It was an uneasy conversation. You have this very capable subordinate. She had asked for a change of job responsibilities and duly got it. But she is new to this work in which you are an old hand. So, you offered to help and mentor her. The immediate context was that you overheard her struggling to connect with a valued client. You just happened to pass by her desk when she was talking. When you called her in to offer help, she knew where this was coming from. And her demeanour showed she did not like this one bit. She politely declined any offer of help and said she will ask for help when she needs it. You quietly reflect on the conversation.Here was a capable individual who could do with a little help. But she takes quiet pride in her work and is very sensitive about any offer of help. She interprets such an offer as a lack of confidence in her. You accept you got it wrong from the word go. Given the context, she was going to react this…
If its so bad,why not make it good? A case for learning.
Have you heard this said about a movie,”It was so bad that it was really good!” Many people actually celebrate this ‘so bad,its good’ movies & even make money by spoofing or reviewing it.That is value-creation! People scrounge for value once they accept going in for the experience.As audience in a speech or trainees in a learning event, we can do the same.Why not? What else is there.Can you raise the bar for yourself as a learner.The measure of doing so would be to transcend & go past the ability of the content,process or the trainer.And to create meaning & value by identifying substance!
Putting a Price Tag & Losing out on Intrinsic Value – in Life & at Work.
A social experiment in Israel is a good reason to explore the after-effects of putting a price-tag on desired behaviour. Our performance assessment & reward structures are built around paying good money for a job done – on specification. And a penalty or lack of increment for sub-par performance. The system works. Or does it? Here’s what happened. Parents in day-care centres in Israel used to keep anxious kids & a tired teacher waiting well past the pick-up time of 4 pm. They were habitually late. Economists monitored ten such centres for four weeks. On an average, there were eight late pick-ups per week per day care centre. The parents hurried onto the scene half guilty, half worried. Fifth week onwards, they imposed a penalty of 3$ for a more than ten minute delay. The parents were paying $380 per month. By the twentieth week, the average pick-ups per week per day care centre had shot up-to twenty, more than double the original average! Daniel Cohen, French economist puts it well, “There are things we do because we cherish them.…
Peter Drucker – On the first job
“On the whole young people have a tendency to hang on to the first job…beyond the time when they should have quit for their own good. Your first job may turn out to be right for you—but this is pure accident. Certainly you should not change jobs constantly or people will become suspicious rightly of your ability to hold any job. At the same time, you must not look upon the first job as the final job; it is primarily a training job, an opportunity to analyze yourself.” – Peter Drucker Drucker also advises people to leave their first job if they are not learning enough or if the company is not willing to heap responsibility on people in junior positions. In few words, Drucker liberates readers; he takes them to a vantage-point from where they can see things most clearly.
The Most Powerful Words for Guiding Human Resource Development in Organizations
In the fewest possible words, can we get a guiding principle for developing people in organizations? In my search for something that works, something not necessarily lofty, but nevertheless validated by success, I can think of no better one than the one below. Every organization develops people. It either helps them grow or stunts them. – Peter Drucker The power in this profound observation escapes the casual reader. Make no mistake about it. For those who haven’t yet grasped the significance of these words, there is a new world waiting to be born! These are the most powerful words for any leader in any role to really reflect on, be it CEO, HR Head, L&D Head or a Business head. What makes them so powerful? They illuminate a truth we seldom consider & act upon. Our most over-used cliché is that people are our best asset. We accept that developing people is the key to organizational success. But do we really think that by not helping people grow, we are stunting their growth? To stunt is to permanently impair the ability…
Designing a (corporate readiness/ campus to corporate/ soft skills for work) course curriculum – Three Key Questions
India’s educated youth lack the basic skills to become employable; ready to be absorbed into work by various sectors. According to Higher Education in India: Vision 2030, a report made by Ernst and Young for FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry), 75% of IT graduates are deemed ‘unemployable’, 55% in manufacturing, 55% in healthcare and 50% in banking and insurance. NASSCOM says that only 10-15% of other graduates are considered employable in the IT/ITES segments. These are staggering statistics. What is meant by being unemployable? Quite simply, it means even though the job candidate has all qualifications on paper, companies do not consider them job-ready. They lack the basic skills to communicate & participate in a team, to understand the context of what their job requires, & to adapt what they know into specific output on the ground. A skills-gap of epic proportions. This crying need has led many colleges, educational institutions & corporate companies to try their bit & plug this skills-gap by imparting skills-training, especially in soft-skills. The result is the emergence of corporate readiness…
Triggering the ‘active’ in Active Listening. What scuba-diving & the hospital emergency scene teach us?
You are scared and excited about being underwater for the first time! As the scuba-diving instructor speaks on how to go about the whole thing one last time, you hang onto each word for dear life. You grab tighter as the instructor moves on to ‘trouble-shooting’ instructions. You ask anything & everything that comes gushing onto to you. You repeat instructions, paraphrase the meaning as you understand it, ask whether you got it right. You are determined to get it right & you care a little less of what others make of you! If you are going to do sky-diving or bungee jumping, you will likely be the same. You may have never heard or known about ‘active listening’ in your whole life & you still end up practising it! Active listening is listening in a way that reaffirms we are communicating; the speaker & listener both experience that they are making a real effort to understand each other. We are exhorted to learn it & get trained on tips & techniques. We don’t know any of it, & yet we…
The efficiency-effectiveness motif
When you fit bulbs onto lamp-posts along the vast stretches of an express way, the way to get the job done quick and fast is one after the other. The bulky crane-like contraption of a vehicle lumbers along as if nodding in agreement. Hardly something to think about in this set procedure. Indisputably efficient and alarmingly ineffective. Why so? Read on. The efficiency and effectiveness motif is well-recognized by most in business and social enterprises. Peter Drucker laid it out for us. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. He then admonishes us by saying “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all ” Effectiveness is the real deal. When the bulbs are fitted in a row, they start with the same shelf-life. They will blow out at more or less the same time, and plunge that patch of road into dangerous darkness for fast-moving traffic. The focus on effectiveness here leads us to the question, “What is the purpose of setting up these lamp-posts? What is the right thing to do in going…
Why communication skills training is so much more than just working with individuals?
What is effortless for us to initiate takes concerted effort to do well. Take breathing & sitting. We breathe on autopilot. Hardly think about it. It barely registers how we sit. We slump into perceived comfort which is anything but that. We all know that there is a mindful breathing practise that makes us breathe better among other things. We all know our spinal health depends on a healthy sitting posture. We never get down to doing both unless we suffer some pain. Is communicating any different? We all can talk & hear wilfully; to fill the silence. And lo & behold, we are all communicators; so we think! The results do not deliver what we communicated for. This is especially true in organizations. Information is the currency of organizational transactions. Is there any other? When people envision & share, plan & co-ordinate, market & sell, organize & implement; they are always communicating information in some form or the other. Due to its all-pervasive nature, organizations rarely disown communication skills as a learning need. They attribute most problems to lack…
What is a juggler doing?
When people reach out for a metaphor to explain how they are multi-tasking, the one that most easily springs to mind is a juggler continuously catching & tossing multiple objects in the air. The juggler is juggling. No doubt about it. Is the juggler multi-tasking? If the multiple objects vary, does it become a multi-task? If the objects differ in shape, size or colour; do they create multiple tasks; a discrete activity in a class of its own ? A task so considered requires its own deliberate attention & specific action. If the juggler is cycling & juggling at the same time, it is definitely multitasking. If the juggler is running & juggling at the same time, it is definitely multitasking. When a juggler juggles multiple objects, it is not multi-tasking. The task is singular.