Leadership 101 - Doing Right Vs Being Successful

There are two ways of looking at things - "Doing Right" and "Being Successful". All actions that are right may not lead to success and all successes which are gotten might not have been gotten in right way". We call someone goof who had the capability to think in a right way and we can give many examples. Like many man made objects, the successes are also made by man. If someone becomes successful after cheating (for example, building a house with corrupt money), we still praise him for being successful (and indirectly for cheating). If someone does something in right way and still fails, he is done. Because of this feedback system, most of us just do whatever is needed to be successful. We just praise success and do not care about being right.

We, the human being, get carried away my the momentary pleasures and gather the guts to do wrong thing if that wrong thing can be hidden or widely accepted in your society. You an option out of two.

1. Being Right and Doing in right way
2. Being Successful

Success gives pleasure gives to your ego and you feel excited until success ebbs out, but "being right" is humane and divine thing, it always excites you. When you are right, there will be great force in you that will drive you towards excellence and you will understand excellence is more than successful.

Who said "excellence" is journey. When you stay in the state of "being right", for you, the excellence will be a destination. This is great lesson I learned and also learning is that "being right" is toughest in life.

Leadership 101 - Leaders Aren't Faint Hearted

Mistake make the man perfect. Not only it makes us perfect, it also makes us strong and gives us opportunity to test our integrity. It was two months after I assumed lead, I made a miserable and bloody mistake. But I was able to sail through with much ease simply because I accepted that it was my mistake (I made others 0% accountable). Since I openly and unconditionally accepted my mistake, my natural response was fierce. When you make a mistake there are two options

1. Bury that mistake thinking that no one sees and be passive as if nothing has happened. When you do this the possibility of you learning something is nil. And you will ditch not only yourself but also the people you trusted you. The trust between you and the stakeholders will decrease and ultimately seize.
2. Stand up like a kinder garden kid with a lot of enthusiasm and accept that "I am the culprit" and own it 200% and make a damn honesty effort for a steeper recovery or probably a vertical recovery. Your stakeholders will be proud of you. They will trust you more and finally they will be loyal to you. That is how you build relationships.

Choose the second one because it takes a great deal to stand up when you are in tight corners.

Leaders Aren't faint hearted.

Two more blogs

It is great feeling to share one's learning in the form of presentation, training, discussion and writing. Now, I have started two more blogs to document my learning, express my thoughts and validate it and give some food for thought for you. Yesterday, I registered as PMI member and this means that I will be taking up PMP in near future. That is going to be a steep learning curve needing discipline. I have a started a blog on Project Management and for the next few months I will be posting on PMP and occasionally on other aspects of Project Management. The blog address is http://tinythoughts.grabyourfreedom.net

Many of us will be willing to earn money and multiply it taking some risks by investing in stock markets directly or indirectly. I primarily started to play with stocks not to earn money (but I dont know why I started to play). After playing for a while, I made tiny losses and huge losses before making small profits. But overall, the learning was great and it taught me how to shield oneself from others emotions. Believe me, stock market is a place with low emotional intelligence and if you can continue to make profits consistently, you are really maturing. So, I am planning to do research on stocks/technical analysis/reading charts. I will be posting few to start with at http://finance.grabyourfreedom.net

Two more blogs to our portfolio

Tiny Thoughts
Value Investing

Leadership 101 - Respect Your Juniors Twice You Respect Your Seniors

It was a gathering. A senior executive was standing in a podium and crowd were following the usual protocol - putting the mobile phones on mute. Another scenario. It was a meeting, the same senior guy was talking to his juniors and all the folks are listening. Suddenly, the phone rings and the guy (one of the juniors) just asks the permission to speak (as a courtesy). The same junior guy speaks to his teammate (who is junior to him) and picks up the phone without showing any courtesy.

For God sake suck up your senior but at the same time do not ditch your juniors. Show them courtesy and show them they are worth showing that courtesy. It makes them happier, it provides enough motivation to be your ambassadors, they become the sales guy of your idea and they adore you to pieces and all of a sudden you become their role models. Two (rather three) things that are important

1. Show authentic courtesy
2. Respect your juniors twice you respect your seniors

This will redefine the trust between you and your juniors. This is one of the things I learned during my journey in pursuit of leadership.

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.