At the onset, it would be a great opportunity to look back on my journey in the past eight years, share those experiences, and reflect back on those memories.

I want to focus on what I have learnt about people in an organization. Generally one would hear that the important asset of an organization is its people. My belief is that just people are not the most important asset.

But the right people are the only important asset that an organization has in the IT industry. Other than right people, everything else can generally be replaced. Intellectual property can be considered the next important asset for an IT organization but with the rapid evolution of technology, IP becomes obsolete with time. Organizations need to constantly innovate and create new IP, which means it is essential to constantly focus on having the right people in the right place.

Over the years, I have worked towards defining ‘Right People.’ In doing so, I have come across three main inter-related attributes -
bandwidth, attitude
and skills.

An organization should achieve a balance of these attributes to ensure innovation and execution.

Among the three, I personally feel bandwidth and attitude are the more important. Bandwidth includes aspects like learning, problem solving. Having strong problem solving skills ensures clear understanding of the problem, enables developing innovative solutions and allows learning new and evolving technologies in this rapidly changing environment. The other key attribute being right attitude, which is where the passion for success, positive attitude, and work ethics come under light. If one has the desire to succeed, then many hidden talents will emerge. With enough desire and ability one can overcome even the most challenging situations. So fundamentally, while building an organization, getting people with the right amount of bandwidth and right attitude is important.

Skill is the third important asset but one that is highly learnable and can be replaced any time. The skills we look for at Adobe during recruitment are basic understanding of core technologies. There is little focus on the skills in specific areas as one can always learn these given the right attitude and ability.

After the recruitment process, the next phase is of investing through training, coaching and guidance. My ideology is based on selecting the best and allowing them to do their job, which they do excellently. But lately I have realized that even smart and hardworking people need help through training and coaching to enhance their potential. Right amount of coaching can help them grow at an accelerated pace resulting in spectacular return on investments.

After hiring and mentoring the best in the business, we just need to provide them a positive and supportive environment and they in turn rise to deliver beyond expectations. Finding and nurturing the right people is an upfront investment in quality processes. Many of the regular quality issues are simply avoided by having only the right people in the organization.

Those who have the desire to succeed should be given challenging and stimulating work, that they have not encountered in their career and challenge them to excel in new capabilities, new tasks and the best way to scale up the ladder.

One should be ready to face failures when the organization challenges people to scale to new levels. Be a partner in the failure of your people because it is after all you who entrusted and recruited that person. It is possible that the recruit was assigned to do what they were not capable of executing. At that juncture, it is better to analyze and figure out what might have gone wrong, try providing training, if required or a different suitable role, and help them move on.

In any case, one needs to be ready to deal with some disappointments. Though, my experience has been that with right people selection and support the failures are few and far between. One ‘mantra’ I have followed is to never penalize for failure if they have tried it in the right spirit. That helps people focus on issue and how to succeed rather than passing blame and finding excuses when things go wrong.

The next crucial step is to reward and recognize people. This is a vital tool to boost the morale and channel efforts of employees in the right direction. It is very important that reward and recognition policies are transparent, fair, objective, consistent and clearly understood by all in the organization. It ensures that the employee and manager are both aligned to the organizational goals. Furthermore, it should be clear to everyone that performance is evaluated objectively and consistently. This allows people to tune their behavior and focus on achieving the core objectives.

What we in Adobe judge while rewarding is performance and potential. Our effort is to educate the employees of our evaluation criteria based on performance and potential. I don’t expect people to come and question on how to grow within the organization for that is known to all. What they ask me is how to perform better and enhance their potential through training and coaching.

After the aforementioned things are accomplished, the next stage is to act upon people who have incessantly failed to perform. It is imperative to act on such people as soon as possible. With people who do not perform, we work hard, give them time to scale up and find the right opportunity within the organization. But if all efforts fail, we move them out from the organization. I feel, it is unjust to keep people where they will be a failure and unappreciated. They should be moved to the role where they have a reasonable chance of success and if that means they have to leave the organization, so be it.

There is nothing worse than to have people who are not excited by the opportunity company offers to them or do not have the ability and desire to succeed. Personally I have sometimes faltered on this aspect and have regretted later for not taking quick decisions without hoping or even wishing that the person will eventually learn but instead they end up wasting time of both the organization and themselves.

In a nutshell, I believe that right people are a core ingredient of a successful organization for they have the right understanding, the right zeal to do things in the right way. And to achieve the ideal win-win situation the organization should reciprocate by providing the right environment and opportunities that is conducive to growth.

Naresh Gupta: Senior Vice-President, Adobe.

Naresh Chand Gupta, who was recently promoted as the senior vice president of Adobe Systems Inc. was instrumental in convincing Adobe to establish their first full fledged research center in India. The center today is 400 members strong and has 25 patents.

He joined Adobe in 1996 as a member of the Corporate Research Group and in 1998 he relocated to India and became the Managing Director of the research center.