Leadership 101 - Can ATM be a Leader?

The era of old (and old age) management and leadership is eroding. If you deny that you will be eroded along with old management styles. So far, we lived in the era of making money and most of the successes of corporations are upheld with single digit and sometimes double digit money matra - profit, revenue. Often, the people are called resources and head counts. But we are not far away from the world of oneness and mutual respect.

One of the key points that was discussed in "The Moonshots to Management" was that the power will go to people who add value and power will be yanked from people who do not add value and by the way, "The Moonshots to Management" was an article focusing management innovation from top notch professors and business leaders. Many people like Ken Blanchard have spoken about Inverting the Pyramid. If you haven't inverted it yet, do it now before you get buried when the pyramid inverts itself. The key differentiators in future centuries will be your people.

If you see "profit" is sufficient criteria for taking up leadership position, then an ATM that dispenses cash can be a great leader. Ask yourself what you have done for the people that you are representing and you privileged to lead. Have a time slot in your day (at least all working days) to think about your people and how you can transform them. Profit is fine for business but transformation is beyond business. Be sensible before it is too late. People will be proud to follow you. Period.

Leadership 101 - Consistency is Key

When we were kids my father gave us (to my younger sister and me) a small container which we used to save daily pocket money. My mom used to give us 25 paisa and I remember in few months we were able to save 10-20 rupees. There is another instance. My father was a bread winner to whole of my family (including my grandma who was living in a village). Out of little money what my father used to give her monthly, she saved 1000 bucks (she might have saved for years) and deposited in a local bank in my name. She was an example of being consistent. Before I became fully aware of this, I loved her, later I loved her and respected her discipline.

Generally we don't care when someone advices about tiny improvements. Being the young blood, we just focus on big things. We ultimately focus on "big things" and lose focus on actual process. But the people who are experienced and matured will focus on tiny and important things. I learned the paramount importance of being consistent from my previous Project Leader - Mr. RK Raja. He is man of consistency and he pushed me towards consistency. My CEO Mr. Vineet Nayar, in one of his yearly meetings talked about rain drops and how the rain drops make an ocean.

When you want to dig 100 feet deep, you need dig 1 feet 100 times consistently. If you dig 25 feet three times or 50 feet one time, it isn't sufficient. Consistency is the key to transformation.

Phishing - What an Idiot?

I never used to look at my SPAM folders and just send those emails directly to graveyard. Today, I happen to see one of the emails that appears to be from ICICI Bank. This is the phishing email and the guy was making everyone idiot. The phishing was tailored in a simple way. Observe the following picture and carefully look at the red rectangle. One rectangle highlights a text linked with a URL. The text of the hyperlink has http://www.icicibank.com/..... and the actual URL goes somewhere which can be observed from the second rectangle.

I was using Google Chrome which promptly pointed that the website was phishing site. This shows that the internet users illiterate in basic information security and the attackers take those innocent but careless people for a ride and make a big sum. This guy still uses a very foolish method to fool us. Beware, when Chrome or Firefox says something, just give it the deserved attention. This is just a thought to promote Information Security in normal life. We are so much obsessed with Internet and we need to use the knife to just cut the fruit and not our hands.

How to Build Emotional Intelligence - Get Rid Of Psychological Memory

It is easier said than done. My journey towards building emotional intelligence is very painful. But I believe that I can endure the pain because at the end of the day it makes me a nice and pleasant guy. On the way, I tend to learn so many things about humanity, human relations, psychology, how to get away from "don't walk the talk people" and yet to unaffected or affect negligibly.

Human beings have excellent memory - many many billions of terabytes. The wonderful thing about human beings is that they forget even the biggest blunders when there have benefits and they tend to blow up small mistakes which goes to an extent of taking a revenge. We need to build the habit of selective amnesia - the ability to forget our psychological memory. This is the key aspect for building emotional intelligence.

There are two types of memory - factual and psychological memory. For example, when your close friend does some unpardonable mistake which you cannot digest, you feel so much pain - the real pain due to the wound and the psychological pain due to your friend's action. In reality, it is the psychological pain that causes so much wound and prevails beyond the physical wound. You tend to spoil your inner well being and your low emotional intelligence erupts in many forms but mostly yelling at others or at your friend. The yell causes more damage to you than to your friend. The first step towards building emotional intelligence is to forget psychological but retaining the factual memory (which adds to your knowledge base) to add the scenario as your learning. The second step towards better Emotional Intelligence is getting rid of psychological memory.

Other posts on Emotional Intelligence can be accessed via this link

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.