Leadership 101 - Goodness Comes Through You (not from you)

I recently read somewhere, "Employers do not pay employees, they are just mediators, it is customers who pay". This can very well be applied to leaders leading a team. All bosses and particularly if you are someone's boss need to remember that you are not giving prosperity and growth. You subordinates earn it and the growth/blah-blah comes through you and not from you. This is true. Since this is truth, it needed not be twisted or you need more examples. The truth is so simple and straight forward.

But the moment when you feel that you are the giver and everything originates from you, no one can stop your downfall and the state of your team will be pathetic. You may not crush your team initially but slowly you will. To be a leader, you need to understand your boundaries and one such boundary is "knowing that all goodness come through you and not from you". This is first thing I learned when I started my role as a leader two years back. Thanks to Zig Ziglar.

You happen to be there, you do nothing more than that. Your duty is to add value and add more value to your team.

Be a follower, then a leader is a possibility

Many of us (I should say most of us) are both leader and follower in everyday life - may it be at work or personal life. At work, we are boss and subordinate to someone and in personal life same is the case. So, we cannot shy away either from leadership or being follower. In order to be at best in both leadership and follower role, we need to understand the factor that connects both leader and follower.

A bad follower cannot be a good leader. Let us say it again - A bad follower cannot be a good leader but can be a good manager. The leader and follower relationship is two way lane. First, the leader should be highly self motivated, highly intellect and give respect to his follower. When a follower has such leader, first he respects his leader, then loves him and finally draws inspiration from his leader. From respect to drawing inspiration is a gradual, study and time consuming process. When the follower reaches a point, then the follower becomes a leader. A follower needs to spend at least one cycle of respecting his leader, loves his leader and having him as a source of inspiration to become a leader.

So, the leadership starts at being a faithful, honest and great follower.

Leadership 101 - Good things should end to spawn better things

It has a three successful association and for the past three years has been such a learning - technical, leadership and emotional intelligence. The three years long relationship with my client comes to end. We have completed the mission quite successfully and our openness in learning gave us successes throughout the journey. It is good to complete a project but it is very painful to miss people. But life just goes on and it will.

I would like to split my tenure into three - first half with technical challenges, next six months with leadership challenges and the final part emotional intelligence challenges. Overall, the past three years taught me - need for patience, walk the talk, building high performance teams and kindling the servant in you. But now, it is time to say goodbye to all the folks who helped me to sail through this journey with a lot of learning. Come on guys, our time is over. Let us party.

In the next few posts, I will be writing on my experiences which shaped my thinking, elevated my performance and kindled my interests towards management more specifically in learning strategy.

Get the basics right - Fix the root cause, not symptoms

Some say, "We are following world class processes to deliver software with quality and in time". Is it the processes that deliver software? Isn't it people? When you want to deliver great software, you got to have great people or at bare minimum you should make great people. Because any great things can be delivered by great people. Mediocre people just deliver mediocre stuffs. Mediocre people with world class processes is just waste of time, false baptism and false hope.

Great people do not need processes, because they know how to do it but they may take different approach - the alternate approach is not usually mediocre, they are just different but equally efficient and effective. If you want organizational transformation, processes won't help you, tools won't help you. You got to make employees great by transforming them. The other methods sucks and usually fails. If you really want to build a world class teams, focus on right things, get your priorities right and do it always - transform people.

Don't drive focussing too much on rear mirror

Just in case, if you are successful in the past, you do not need to necessarily be successful in the future. The future may be very different. Would you ever drive only by seeing rear mirrors? Rear mirror just helps you to keep you checked. The present and the past successes are just like seeing through rear mirrors. It is something like sugar written on a paper and utmost it breeds complacency. But seeing through the future is different ball game and exciting too.

There are two ways that one can do to learn how to pierce through the future. Go through some websites and go through some presentations of people, memorize few words to appear that you are educated. Then you address a gathering rather blabber something. This one particularly works well when you have authority and up in the hierarchy. Many folks are made to sit like a ducks and they hear you duck quacking - quack, quack, quack. Irrespective of the time slots given to you, you just quack. The second way and often least preferred route is to make whole heart attempt to learn seeing through the future from the scratch. The second method is worth taking and equally rewarding.

When it comes to a vision, it has to so compelling and the strategy built has to be forward looking and motivate people to give their full. Don't blow the old trumpets which never worked, people are clever sometimes to recollect your tune as they heard it many times. No vision/strategies can be so compelling than creating a future. So, don't drive people to look backward but just encourage them to look forward because the past is irrelevant.

Competing for the future - Chapter 1

It has been quite a while after I started to read "Competing for the future" by Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad. I have read through the first chapter twice and planning to read few more times before moving on further. The first chapter just sets the context of whole of the book and brings out the importance of reinventing the industry by regenerating core strategies moving beyond restructuring and reengineering. The first chapter emphasizes the very need of organization transformation in the light of industry transformation against organizational transformation to just catch up with the competitors. The former is blue ocean and the latter is read ocean. The first chapter gives a lot of examples of companies like IBM, Sears, Xerox on why they failed and HP, Wal-mart on why they were successful. I certainly feel that I have invested in a good book to improve by business knowledge. More posts to come on other chapters.

