Adopting Best practice - From where? and How?

In my earlier blog on best practice (http://mentorsofmanagement.blogspot.com/2011/01/mirror-technique-to-adopt-best.html ), I had mentioned about mirror technique.

This blog is a continuation of that blog wherein I am explaining simple, smart and efficient way of adopting best practices.

What is best practice?

Best practice is the way of achieving a target with maximum possible effectiveness and efficiency with the minimum possible effort. One of the fundamental mistakes that we do is that, we feel best practices can be adopted from only with in the confined limits of your organization or peer organizations. This puts a  major limitation.

Where to adopt best practice from?

The one and only rule that I would like to put forward for adopting best practices is that ‘ Best practices should be adopted from just about any source’.

Be it be from your manager, your peers, your subordinates, peer organization, you parents, relatives, friends, other organizations providing unrelated services, even from strangers, situations and so on.

The beauty of doing it this way is that, you are not wasting your time experimenting best way of doing things. Other people has already put in their time to research, experiment, implement and prove a best practice there by giving you an opportunity of ‘not to reinvent the wheel’.

Let me make it as simple as possible for you to understand. For example, if you are a car manufacturer, how do you adopt best practice?

Can you imagine you making a car with

·         Designed in Italy

·         Technology from Japan

·         Engineering excellence from Germany

·         Labour from Korea

·         Manufactured and marketed in America

·         Tested in India

·         And available at Chinese rate?

This exactly is your expected outlook towards adopting best practice. Embrace the best of all from around the globe and you will be one of the smartest person in the world.

How to adopt best practice?

Having known where to adopt best practice from, now the question is How to adopt best practice. It’s simple but requires pro-active effort from your end.

There are two part to adopting a best practice

1.       Adopting the best practice

2.       Improvising on the best practice

The trick is, once you understand where a specific best practice to be adopted from, you go one level deeper to understand how they do it. Once you know the tricks of the trade, it’s a matter of adopting and implementing the same.

Once implemented the story doesn’t end there, it leads to the next level – The very act of owning it. The only way you can own it is by customizing and improvising the best practise which you adopted to suit your requirements.

Example

Part 1 -  Adopting the best practice - Street beggar saving money

Can you ever imagine you have a best practice to adopt from a street beggar? Let me take that as an example here. The street beggars have the unique ability to save money! – Something which is hard to even dream for most of us J.

How do they do it? The trick is that they live a simple life which requires barely any money other than their food. Their spending is very less proportionate to what they earn. Sometimes, you will be astonished to know that they save much more than most of us by the end of the month!

Isn’t it a wonderful best practice to adopt?

Part 2 – Improvising the best practice - Investing saved money

Now let’s take it one step forward and see how we can improvise on the above best practice adopted

Much to do with their luck, the sad part is that the street beggars do not have enough education and general knowledge that they never think of investing the money. They only know how to save. So all their hard earned money will just die with them without any investment for their kids and their kids end up leading similar life.

So, what is the take away from it? Simple! Improvise on it by investing the saved money. That way you start owning it and be smarter. Which means, your role doesn’t end where you have just adopted the above best practice. You need to slowly own it. Unless you start adding your ideas in to the best practice adopted, it is just another off the shelf idea which got adopted as it is without even checking its fitness in to your specific context.

You can invest in your own education, children’s education, owning a land/house, new business etc. You can find many fine examples where people with their patience and investments have made it big.

Having given a generic example above, now I want to come to our core Topic. How to do this in a professional environment.

As a professional, you all can start identifying the areas where you want to sharpen your skill. I am listing some examples here below as TIPs and the source from where you can adopt the best practice.

