1 % technique for taking feedbacks

It is probably for the first time in my blogs that I am narrating a management concept giving the preface of my experience. '1 % technique - a  technique to take feedback'  is a part of one of the my major learning in my career. And I thought this technique deserves much more weightage than any other blogs I have written till date - simply because most of my blogs till date is all about what needs to be done to improve yourself, and this is all about how to improve yourselves.

This is the easiest and most effective way I have ever learned to take feedbacks.

Managers - Dont mix up and mess up!

In continuation with my earlier blog on the need to delinking thoughts from words and action, in this blog, I want to stress the importance of seeing various incidents, people and situation as separate instances. This is one of the most important qualities a manager should possess.

What happens in general is, when a manager encounters a specific situation involving a person, he starts labelling that person as with specific character. When the same person is involved in a different situation, the manager starts seeing the person with the label already attached. Then the new situation becomes a different composition and any effort from you to resolve any issue will be in vein.

Manager's thoughts, words & action needs strategizing

Manager's thoughts, words & action needs strategizing. A Manager’s thoughts don’t necessarily define him, but his words and action does.

It is high time for you to start delinking your action and words from your thoughts in your professional life. First of all it is extremely important for you to know why the delinking is required.



Strategizing



As a manager, you will come across several instances or issues where emotional outbursts happen among the people you interact. At this point, as a natural gesture, it is quite possible to get carried away by your emotions and get hyper. You have a delicate situation where the stake holders who are involved can be of different nature – client, team, managers, organization, peers, delivery etc.

Remember, you cannot compromise your delivery for any of these stakeholders, because it is a proper delivery that keeps all

Matured manager - Think positive and let success follow

We say “Managers need to be matured to handle situations”. But what does it mean? Let’s analyse.

For Maturity to come, 3 factors have to combine together – experience, exposure and your interpretation on those two. You can make good times out of your bad experience and vice versa. It depends on how you see things. During tough time, it is easy to flip towards either positive or negative outlook. Let’s see how we can tune our mind to think only positive.

In Bhagavad Gita, there is a verse which says “Every that has happened, which is happening and which is going to happen is for good”. Believing in this is a good start for a successful career. But don’t stop there. Take it to next level as follows.

Keeping the belief that everything happens for good, If a seemingly bad incident happened or is happening to you, try to make sense of what good it is going to lead to. Many times you will get answer and it will help you to see your bright future and open a new world of confidence and positive outlook before you.

This practice if done often, will exercise your mind to think positive and you will end up looking forward always. The fact is that there is hardly any human being who has made it big without going through tough time and the good thing is that there is always a way out!

Smart people will find the way out and this is the simple secret on how they make it.

For example, if a senior resource in your team is moving out quickly from your team and your delivery is

Goal - not just about achieving it, but is about how well u achieve it

Have u ever wondered why we do not get the results even when u feel you have put in your full effort? For example, you have been giving your 100% commitment, but still the productivity is not up to the mark.

Your efforts always have to be in line with your expected end result. Many times people spent a lot of time and effort to get something right, but irony is that the action taken will end up yielding a different result. This gap between your efforts and end result will yield to leakage in productivity, quality and satisfaction, and most importantly your precious time.

Three qualities a Manager should possess

Everyone will have one or more traits prominent in his/her character. Some are emotional, some short tempered, some caring, some very centred etc. As a part of gearing up to take up a certain role in his career, one has to tune his character to suit the role he assumes. Here in this blog we will try to understand what are the prominent characters a manager should nourish to handle his role properly.

Before going in to it in details, I am giving an example here below to give more clarity on what I mean. If a person with soft nature has taken strong decision to be a police officer, he has to imbibe a tough nature in him or else he might not be able to handle tough situations resulting from his role. So even before he goes ahead and assumes the new role, only 2 options are left for the person

Turn your negatives to positives

Have you ever wondered, “How I will live with your so called negative traits and yet excel in your career?” Take my word for it that you can not only live with it, but also use it to get positive results.

