Ask any leader to share what they wish they could avoid and top of the list would be : I wish I could avoid being interrupted by people in my daily schedule. When Doug Conant became a CEO, he tried his best to not get interrupted. Did not work. Left with no other choice, he thought over how he viewed the challenge. He was looking to avoid these people interruptions so that he could maximise opportunities for exerting stronger leadership – at a time and place of his own choosing. What if he looked at it differently? What if these interruptions themselves were timely opportunities to exert strong leadership? Thats when he came up with the concept of a Touchpoint. A Touchpoint is an interaction where you get an opportunity to deal with an issue and move things forward. People were coming to Doug because there was an issue they needed his help on. The brilliant insight Doug had was that when people come to you for a talk on their own, they are already primed to be receptive to what you…
Creating space by reclaiming time – A message for achievers and leaders
You clump all of the wood material and stack it on top of each other. And start the fire. But, the fire doesn’t catch on. All the wood is right there. Something is not working. What is it? An experienced camper taps you on the shoulder and you step aside. She rearranges the wood in some pattern that you can’t make sense of. And lo and behold, a brilliant blaze starts leaping up towards the sky! What did the camper do? She created space, oxygenating space, as Juliet Funt calls it. Fire needs air to move through the wooden pile and supply oxygen. In the previous arrangement, there was no space and no air movement. When the space is there, you have a fire! Where is the oxygenating space for us in our lives? To power us towards achievement. Funt calls it white space, in reference to the white that signifies free time on our scheduling calendar. Coloured is time blocked. White is time without anything scheduled. This time – creating it, safeguarding it, and expanding it – holds the…
The wisdom in serving self-organising systems
On 1st April, 1973, the Government of India launched ‘Project Tiger’ for the protection and conservation of the rapidly dwindling tiger population. Kailash Sankhala, the first Director, set forth on the guiding principle for Project Tiger. Do nothing (to the forest) and allow little to be done. On visiting TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences) as part of a combined faculty group conducting a career guidance workshop, I remember reading a commemorative plaque there. The words that stayed with me were.. The end of social service is to end social service Dr. William Osler, the father of modern medicine, and a pioneer medical educator, was being counter-intuitive when he said.. One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine. The fields differ, but the approach underlying the words, the awareness they all show is that of intervening in a self-organising system. In order to save tigers, the action-oriented saviour may have adopted a gung-ho approach. A slew of measures and directives. Sankhala knew that intervention was the problem in the first place.…
2020 – A few insights to carry forward into 2021
The very idea of a New Year is a figment of human imagination. Having said that, 2020 has given the idea a new shine. The world so urgently wants the new year to make life better! Perhaps, that is what all ideas ultimately are – containers and transmitters of human energies.. We are all invested in the idea and our collective belief is a powerful force in making things happen! So, are we going to leave all behind in 2020? What if, there is something to remember and carry forward into the new year? On asking this question, here are a few things that emerged from the shadows of this year. The real world and what it takes to stay alive We now know the real world. A mortal threat made us aware of it. The real world is where life persists. The real world is where decisions and actions that help us stay alive and well are made. The last year gifted us the context within which we recognized this real world. Without this context, we were leading self-absorbed…
Non-Being in the Pandemic
Individuals and organisations are hunkering down to brave this pandemic. Those on the margins of a secure life are clinging on for sheer survival. This is not an easy time to live in. Are we making it more difficult for ourselves? Why is it that we are sheltering in our homes, but feel locked out of Life – its vitality and energy? A sliver of wisdom from Tao te Ching entered my awareness to engage with these questions. We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use. The pandemic has forced the world into an arrested state of being. The outwardly movement of joining spokes (connecting), of shaping clay ( storing), of hammering wood ( building) is no longer completely available for us. And because we work with…
Organisations in Crisis – The Danger and the Opportunity
