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Here are three things everyone knows. Listening improves communication. Appreciating people makes them perform better. Leaders create more leaders. If you get to hear them, you say, ‘ Yes, that is true.’ As an afterthought, you add, ‘ That is common sense.’ A series of questions to ask is 1) Is this held to be true? 2) Is it so widely known that it is common sense? And if the answer is ‘ Yes’ ask, 3) Why doesn’t it happen enough? The eloquent answer, ‘ Common sense is not common’ is a cop-out. Stay with the question.  Why doesn’t it happen enough?

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”                 – Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th Century Sufi mystic Bewilderment – 1. (meaning) the condition of being confused and disoriented. 2. (meaning) situation of perplexity or confusion, a tangle. Cleverness – (meaning) the ability to understand and learn quickly & easily. The seller and the buyer in our commercial world do not sell their cleverness and are scared to buy bewilderment. To sell, in Rumi’s spirit, the sense he meant it, is to let go. To buy is to let in. Let go of cleverness. Let in bewilderment. Look at the meanings again. That would be a crazy thing to do, isn’t it!  Consider this, a corporate head gets into the ‘let’s talk business’ mode which the trainer-consultant was anyways waiting for. Do they do what Thomas Huxley so beautifully expressed centuries ago? Here is what Huxley said. “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” Far from sitting down before fact as a child,…

We were suddenly aware of each other. It had started to rain. Joggers park, Bandra ( west) in Mumbai builds a canopy, a temporary shed, over its circular tracks in the monsoon. So, that people can huddle together if it rains. And it did yesterday evening. And so, people converged onto the sheltered space. It was a special get-together. Strangers, old pensioners, toddlers, resident cats, couples, singles, teenagers, new parents, resident foreigners. And without any shared agenda, here we were, sharing the same space. The toddlers were the leaders. For them, everybody was one big family! They were moving around.They were on their knees, stroking the cats, and inventing a game at the snap of a finger! Somehow, the rest did not reach out for their familiar refuge, their cell phones. They watched the kids. And smiled… All of us were simply inspired to “be” in the moment. How rare, how exquisite.. This togetherness without reaching out for something. It is the feeling of community. It stopped raining. The connection broke. We all wandered off. Bandra ( West) experiments with  ‘Equal Streets’, an…

Nothing succeeds like success. And nothing misleads like success. I refer to the endless streaming content on success and on successful people. Why do I say mislead? It is not the success stories that mislead. It is what we focus on in those stories that is unhelpful to our present context. We focus on the habits and practices of successful people. ‘Already’ successful people, if I may say so. That is, the habits and practices of people for whom success is a foregone conclusion. And of people who continue being successful. The habits and practices do not seem like those of people locked into the struggles of their life. They do not ring true as habits and practices of people at their most vulnerable. Of course, not all habits and practices come across that way. The successful have a few habits and practices, both before, and after success. In our present context, we are locked into struggles of our own. The already successful inspire me, no doubt. What is more helpful is to feel in my gut the desperation as well…

My previous post unpacks “hire for attitude, train for skill.” This post tries to repack it! The last post was more abstract, it talked about implications. This one aims to be specific, it talks about actions. We are jumping right in, considering a few examples of performance against the grain. Quite often, it is the cop with the bad-ass attitude who succeeds in nailing the crooks. The regular cop who goes by the book, the cop who is a perfect fit for the recruitment specification doesn’t.  Of course, nobody wants to cram the force with all bad-ass attitude people. That would be creating a Frankenstein. But this frequent success calls into question the simplistic interpretation of  ‘required attitude’, the attitude considered right for the job. A system is effective if it accommodates such a bad-ass attitude cop while putting in safeguards to shield the system from his deviant ways. To be sure,attitude is not the same thing as integrity or character. Integrity & character are non-negotiable. Those who reject any criticism of ‘ hire for attitude, train for skill’ do so because they think we are condoning…

For the millionth time, I saw the words, “Hire for attitude, train for skill” used in relation to recruiting. Just decided to unpack this advice for what it entails. 1) What specifically gets the work done – attitude or skill? The skill is the basis for action. If attitude is present and skill is not, no work gets done. If skill is present, and attitude (presumably the right one) is not, it is possible to still get the work done. Of course, attitude ( or the lack of it) will cast a dark shadow over performance. But,if performance is the real object,skill is the light in which the object shines. And attitude is the shadow. The shadow can blend in or smear the lustre of appearance. It cannot create it. When push comes to shove, if people have to choose one, simply for the sake of getting things done, one has to opt for skill.  2) How much time do we have? Part of the challenge is people don’t have the luxury of time to train. There are job vacancies that are causing…

Here are a few things we don’t ask about leadership. In rambling fashion. 1) The camera pans on to followers. The leaders words boom out across the stadium. The words light a fire in hearts. Followers are on their feet, clapping and cheering. They scream out their lungs & proclaim their support for the leader and the cause. The scene repeats itself. Everyone is talking about the leader. Nobody asks this about the followers. What life conditions made them turn into followers? On what grounds do they support the leader? If there are grievances that make them rally around the leader, would the leader want to solve those grievances? In the event of success, why is so little known about the numerous actions of followers and so much known about the masterly moves of the leader? 2) The political leaders get on-board the plane. They are going for a leadership development program at a world-famous university. People read the news and watch the news reel, nodding approvingly of the move. Great to have politicians being taught how to lead by people who are…

I kept quiet because my words make volcanoes erupt! My wife was boiling with rage. She had been put on a fruits only diet by her doctor. It was tough going. And now she had been given a raw guava by our domestic aide. She demanded an explanation. “Have I ever said I like them raw?” she fumed. Of course, she had never said that. Why did he then do such a thing? You see, it was me. I love ripe guavas. I had specifically told the aide to give me only ripe guavas. Our domestic aide was clear on what I want. If you have a few guavas, and you are told what one customer likes, what do you do about the other customer? Ask the other, right? Yet, he did not do that. I believe even I would not have asked. Here’s why. What would one prefer the situation to be? It is perfect if one customer likes ripe & other likes raw because it is easier to buy & stock guavas when they are at different stages from…

I go to a yoga institute. A few yoga instructors swap schedules for a particular time in a way that makes us experience all of them equally. There is a Thai instructor for whom English is not the first language. She is excellent in caring for our particular needs. And she is very sensitive about in-the-moment attention we all require. I found it a little difficult to pick up her accented English initially. With time, it has become better. All it really required was for me to become an alert & aware listener. When I started paying complete attention, I could understand everything she speaks! The other instructors speak English that is easy to pick up. How does one assess the Thai instructor as a yoga instructor?  All instructors are at par with each other in terms of expected competence. They all do their work in a way that leaves everybody content. However, a cursory participant out there for just one day would just make a quiet mention of how he or she struggled to pick up the english accent of the Thai instructor.…