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!

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

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.

Strategizing – a skill worth acquiring

How many of us have estimated the importance of having right strategies in execution of tasks and in meeting targets? If not, it is worth considering now.

Almost all of us in this busy world are extremely good at working hard to meet targets. In fact working hard has become a norm and will hardly give you the full advantage if you want to compete.

During many occasions we have also heard experienced people saying “Not just work hard, work smart as well”. What does this mean? Let’s try to understand.

The client expectations and our ambitions to set new bench mark on client delight is practically unlimited, but our time, resources, capabilities are always limited to its availability.Hence there will always be a disparity in meeting both at the same point.

The most common scenario is where; we either compromise on the quality to meet the timelines or to extent the timelines to achieve a desired quality. Both have its own impact on client delight. So, how to tackle this? The only solution is to have right strategy of execution right from the beginning and meet both quality and timeline without compromises.

To say it simple, strategizing is all about knowing how to cut down the ‘H’ number of hours required (in normal scenario)in achieving a task to say ‘H/X’ number of hours without compromising on quality.

The ‘HOW to achieve’ part of any task takes prominence and a smart way is formulated. While this is mostly left to the person who strategize, there are some basic guidelines that might help to set the route correct from the beginning.

1. Never plunge in to an available solution and start working on the tasks without you personally getting convinced on the solution –This will ensure the solution is fundamentally strong
2. Invest a decent amount of time in the beginning of a task for only strategizing the right way of resolution – This will save a lot of execution time eventually.
3. Take a stock of the time resource and effort – This will help you to ensure the expectation is set right from the beginning at all levels
4. Juggle around with your mind/notepad with all permutation and combination of assigning right work to right set of people – This will set the right kind of delegation and help gain confidence on your own solution
5. Prepare your excel with the charts to collect data while executing the tasks – This will reiterate that every step is rightly supported with facts and figures
6. Always analyse your data throughout your execution phase – This will help you to re-strategize during execution phase
7. Change your strategy based on how the delivery progress – Very important as same solution from beginning might not hold good throughout the delivery
8. Set priorities for deliverables and emphasise completion of tasks based on the priority of client importance – Very important to reach end result of attaining client delight
9. Phase out the delivery as required and keep client informed of the different phases and corresponding deliverables well in advance –This will even out stress and ensure quality at every stage
10. After every phase of delivery, send a consolidated closure mail with achievements of that phase along with what is due for next phase – This will demonstrate your professionalism to client in standing throughout the delivery phase.
11. Complete each phase with at most care there by leading your delivery to an end to end success – This will ensure a perfect delivery and give you enough confidence for you to take up bigger tasks

The basic rule while defining strategy is that, you never know how to tweak your initial strategy unless you start executing the same. So the key is to start the execution once you have a decent confidence on the initial strategy.

Having set the initial strategy, while executing it, an entropy creeps in to it by way of many non-value add and time taking sub tasks. The primary focus should then be on identifying and isolating them.

This will highly improve the efficiency, cutting down the time required to do the job there by achieving our ‘H/X’ hours target. Once you master this art, you can start defining the denominator in your terms. To start with, half of the normal time required (H/2) should be a good start.

The key is to have right strategy to begin with and then redefine the strategy throughout the delivery phase till the closure phase is signed off by the client.
So let us start by challenging ourselves that we will finish a task in half time. Bet me with right strategy, this will be a cake walk for you and treat for your team .

Career planning – a journey from ‘having Potential’ to ‘building capability’.

How many times have we gone to our drawing board to plan for a successful career? When you sit for the same next time, just try out few of the below tips.


Career planning is a conglomeration of many carefully planned short successful journeys where each journey starts from the person’s ‘have potential’ stage to ‘have capability’. Let us see how we can decipher this thought.

Many times we fail to interpret the word potential. If someone says you have a good potential, it simply means that you are on the right path, but you are not quite there. Many times we become complacent at that stage and forget to take it further and build the capability.

To start with, it is important for us to know what potential we have. For example, if someone says, you have the potential to become a good manager, it doesn’t mean that you are a good manager. It just means that you have the qualities to become a manager. While that person’s job ends where he has commented it, your job has just begun. You now need to nourish the potential and gain the maturity to handle a managerial position.

This means, simply having potential will not help but you need to work towards building capability in you. Until then you are a trainee. It is as good as telling that a person, only with his imagination capabilities will not become an architect; he has to build the capability by learning the techniques through a well-designed architecture course.

