This is the ‘Win with Stories’ newsletter. It’s focused on helping founders, entrepreneurs and business owners. Every week I send an email with a business or life message wrapped in a short story. I also share one actionable tip to help you enhance your business storytelling skills.
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How Sandeep Bakhshi steadied the ICICI ship after Kochhar’s infamous exit(and what’s the communication lesson in this).
I read an interesting story by Rounak Kumar Gunjan of The Ken about ICICI over the weekend.
Nobody would have envied Bakhshi when he took over ICICI in October 2018.
Employee morale was down, and attrition was high.
There were questions about what the future held for the bank.
Cut to today, the bank has posted its highest-ever earnings. It also employs the highest number of people that it has in its lifetime.
How did Bakhshi manage this?
Rounak’s story shares some insights:
👉 Doing away with Bell-Curve assessments:
Bakhshi needed to give employees a sense of stability. So in a surprising decision, he did away with Bell-Curve Assessments. While top private banks use this, it pools employees into performer groups.
Employees might find themselves in the low-performance group after having performed well.
👉No Firing:
The bank now believes in ‘No Firing’. At worst, you get a posting to a place/position is not pleasant. This is creating a loyal group of current and ex-employees for the bank.
👉Work-life balance:
The bank also offers the best work-life balance amongst its peers. Employees even go on three-week leaves because there is adequate staffing.
But the action from Bakhshi that inspired me to write the post is this one:
👉Approachable leadership culture:
There are two elevators at ICICI headquarters in the Bandra-Kurla complex in Mumbai. One for regular staffers and another for the ones who are director-level and above.
To his colleagues’ surprise, Bakhshi started taking the regular elevator to his office on the tenth floor.
This, the article states, created the cultural shift.
And, the entire story reminded me of one thing.
<Your actions are the best stories you’ll ever narrate>
Many ICICI staffers shared this elevator anecdote as an indication of the change at the bank.
Just like Bakhshi, all of us shouldn’t just talk about change but also be the change.
One communication tip for today:
Big actions create the narrative, but small actions create stories worth retelling.
ICICI doing away with bell-curve assessments, offering better work-life balance and going easy on firing are important actions. Yet, these deliver the message that ‘ICICI is trying to become an employee-friendly place.’
But Bakhshi’s action of taking the staff elevator and not the director one which makes you believe this message more than anything else.
And this is true in many cases. ‘Tata-log’, a book that I am reading at the moment narrates many such anecdotes about the Tata values and belief systems. But the Tata way of doing things only becomes clear with actions of its leaders and employees, and not with broad-strokes description of its policies, etc
So no matter how many big actions you take as a company or leader, if it is not mirrored in your small actions, then people may choose not to believe it. Even if they do, they may not have the ability to narrate it to others due to lack of a story or anecdote to talk about.
That’s it from me this week. Tell me one thing that will make you share this newsletter with friends and colleagues 🙂
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