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.

Know your worthiness and dream BIG

Many times we look at Business icons like Narayana Murthy, Azim Premji, Ramadorai and likes just to wonder how they got to these highs in their career with out even wanting to think about the effort that they have made to be there.

No body is born with 100% skill. Naturally we may have some skills inherited in your genes. This I believe nature has given to us to help us make a beginning. In this challenging world, to expect any thing more than that would be little foolish in my view. Hence I like to believe our natural skill set is just 10%(figure for the sake of putting here :-)) of what in total we can build in our career and in our lifetime. The right perception about our career, focus and hard work pays when it comes to building the rest 90%.

The secret of your success lies in setting the right perception about your career. For this, knowing the below I think will help.

Know your own worthiness at two levels

a. For the current demands in organization
b. For future prospects in organization and your aspirations

Let me explain what I mean by above.
Knowing your worthiness is all about exploring yourself , identifying your core skills and the heights that you can scale in area where your skills and capability match. In other words, your ability to think where you need to be after 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years . If not, no better time than now to do it.

Simple examples of such a chart is

• In 5 years - to be a Project manager, 8-10 years to head a Delivery unit, 15-20 years - business head/VP, 20- 30 years - CEO/COO, 30-40 years Chairman of a company, to be in board of directors etc and so on.
• Or it can be - In 5 years - to be a tech lead, 10 years - to be a solution architect, 15 years - technical consultant and so on.
• Or it can be - In 5 years - to be a Project manager, 8-15 years to be a Business development manager, 15-20 years to be a business development consultant, 20-30 years to be a CMO and so on
• Or it can even to set up a company of your own, create job opportunities and much more

What this exercise does ?

This to me is exactly what we call as setting a vision for ourselves. This exercise quickly sets a structure to your career plan. Subconsciously this also sets correct measure and expectations (with yourselves)for your current worthiness in any role that you may aspire and also in your aspiration for the future roles that you would like to handle.

One of the greatest gifts God has given us is the power to dream. The beauty of a dream is that it doesn’t have any rules or limits. Hence you can dream just about any thing in this world - even things which doesn’t exist in this world.

Every great step starts with one single step.
Every step that you takes builds confidence and positive outlook in you and several such step takes you to higher roles and responsibilities. The small steps you have taken will be your investments for your future. I believe this is the only right way to shape your career. It should be gradual and steady and should align with your capabilities. That means … no short cuts!

However, There is one way you can regulate the speed at which you reach new heights.. by taking those small steps and learning from mistakes more frequently. Imagine you setting your goals on a daily basis and evaluating it at the end of the day there by setting new goals for the next day!.. There is no limit to the heights you can reach.

This means that the entire horoscope of your career path can be drafted by you.

Now the question is , what the first step should be. Simple! Start your first step by dreaming.Dreaming about you and your organization's future, its road map, success and glory.

• If you want your company to grow in terms of number of employee base, start dreaming hundreds and thousands of people working around you along with you
• If you want company to grow in size and spread, start dreaming a delivery centre in every part of the world
• If it is for organization's social cause, start dreaming on how the villages in India are transforming and prospering due to our contribution.
• If it is in terms of luxury, glory, comfort and so called 'status', then go ahead dream of huge glass mansions in your own IT park with Hi-Fi facilities.

Dream big, that’s the only first step to making it real. Lets start with this cash less investment.

P.s. Don’t forget to take the second step immediately.. Dreams with out subsequent effort is good to nothing. Keep performing .. Keep re-discovering yourselves.