For that first you need to realize the ground at which you stand.
1. The first step is to know your own limitations – This helps you to know what you want to improve.
a. Write down the things that you need to improve. For example: Short temperedness, over aggressiveness, cribbing nature, poor people management capability etc.
2. The second step is to know your own strengths. Each one of us is gifted with a unique strength. But unless you know how/when to sell/use your strong points, it is of limited use.
a. Write down your own strong points. For example: High level of awareness, Meticulous and methodical, commitment, hardworking etc.

Now starts the game!

The Art Of Mind Management

Management has various facets. At gross level as we all know, it is about managing deliveries – Time, cost and quality. Volumes of books are available off the shelf on this topic which I do not intend to even remotely refer to or repeat.

Mind Management!!

What I really want to share is my thoughts on management of something at much subtler level - Mind Management!! This is for all those ‘On the job Managers’ and ‘Aspiring managers'. The first thing that we need to learn to tackle is not the delivery, team or client, but our own mind, and the mind of the team.

Yes!, this might seem a little off the track but this is a fact. And before you even step in as a manager, these are the ground areas which need to be worked up on. This is as basic as learning the alphabets before you join them together to make sense for others. Let us check out the following few queries

Mantras For Being A Successful Manager

Last week, I had a post on "Mind Management". In this post, I'll share my thoughts on few more subtle behavior aspects related to managing a team.

"Practice makes a man perfect". No one is born as a manager. It is only his perseverance, focus in the right direction along with a flair of management that makes him equipped every day. One of the golden rules to follow is

"Be assertive and be like a rock if you know you are righteous in what you say; at the same time accept any mistake immediately and be humble if a mistake has happened from you"

It is not easy to cultivate this in you unless this is natural to

Think and act ‘Beyond The Obvious’

One of the finest qualities of a manager is his ability to 'Not to get emotionally dragged'. The ability of seeing things objectively will highly enhance the management quality in us.

Being in this stage, dealing with 100 different issues at the same time becomes so natural. You will never miss out on reading important mails, on mail reverts, and even attending an evening party while a crucial delivery is happening in parallel on the other end.

Keeping one or more focus in your career is extremely

important to attain this stage. You can decide the number of focus points depending on your multi tasking capability. But it is advised to start with minimum.

It can be things like;

• Achieving you project/unit/company goal in terms of revenue, number of employs
• Achieving client delivery excellence etc
• Achieving your personal goals (But make sure your personal goals are aligned with company goals)
• Achieving a high level of employee satisfaction in your team

Once you have this goal, you are all set to tackle many issues that you will come across on a day to day basis. Having set the background for the topic, let me come back to my topic - 'Think and act beyond the obvious'. Among the many of the issues that you may come across, I am interested in applying the above logic in ‘Team handling' and related issues'.

While handling the team all managers will come invariably deal with - appraisal sessions and related activities.

Going by the guidelines set by the organization without any deviation during appraisal sessions is one way of doing it. It doesn’t require much skill and can be done easily.

But being intelligent and applying logics along with the above will take it one step further and will really help the team perform in future.

At this point you should start 'Think and act beyond the obvious'. There are certain acts which falls in 'beyond the obvious' category - which I would categorize as 'Value adds' while managing. Which means, it doesnt necessarily fall in to the standard guidlines set by the organization.
To make it clear, please see the below chart.

The moment we add more dimensions to the obvious category tasks, the quality of thinking pattern in the team changes. This changes the dynamics of the team. And when team’s thinking pattern is focused and matured, it becomes collective consciousness.

Yes!.. This is the level at which a manager should operate.

It is your capability to make your team think beyond the call of their duty, that makes the difference, ultimately it will lead to a dynamic team.

As a Manager, you should know the depth of your teams capability. If you don’t know where you stand at the moment, you can’t take your ship to the next required port. This is a world that moves on theory of relativity.

The team is as good as the team's manager.