You should never try to venture in to an area where you do not have the potential. For that identifying your areas of potential is very important. The human race is created with such diverse nature that everyone has got a specific role to play. The key is to identify what role you need to play in your career.

If you end up doing a job which is not as per your aptitude, your work life will be nothing short of a disaster. This is true how much ever good position you are holding. Similarly if you do a job in which you can add value, you will enjoy every bit of your professional life. This is true whatever may be the grade of work you are doing.

Now let’s see how to build the capability. Experience with right expertise is what defines one’s capability. The journey from potential to capability is all about nourishing your potential in line with expected end result; i.e. “having capability by way of building expertise through adequate experience”.

Here the only variable is the level of experience that one can get. The experience varies with 2 factors
1. Availability of opportunity
2. Your alertness to grab the opportunity.

The good thing is that if you are alert, opportunities will hit your door. Or in other words, we fail to recognize the opportunities which are hitting our door, simple because we are not alert. So opportunity is not a factor of luck alone, it is also a factor of our alertness and acceptance.

In short, if you are smart, you will make use of the available opportunity efficiently and prove that success is all about attaining the goal by;
1. Identifying your potential and all available opportunities
2. Perseverance & focus to use the opportunity and nourish the potential
3. Building the capability through right experience, exposure and expertise

So be alert!; opportunity is already in our door steps. Your short journeys from potentials to capabilities start now!

Worred about productivity of your team?.. Try this out..

RESPECT = PRODUCTIVITY!! … Seems strange? Let us try to understand this theory

If you want to improve productivity in your professional arena, we should go back to the basics of human nature.What I mean is as follows. Everything which involves human effort has an invisible factor contributing to its success. It is the READINESS of HUMAN MIND!

Unless a person’s mind is ready enough, he will not have his thoughts prepared and his actions will not yield the desired result.

Productivity can be measured in terms of quality, timeliness, efficiency, cost save etc. Since most of our jobs involve human effort, the output also varies based on the person’s mood to do the work.

Now the question is how to ensure that the person has the right mind set to do the work? Simple! Just make sure he is provided with the right atmosphere to work.
Now, how to ensure the right atmosphere?. Many a times, it is not just the physical environment and the gimmicks in the office atmosphere that will suffice. It is the persona very own attitude that makes the maximum difference.

The only one thing that can override any mental hurdle a person might be crossing over is his self-esteem. That is why different people overcome the similar difficulties to different levels of success.
A person with better self-esteem and confidence will handle difficult situation better

A good manager should understand this basic truth and should start boosting his colleague’s self-esteem. How do we do that?

Simple! GIVE him the RESPECT and SPACE for him to execute his ideas on work.

However big/small the position your colleague holds;
1. Respect him for whatever work he does; Because without him, that part of the work is incomplete and also because you might not fit in to his shoes how every small or big the work he does – just like the way he might not fit in to your shoes.
2. Respect his thoughts and ideas; Because, one brilliant idea might change the phase of your delivery or even your company
3. Respect him to be a part of your team; Because without him, your team is incomplete
4. Respect him for his good works; Because you never know, his one small good deed might inspire your team as a whole
5. Respect him for his failures; Because his preparedness to face same challenge has changed after his last failure and you have a better competent person with you.

Finally, Respect him for no specific reason! Because he is another self-esteemed individual as YOU!

Eventually, without your team’s help, you can achieve nothing. The moment you start respecting people for what they are; people start going all the way out to help you. They try to put in their best effort to ensure your interests are met with. There is no better way to get the best result.

How much ever control you put in place to improve productivity, if the above basic factor is missing; the efficiency will always be one yard below the desired.
Similarly; If you start respecting your team, no matter what minimal levels of controls you have; it will ensure a minimum level of desired productivity.

It is because; you now have a self-motivated team which is already in auto pilot mode.
Now what do you think? Is RESPECT = PRODUCTIVITY?

Deligation and ownership

For some one who is aspiring to be manager; Skilful delegation has to be cultivated as his second nature. Proper delegation will give you space to take more responsibility. You will grow that way.

On the other hand for an experienced manager, taking ownership is his first step, delegation happens naturally.