In times of grave uncertainty, organisations find themselves in a situation that spells both danger and opportunity. It is dangerous to go into a binary mode- fight or flight, do or not do, decide or not decide, now or never. Gripped by survival anxiety, organisational leaders want to stamp their presence on the proceedings. There is comfort in poring over spreadsheets and calculations and being able to make changes with a few keyboard clicks. They are making changes on the map and the map is not the territory. Where is the opportunity? The opportunity lies in reimagining things anew because you are forced by the turn of circumstances to return to the basics, the fundamentals. When the blueprint is taken off the dusty shelf and revisited on the decision-making table, you find yourself more willing and able to make changes in the very design and workflow of the organisation. A water reservoir in times of severe drought year can go through a complete overhaul because the water levels are so low. A dilapidated bridge on a busy national highway can…
Organisations – Resisting the pull of going back to Normal
Business Organisations love predictability and control. The COVID-19 pandemic has left them without both. After gaining a modicum of breathing space, they are mulling over their options. What do we do next? After a disruptive & disorienting shock, a natural comfort move is for organisations to fall back into familiar routine and feel in control. If resilience is defined as the ability to bounce back to the normal state, the going back to routine does seem like going back to normal. However, being insistent on routines may be a less than optimal response. When we have no faith in the future we incline to arrange our lives so that we can predict the future. We either make of our existence a rigid routine or pile up all manner of defences to make it secure. The craving for security stems from a need for predicatibility, and its intensity is in inverse proportion to our faith in the future. -Eric Hoffer The strategies and plans these organisations had made before COVID-19 and the systems and processes that have been instituted for execution,…
Corona Outbreak – The Call to Action for all Social Organizations is Now
A healthy business cannot exist in a sick society. – Peter Drucker Organisations that see the writing on the wall are not waiting for the WHO to declare a pandemic. They are taking matters into their own hands because they know that it is better to be safe than sorry. They range from start-ups to giant corporations. They are willing to take a hit as they know the calamity that they want to pre-empt. The single biggest reason for the spreading of the virus is that infected people are in circulation around the world.And whatever the world can do to limit the circulation of people and make it absolutely controlled is bound to help us all. Whatever arguments that are being dished out to deny the need for an absolute clampdown on people movement are arguments of convenience made out of an inability to visualise how quickly things spiral out of control when they cross a tipping point. The governments that have succeeded in containing it have absolutely been prepared for a complete lock-down. Their fast planning and furious action…
Why is empathy so hard to experience?
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the thoughts and feelings of another. Empathy is prescribed as an essential attribute for leaders and managers. When you are able to understand and identify with the thoughts and feelings of the people you work with, you will succeed. Empathy is such a natural human response to life,why then is it prescribed? After all, nobody prescribes breathing as a way to live. We breathe on our own. And so do we empathise on our own, don’t we? We instantly empathise when a stranger on a train or a flight speaks about a recent bereavement. We maintain peace and quiet for a colleague hard at work, even though usually we like to ruffle their feathers; because we know that their next meeting could be career-defining. We can identify. We can relate. On the other hand, social life and work-progress is also based on moderating or disregarding empathy. A hard thing to accept, for sure! Our much loved team leader has fought hard at a meeting of higher-ups. He did his best for all…
LeaderPlay – Compensating for flawed employment
Sometimes, I believe that compensation is the perfect word for high salary packages. As leadership positions dwindle, how else can you compensate an ambitious performer who had been misled into believing he or she will be at the top of the heap one day. The unspoken truth about personal development within organisations is that the potential for self-growth for individuals working under the same setup for long is limited. There is no real exposure to the sheer range and diversity of the world outside. This exposure makes so much of a difference.You compensate the ambitious performer for not being able to provide them that; after all, you want your best racehorses cooped up in the stable. Funnily enough, the organisation can avoid this compensation by rethinking why it has to prevent employees from seeking substantive growth experiences elsewhere, if not outright multiple employment. And it is a win for the organisation as well. Enabling your employee to engage uninhibitedly with the world is the best engagement strategy one can think of. Universities who demand that full-time faculty also take on…