I had an interesting conversation recently with a business leader about employees taking up people management roles for the first time. Individual contributors who do well in their roles, get promoted to people managers as a natural career progression in most companies. His concern was well founded – how do we promote people without measuring their ability to manage people?
Trust is often referred to as the holy grail for teamwork – everyone seems to agree on its importance. And yet only few seem to know how to go about enabling it. Intuitively, it makes a lot of sense. You would possibly get better results in a team environment if you can trust your team members and work together. However, a shift to the virtual work mode has made this even more challenging.
Do you have the right tools to manage your “human resources?” If not then this article is for you! For starters, don’t think of yourself as someone managing human ‘resources,’ think of yourself as someone managing human ‘responses.’ If you are managing a team or if you have to get things done from others, you know that everyone is different and has different motivations. Knowing everyone and catering to the needs of different people is challenging since you have to work with a large variety of people. But there is good news – there are certain motivation strategies that apply to everyone. Using these strategies can provide you with the tools you need to influence people and get things done.
The plot is laid. The location is set. The target is here. We just have to execute everything at right time and place! The plan is to steal the golden route to the airport. We will have to hijack the city’s traffic control system to get the car with the gold on the planned spot to execute the robbery.
Continue reading “How to Train Your Manager: A Roadmap to New Manager Training”
Does the pursuit of being more productive and achieving your targets get you glued to your laptop screen for hours? Do you experience stress from managing multiple projects that eventually takes on the form of body aches and physical exertion?
Continue reading “7 Tips to De-stress Throughout the Workday”
The Made in India guy, Milind Soman, is making all the right kinds of news these days. The 51-year-old just completed one of the toughest marathons in the world – The Ultraman Marathon. We have reason to celebrate because he has set a new fitness benchmark for people across all ages. I remember him as someone who was the first to set new trends in every industry he went into. This made me write about his life stories, which I summarize with a concept I call limitless leadership. Here are a few observations to help us discover the leader within and go beyond personal boundaries.
A leadership fable by Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, really brings to light how teamwork remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.
“Teamwork is not a virtue, it’s a choice, you have to decide whether you want to be a team or not and accept the sacrifices and the cost it entails, ultimately it comes down to mastering some simple concepts that you probably already know but the hard part is doing them everyday, day in and day out, it’s a discipline of mastering some simple things”
Teamwork is the most untapped competitive advantage of business today, the question though is, why is it so rare? For all the talk about teamwork and all the attention it supposedly receives, it isn’t apparent in most organizations. Why?
Continue reading “Book Review : The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team”
I recently watched an America war movie inspired by true incidents that happened during the World War II. The script is based on the non-fiction book Unbroken : A World War II Story Of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption; and revolves around the American bombing mission against Japan during the April of 1943. The protagonist is Louise Zamperini, an US Olympian and Army Officer who survives a boat crash only to end up in the Japanese prison camp.