Work on Plus Factor - 3 + 3 = 6

When we were kid, we were fine, we were able to understand and get true learning. We learned that three plus three makes six ( 3 + 3 = 6). We were so curious on "plus". Whenever a simple math was given to us, we were so excited to solve the math. We were focused on the method rather than the result. The method, when properly thought out and done, it leads to proper results. We were so much immersed in the true learning. But as we grow, we tend to forget the "plus" factor - the experience, excitement and thinking. This is because of that we are overly focused on the results leading to fear or greed.

We need to go back to elementary school to relearn the importance of "plus" factor - the experience, excitement, thinking and joy out of true learning.

Reskill or be ready to be irrelevant

People used to say that "Change is Permanent". But when you closely watch the change, we will understand that change is not permanent. Let us consider the penetration of technology in our everyday life. Few decades before the penetration of technology was slow and not that rapid. But today, we have so many new markets, so many new products and people often surprised by the technological change. By the time people get accustomed with one technology, it becomes irrelevant and people feel that they are left behind. So, in today's fast paced technological life, we cannot say "no" adapting to change as we may need to completely renounce technology (which no one is ready). Even the change changes rapidly with more acceleration than the previous day.

The same is the case with an organization because the organizations are also built on top of technology and it cannot isolate itself from outside world. If the organizations want to leverage the maximum from the change, it is highly essential that the organization goes for reskilling everyday. The individual need to forget the technology/concepts that became irrelevant and should start learning new things that are widely adopted.

The only way that the organization can be competitive is by reskilling its employees. So, reskill, reskill, reskill.

Leading a change - My Views

There was a fire breakout in a community and all the people living in the community work hard with the firemen to put off the fire. The fire extinguish operation went on for almost 10 hours and finally all were allowed to get into their homes. The community felt that such fire accidents were painful and now they were able to manage with fire since it happened for fifth time in a row. Now it had become a growing problem. The community also had an association and they planned to meet on Sunday to talk about the recent fire accident and put an end to such accidents by adapting fire prevention measures. Sunday came, they met and installed fire prevention funds diverting association funds and collecting additional money from each home owners.

If you look at this case, this is a change and on a contrary to the popular belief - the people will be against the change, the co-operation was tremendous. The people were willing to co-operate and more inviting to the change. How people co-operated? It is because of one thing that connect the change and the people who adapts to the change which is permanently putting off the fire. They were happy that they no longer need to spend sleepless and painful nights/days with dreadful fire. The one thing - the very purpose of the change has to be powerful and the other things like communication, branding, piloting, feedback comes next (but certainly important).

If you are leading a change, if you can find a single idea that interconnects people and connect people with the change, the change will be successful. Else, it suffers and digs it own grave.

Stop being a Bozo, be Sensible

The world revolves around me and how can it revolve around the sun. I am the leader, possibly because I am more experienced (probably few more days) than you and you got to think as I expect you think, I will give a dot and you have the freedom to stand and if you are intelligent to play within the dot and most important thing is that you have to update me, when you do anything. Welcome to the world of old generation. This concept of leadership is old, probably only few hundred years when we lived with animals. We say arsenic is silent killer, but this is sick leadership and dreadful than arsenic. It kills people shaking their self-confidence, spoiling their creativity. It helps to create herds not organization.

I think, "sick leadership" should have been a conspiracy against an organization. It is clearly a trend and starts with an idiot who has more power and end up misusing his power. While he misuses his/her power, some class B sees it and there comes the perfect understanding. This class B again creates many class B when Class B reaches a threshold gives way to Class C. The sick leadership will appear to give great results but it just gives wrong hopes. The term follower has often misunderstood. The follower has a different meaning than a slave and a happy slave can never be a follower. The follower connects with leader for a common and noble purpose. The leader has a different meaning than bozo.

Stopping being a Bozo, be sensible.

What leader got to do - Identify and Delegate

If you are idle chick, you will served as soup - you will be chicken soup for someone's dinner. As more Gen Ys are supposed to join as workforce, it is very important that a leader understands the typical attributes of Gen Ys. There is a intelligent Gen Y in my team. He uses his mobile and says that I will send status report in SMS. I can hardly understand what he types and I am totally incompetent before his SMS English. After sending SMS, he justs laughs at me. But he completes his job well and inspires others with his workmanship.

It is not only life style that is different, the apporach towards work changes between Gen X and Gen Y. All intelligent and focussed Gen Ys aspire to become project managers within 5 years and the important point is that those people are willing to stretch. They look work as place to learn, they want their managers to be their mentors. In this scenario, one needs to exercise atmost care in spoting the talent and grooming it. This is unusually difficult because they expect to grow faster. For the modern day manager and particularly Gen X managers, it is going to difficult to keep up the pace with Gen Y's expectations. One needs to spot the talent and wait no time to delegate it to next level. Delegation has been there in dictionary and management books for a very long time but it is the time to put that into practice. Else, the leaders job will be difficult in handling Gen Ys.

The leader's job is to identify talent, delegate work and move on to take up something big. This has to be a never ending loop :-).