The following are some of the example I use for my own adoption

·         Customer satisfaction and impeccable delivery – Implement exactly what you expect from a Multi-cuisine restaurant after ordering your lunch

·         Constant evaluation and alertness – Implement exactly what you expect from the Security guard of your apartment

·         Agility and Dynamism – Implement exactly what a formulae 1 racer expects from the boys at Pitstop

·         Perfectness – Implement exactly what your expect from your Vehicle mechanic while doing the service of your vehicle

·         Timeliness – Implement exactly what you expect from your grocery shop/pizza after ordered for a home delivery

·         Quality – Learn from Japanese people on how to stick to the quality coveted by all

·         Sharpness – Implement exactly what you expect from your advocate would take up your issue and help you resolve it

These are only few, I recommend you sit and invest time to come up with your own best practice sources. Remember, what works for you each one of you need not work for all others. The sources of best practices will change based on people’s observation capacity, ideologies, their understanding of the things around them.

So, explore your capacity and start adopting best practices. All the best!

Tip to managers - How to regulate your thoughts, words and action

This blog is in continuation to my earlier blog http://mentorsofmanagement.blogspot.com/2010/11/managers-thoughts-words-action-needs.html. In that blog, I have mentioned the need to pause, articulate and define your action.

In this blog, as a continuation, I would like to emphasise and explain the need for a manager to be able to regulate his thoughts, words and action.

Thoughts and its regulation

Thoughts are the products of the following two things – Our beliefs and our intentions. I am explaining this using various examples that I can think of.

Beliefs

Beliefs are result of our past experience both through various events, what we happen to hear and what we are taught. It is mainly the impressions that we keep about people, and systems in which they are operating. So as a manager, it is very important for you to delink your words and actions from various impressions that you have built over a period of time through your experiences. Unless you do this, you become one among the team members who tend to get in to day to day tussles. In effect by not delinking and there by thinking dispassionately, you become more a part of the problem than and less a role of problem resolver.

So start questioning your own beliefs & past impressions whenever it tries to influence your decision. Particularly the decision that you take which affects the team or organization.

Intention

Consider the position of a pilot.

From the ‘take off’ to ‘landing’ the entire control of the Journey is with him. He has the ability to fly the flight at whatever levels he wants, whatever speed he wants and even to decide whether to even land or not in a place. This is because the flight is equipped with controls, switches and levers which the pilot can manure to his requirements.

Now relate the pilot as a manager, the flight by itself as the delivery/team the manager handles, and the controls/switches and levers of the flight as manager’s own thoughts. Like the way a pilot can handle his flight by proper regulation of the controls, a manager also can handle his delivery/team through a properly regulated thought.

Now, the controls that the pilot poses can be used as per his intention. If the intention is to land smoothly, he can. if he wishes, he can intend not to land in a specific expected place or to delay the flight making the traveller’s life difficult. Similarly, a manager’s intention also has a major role in what the end result would be.

If the manager’s intention is incorrect, it will reflect in every action that he does, words that he use and even in subtle gestures that he makes.

Take the following example: You might have noticed people generally tend to make the following excuse when things go wrong “my intention was not to hurt anyone”! Doesn’t it sound familiar? There is nothing wrong in what he says and he is correct in telling so in his own terms. But there is something missing here – I.e. the fact that while didn’t want to hurt someone, he also didn’t have specific intention to secure other person’s feeling.

This small thing makes all the difference. As a manager, you cannot escape by lame excuses like above. While you intend to achieve an end result, if you don’t want to have undesired impact during the run for it, you should add all what you want to achieve as a part of your intention. Else there is a fair chance that you get undesirable surprises.

Thus, your intention plays a major role in manifestation as your end results.

Now having said about Thoughts in details, let’s take this to next level. There are 2 by products of thoughts – Words and action.

Words and action & its regulation

Just like the way we understood thoughts as final outcome of beliefs and intention; I would classify words and action as the final outcome of thoughts. Further to it, when we do an action, there is always an end result and it is the end result which is perceived and that matters for outside world. None other than manager has the full stake in deciding how the final outcome should look like.

Simply because the end result is ultimately the outcome of his own beliefs and intentions J. To summarize;

·         Beliefs & intentions regulates the thoughts.

·         Thoughts regulate the words and action.