Management

A good manager should know the art of managing at both micro as well as macro level. This helps to strike a balancce in delivery. The concept of micro/macro management to me is as follows

Micro management:
Any manager who looses the control on the details hapening under him can expect negative surprises every now and then. Like - delivery slippage, people management issues, etc. This lose of sight will eventually put him in fire fighting mode and will hamper the smooth expansion of the team. Hence some amount of micro management is necessary to keep updated on the actual pulse of the people and delivery

Macro management
At the same time, a manager should also have a birds eye view on the prospects coming through his way. For this to happen, he should be vigilant on the opportunities coming across, clear on the short term and long term goal for his unit, spend enough time every day to analyse the issues and come up with strategies to combat it in future.

Politics and ethics in work environment

Politics & Ethics : Both are integral part of any system where a group of people interact with each other and work together.
Politics in Job : For me 2 types of politics in Professional life : Ethical politics and non-ethical politics

Ethical politics: Being true to yourself and others, taking decision based on your concious, intention always moulded by companies atmost interests, un biased desicions, no surrender policy to politically motivated activities/groups, go one step ahead and help de polarizations and groupisms in company

Non-ethical politics: Any activity motivated by intensions to down play people or organization.

Deriving Productivity

Productivity should be the one of the prime focus of a manager - Some people are productive when they get more responsibilities, some with recognition, some based on their area of interest, some doing monotonous job, etc..

Understand the pulse of each employee, facilitate to make them productive and drive the show.

Are we motivating enough?

Some people naturally have lot of urge to prove things.

If they dont get the oportunity in their area of expertise/interest, they feel left out in the race and to catch up with the race they try to do things differently.
With no surprise, things which are done differently in such circustances gets noticed differently in most occasions with frawn forehead.Any thing notified away from the normal ways of doing things will get described based on convenience and intentions.

This makes situation all the more worse.
Any pointing fingures/question to the person on these lines will make them even more dejected and they lose their natural rhythm.

Finally though they have capability , they lose the race.
When they lose the race, some one other than them also loses a bit -- The organization.

Motivation - Empowerment - Facilitation - Recognition - Feedback. Let this be tried out across the board. High Productivity is guarnteed.

For Managers a 5 mins listening to the team can save 50 mins resolving thouse issues which would have never occured othervise.

Ownership in 2 ways

Ownership comes in 2 ways

1.When an opportunity is given to a person and when he is ready to take the ownership
2.Voluteer by any person to take up new initative

In either case , from the moment the task comes in to some ones hand, there is an enourmous amount of expectation set. The success of the ownership is when, the expectatins are either met or is exceeded.

The completion of the task is directly propotional to the genuine interest of the person driving it as well as on his capability to drive it. So it is extremely important that the ownership is given to the right person. Else it might bring a slow result or some times no result. The good thing is that there is always some thing for every one. It is at this point that the Managers should step in. They should identify the right task and and facilitate the reportee to accomplish the same.For this to happen active discussions should happen in the teams.

What it means to take initiative

Taking initiative is Courage to take challenges beyond the perview of our day to day work. Doing day to day work is business as usual. Taking initative is geving the best to what you are good at outside your day to day work. For example, if you are a good mucisian, you can take initative to build a music brand in the organization.Every individual has his own unique strong points. If every one take concious decision to take initative to explore best in self and there by contribute to others, the power of organization to scale new heights will be enormous.

There are some thumb rule while taking initives

1. Under no circumstance , you should drop the initative
2. No reason for backing out can stand before you, if you are strong like a rock.
3. Your descipline will only make others feel that the initative is rock solid.
4. Take it for granted that, your commitment to the initative will be time tested
5. You commitment will also be tested by others first before they welcome the same.
6. Do your best to add value to your initative.
7. Take it for granted that there will be criticism. Combat it with the belief that you knwo the best on what people criticise- in this case the very own initative.
8. Welcome critisism with an open heart, weed out the emotions and understand the core message, analyze if there is any key takeaway for you, do the mitigation, give the feedback
7. Believe that your initative will be a huge success
8. Believe that like minded people will slowly start accepting you as a leader and will start following you.

How best are we mentored?

Every manager should aquire the skills required mentoring. The mentor should genuinely show interest in the upliftment of their reportees. Mentoring has dual purpose. Firstly for a Manager, it will help in understanding the issues faced by the reportees and help them perform better. Secondly, it will help them to take better decisions as they already created a comfort zone by interracting with the team and understanding the difficultines of the team.Hence decision making is no more head breaking task.

This is the preparation step towards mentoring. Managers should take him to understand an employees feelings before start getting in to serious mentoring. The mentoring should happen not just to get the running project finished. It should be for the over all well being of the employee. Primarily after a mentoring session, the employee should get the confidence to take new challenges.