Chellappa, my full name, you’ll probably find me on LinkedIn. And you know, I also have my podcast, People Strategy Leaders podcast, which is available on all podcast channels and also videos on YouTube. And obviously you can learn more about Engagedly on Engagedly.com – E N G A G E D L Y dot com.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:02] Excellent. Thank you so much for your time today, Sri. I very much appreciate it.
Sri Chellappa: [00:37:07] Yes. Thanks, Sara.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:08] Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. What a pleasure it was to talk with Sri Chellappa, Co-Founder and CEO of Engagedly. Here are some key takeaways from our thought-provoking discussion today. Embrace ongoing performance conversations. Annual performance reviews might be on their way out as they often fall short in driving meaningful change. Instead, focus on regular, evidence-based performance conversations that occur throughout the year. Cultivate a transparent and trust-based culture. Organizations thrive when built on transparency and trust. Embrace open communication, encourage diverse voices, and ensure actions align with stated values to foster a collaborative and innovative work environment. Harness the power of coaching and mentoring. Investing in coaching and mentoring programs can lead to improved performance, higher retention rates, and increased employee engagement. Empower your workforce through mentorship for long term success. Join me in exploring these transformative ideas and more on the latest episode. Let’s shape workplaces that inspire growth and excellence together. Thanks for joining me today. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.