·         Word and action leads to an end result.

Now let’s see the end result in little more detail.

We can classify the end result under 3 category.

1.       An end result which leads to surprise

2.       And end result which leads to repentance

3.       And end result which leads to pride and contentment

Case 1 - The end result which leads to surprise

These are occasions where you do an activity without focussing on the end result and just keep getting pleasant or unpleasant surprises. This is how a normal average person works. Based on the result, he takes next action which again results in another surprise. And this goes on. In day to day management, we call such kind of delivery as fire fighting or reactive mode of working.

This definitely is not recommended for a manager.

Case 2 - The end result which leads to repentance or reputation damage

This is a result of an action taken with intention which is not in best of interest of the team, people or system. These are also a function of impulsive decisions without much depth in thoughts.

Impulsive emotional emails, on floor fights etc are quick examples. This again is not desirable quality of a manager.

How do you counter the above two cases? Simple! By regulating your thoughts, words and action as mentioned below

1.       Observe the emotions arising out of the impulsive thoughts and give time for it to settle down – don’t try to fish in dirty water. Let the dirt settle and clear the water.

2.       Stay away from taking impulsive action – Patience is a good virtue to have

3.       Try and find out the end objective and ensure it is in the best interest of the team and organization – Have good vision and values

4.       Regulate your action by breaking down you action in to stages –It’s always good to take baby steps first and accelerate your pace as you gain confidence and grip

5.       Thus take calculated risks and moves with an expected end result than leaving the end result to destiny – Let the control be always with you. You need to know how and when to pull the strings for your  puppet show to be successful

When you do things like this, you have full control in our action and even if it goes little unexpected, you always can pull your strings to align it at any point. I do understand this is little complicated topic, but I hope you got what I am trying to explain here.

Having said how to handle above 2 cases, I am coming to the most ideal case.

Case 3 - The end result which leads to pride and contentment

There are certain end results which always gives pride and contentment to the manager, team and organization.  The thoughts, words and action which lead to it are generally very positive and matured. The thoughts, words and action which leads to such end results are the ideal bench mark for a manager.

The end results like high employee satisfaction, continuously maintained client delight, achieving organizational goals like CMMI, ISO, being top among the peers, building a loyal and committed team etc are few examples of such high value end results.

For a manager to achieve or contribute to such high value end result is by way of having a strong vision and values in line with or even better than the organization. The moment a manager’s thoughts, words and action is aligned and regulated in this direction, he surpasses the normal hierarchy and take leaps in organization ladder.

This exactly is the secret of how few people make it to the top positions, while they too at one point of time started from where we all started – from the junior most position in an organization.

As I said, If you want to make it big, let’s take baby steps to start with. Start seriously to observe and regulate your thoughts, words and action. All the best!

How to make your feedback sessions effective

This blog is a continuation of one of my previous blog titled ‘1% technique for taking feedback’. Further to that in this blog I would like to share my thoughts on how to effectively give a feedback.

Many times, we see different management activities as individual activities with our realizing the correlationbetween them. Here I am going to explain you how such two activities are interlinked. Have you ever thought mentoring and giving feedbacks can be interlinked?

The simple way to put it is “the more you mentor, less you need to give explicit feedback sessions”

Though feedback by itself is essential and ‘Feedback sessions’ are perceived to be a good way of doing it, it is not healthy always. The reason is the success of feedback session depends on how well the direct feedback is given and how well it is received. Both are highly subject to the manager’s and sub ordinate’s undrstanding with each other.

In most cases there can be conflict of interests and the effect of which is just another meeting for opinion expression and subsequent walk out.

The opinion expression happenes in 2 ways - ‘Explicit’ and ‘not so explicit’

‘Explicit’ is when two people of same cader (e.g. peers in the organization, business partners etc..) share feedback. In this case when one person comes up with a feedback, the other person inherently has a tendancy to defend it as his believes doesn’t concur with the feedback given.

