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…
Embrace Mediocrity for Work-Life Balance & more advice from Gail Golden
The byline in Gail Golden’s book, ‘Curating your Life’ speaks about ending the struggle for work-life balance. In the Modern Wisdom podcast, Gail shares numerous ideas and insights to end that struggle. To me, the one that stood out was – embracing mediocrity. Our quest for excellence makes us indiscriminate in a way. We want to be fantastic in everything we do, put in a lot of effort. In our mind, it is a reflection of our commitment and sincerity. Gail invites us to accept a liberating truth : Most of what we do in our life is mediocre. We slog it out in the quest for perfection. Not content with good. In fact, we don’t even need to be good. Just well-enough is acceptable. Once you realize that you can be passable in multiple areas that are not core in your life, so much is unlocked for you! Free of the mediocre things by not doing it at all or doing just well-enough; you can now pour out your time and effort doing the few things you are truly…
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…
Working from Home – Few thoughts
Work from Home is easier said than done. Here are a few ways of perceiving and a few thoughts. a) This is just a change of scene. We are used to different ways of being as well. We are not the same at work and home. We appear to be more purposeful and focused at work. We experience ourselves as free beings at home. When you settle down for work at home, the being has to be chosen for the doing. To be a free being for work is a reservoir of possibility. What we put in by way of free will and pure intention can create new realities. b) I will be as productive as before. The context and circumstances that necessitated work from home continue to have a powerful impact on everything, society and work included. Acknowledging the power of context is important. When you know that a pandemic is out of control and lives are being lost, the anxiety and the uncertainty get to you. You will be less productive, but more reflective. The meaning of work, its…
The Peter Drucker Diary – Entry 5
The work of a genius or giant often presents an anomaly. Reverential regard obscures the real work. People know the name, but haven’t engaged with the work. In this series, we take one Peter Drucker quote or excerpt and seek to understand it. Entry 5 “Expect the job to provide stimulus only if you work on your own self-renewal, only if you create the excitement, the challenge, the transformation that makes an old job enriching over and over again” A job, especially in the context of an organisation, is in place for producing consistent results as demanded by the nature of the task or the wish of the customer. This creates routine. Any routine becomes mindless after some point of time. People go through the motions and deliver the minimum acceptable results that bear the stamp of consistency. For the organisation, most such results are low-stakes and deemed acceptable; and so, everybody plays their part in the drift downwards towards mediocrity. Peter Drucker puts the onus for a positive handling of the situation on the job-holder. Do not expect the…
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…
Indigo Fracas – Flawed Disciplinary Action
Indigo Airlines flew directly into a storm kicked up on the ground! Two Indigo staffers were caught on video trying to pin down an abrasive passenger. This was a fight more common among kids at school. Not at an airport. The incident happened in mid-October. The video, shot by an Indigo cargo handler, came out in November. Curiously enough, the cargo handler was removed from the job. As per Indigo’s public statement, he had instigated the other crew and was directly responsible for things coming to a head. Still, no matter what the cargo handler did, there is no way the people who actually got physical can be let off the hook. This is where Indigo seems to have gone completely off the radar. Let us accept for now that the cargo handler was the instigator. Even if that was the case,were the two other staffers such mindless automatons that they would just follow someone’s bidding, even if that be of their own supposedly senior colleague. Indigo claims the staffers used force to rein in an out of bounds passenger as a matter of…
Why Feedback falters
“So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” – Peter Drucker As a trainer, as you grow older, you may not become wiser. But you begin to think and wonder if you ever thought about things before! What was I thinking of when I asked people to use ‘sandwich technique’ for feedback years ago?! Praise first, Criticise again, End with Praise. Who was I kidding when I asked people to not focus on the person, but focus on the behaviour. That keeps it specific and makes a person less defensive, I said. Both are specific suggestions, much lauded. Both reduce things to a formula. And formulas and human interaction; never have the twain met! What is wrong with the ‘sandwich technique’? As a feedback recipient, do you consider yourself a thinking person, someone who observes, learns and predicts? If you do, you know soon enough that here is a practiced technique on its way. Mechanical, contrived, and utterly predictable. And once you know what’s coming, you stop listening. I can very well…
How to be an Employee : Peter Drucker’s classic career advice
Being an employee is an art, says Drucker. And he says getting fired from your first job may be a good thing! Isn’t that interesting? Peter Drucker wrote on this topic almost forty years back. The Basic Skill He starts off by asking, ” What can you learn that will help you in being an employee?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is communication. Drucker calls it a basic skill which very few students bother to learn. This one basic skill is the ability to organize and express ideas in writing and in speaking. For Drucker, an early start is beneficial. ” The foundations for skill in expression have to be laid early : an interest in and an ear for language; experience in organizing ideas and data; in brushing aside the irrelevant; in wedding outward form and inner content into one structure; and above all, the habit of verbal expression. If you do not lay these foundations during your school years, you may never have an opportunity again. You should take courses in the writing of poetry and the writing of short stories. Most…
Living with your work-identity
In a play being staged in Italy, the actor was hooded and being hanged. Something went terribly wrong and he was being strangulated for real. There was a medical practitioner in the audience who noticed his bodily struggle and rushed in. The actor died in the hospital later on. Without the medical practitioner, he would have died on the stage itself. This got me thinking about our work identity – to what extent is it a part of our social life. For doctors, there is almost no social life independent of their work identity. Everywhere they go, they stay doctors. Once upon a time, they were invited to mark themselves as doctors on rail ticket requisition slips. This is very handy in times of a medical emergency on board the train; or a flight for that matter. Doctors might be on a honeymoon, but their Hippocratic oath will take precedence over their wedding vows if somebody needs immediate medical attention. Such is the nature of their work. On the opposite end of the spectrum is an intelligence agent, more commonly understood…