Also most of the time, the feedbacks are given with out knowing the position in which the other person has taken certain actions.

‘Non Explicit’ is in scenarios when a manager is giving feedback to the sub ordinate. Here there can be 2 scenarios.

1.      Feedback given with baggages of ego and personal agenda’s.

2.      The feedback given in a dispassionate manner keeping only the betterment of the candidate

In case of feedback with personal agenda’s and ego, there is a high possibility of the candidate not accepting the feedback the way it should ideally be. Simply because there is a history of tussle between them or because the interest of the person is not safeguarded properly. In this case feedback session fails and it only becomes a forum to express opinion and aggression.

In the  second scenario, there is a high possibility of the feedback being successful, but it has a demerrit if similar multiple sessions happen. The demerrit is that, every time the feedback is given, it also sends a signal to his subconscious mind that he is not the best and that he lacks some thing. For the first time, the feedback session will work perfectly well. In the second session, it will not be as effective as the first time as the person either will start getting bored of feedback sessions or his subconscious mind will start losing the confidence on his abilities to scale up.

On a different note, ad-hoc feedback sessions will work well with people with good level of adaptability and attitude. And to get a team with such majority people will be a dream come true.

So what is the best way out?

Simple! Start mentorng your team. Mentoring is a more stremlined and matured way of scaling up a person that adhoc feedback sessions. Feedback sessions are like medicines that ou give when the desease has gripped the person. Mentoring is like feeding the person with highly hyginic and nutricious food so that his body gets the immunity to fight desease and thus avoid the same.

if you have a feedback, package the same as a mentoring item than an explicit feedback session. When you  try to scale up the people through various mentoring session, it  gives the same result with out needing to send any strong signals to his mind.

1.      In mentoring, the beauty is that both parties recognizes the effort and need for scale up equally well.

2.      The acceptance level of the candidate for the manager as a mentor will be very high and he will look forward to his manager for his next input

3.      No casualities of a typical feedback session

Thus mentoring is a suble way of giving feedback and hence this is a smarter way of managing people.

I will come up with a separate blog on how to do effective mentoring. Till then, thik over the above technique and start mentoring yourself to be a good mentor.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

"Mirror" technique to adopt best practices

All of us have come across good practices around us and in corporate world especially, we come across the the term ‘best practice’ often.

Like all of my blogs which says not only about what needs to be done, but also, the technique as to how to do it; this also has a technique to it.

This technique which is called mirroring technique, is simple and extremely effective in case you are finding it difficult to adopt a good practice.

In general, people expect things to happen in certain way. For it to happen, we expects that people around us to do things perfectly, so that situations align by itself in the most positive way for us, ensuring we get the expected result.

For example, when we call some one for a meeting, we expect them to come to the meeting on time. Till now it is perfectly fine. There is no harm in expecting things to go the way you need.

Now let us see the irony.

When your colleague calls you for a meeting for his purpose, how much weightage you give for that? In all probability, you will end up being late for the meeting or some times not even turning up.

This is where we need to correct things. We end up doing this mistake because we find reasons to support your mistake not realizing that tomorrow you will end up being the victim.

Being a manager, one of the principles that you should follow is to ensure you do things exactly the same way as you expect others to do for you. This by itself is the technique which I wanted to share with you.

1.      If you expect others to be on time in your meetings only if you show up in meetings on time.

2.      If you expect others to listen to you, ensure you are a good listener of their concerns

3.      If you want to give feedback to your team, be prepared to accept feedback from them as well

4.      If you want others to trust you, make sure you maintain your trust and intergrity with them equally well

5.      If you expect respect from the team, start respecting them and acknowledging their good works

This is nothing but adopting the best practices which you believe others should adopt. That is why this is called as mirror technique. You are mirroring your expectation with others to your self.

Last but not the least, being a leader, if you want to lead them from the front, be ready to go behind them and empower them – This again is a mirroring techinique.

Simple techniques like this doesn’t involve investments, but have very high returns.

Happy practicing this technique

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