As I gazed at my husband who was almost comically balancing himself on a tree trying to fix the decorative string lights, it made me pause to think about all the festivities and how these traditions have not only shaped us but have been a part of learning even in the professional context.
Continue reading “The Great Indian Festival : Beyond Online Sales”
In the post-pandemic era, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit will reign supreme. Not only individual leaders but rather, organisations across the board will have to step up their game. But, how can traditional organisations bring about such extensive radical changes effectively? The answer lies in a threefold approach –
Continue reading “4 Characteristics Of A Transformational Leader”
There is no denying the power of music. Be it a celebration or a low point in our lives, music can help amplify the experience, every single time. Music is especially important for us Indians. Blame it on the constant influx of classic Bollywood songs and their timeless videos; but music has always been a big part of our beautiful culture of colours, music, and celebrations.
Teleflex India | New Leader Assimilation
Assimilating a new leader into a team in a manner that the team gets to know the leader in a deeper way and the leader also gets a better sense of his team members.
The team had a new leader who had moved in recently. He had also recruited many of the leadership team members recently. As this new team was coming together at the start of a new journey, there was a need for the team to know and understand each other better in order to synergize for producing better results.
Working closely with the HR Business Partner we decided on a few things:
1) While this was a very important intervention for the team, they did not want this to be done in a very serious tenor. “Fun at work” was after all, one of their core values!
2) The session had to give the participants a tangible language by which they could better interface with each other’s strengths and differences.
Basis these two key inputs, we decided to anchor the workshop design around a psychometric tool. The tool of choice was Emergenetics, since it was something that participants could very easily relate to and its colour coding gave a language which everyone could easily adopt even after the workshop. One other very tangible benefit that Emergenetics has over other psychometric tools is that, post the workshop – all the learning and insights are captured in the form of a very handy app that each participant could always refer to. Participants could also use the app for a quick understanding of how their preferences would play out against the dynamic of another person in the team.
The workshop itself was conducted in a signature FocusU style of leveraging the Kolb’s Experiential methodology. This meant that the intense discussions about preferences, behaviors and thinking styles were punctuated with activities that were light and yet powerful enough to be used as props for the debriefs.
In the many times that we have run New Leader Assimilation workshops, we have often also run a very interesting activity called the Hot Seat, that gives the team members a much deeper insight into the personality of the leader. It also helps builds bridges between the leader and his team – since it brings out the human angle to the person behind the persona too.
This is what the leader Rajeev Nagi (The Managing Director of Teleflex India) had to say about the intervention:
“At the very outset, I would like to thank Focus on behalf of my management team for having organised a memorable team-building program for the Teleflex India management team, and for our senior leadership team.
As the leadership team of a fast paced medical devices company in India, we have an arduous, and at the same time- an immensely enjoyable challenge, of consistently out-performing the industry in India by a significant degree. In parallel, we have to ensure that the task of organisation and culture building continues, given our long history of having existed in India as a rather ‘placid’ joint venture company where any kind of change was an exception! Put both together, and you have the perfect situation of an organisation that really needs change management, and needs to build a team that works closely together with high levels of synergies.
While team building is a long journey for any organisation that wants to pursue it in letter and in spirit, what team FocusU managed to achieve in a day for us was to act like a ‘catalyst’. You managed to run a deft script designed to make us think, understand ourselves better- as individuals, and as a collective, and helped us understand our individual and collective inflexion points that would help unlock our untapped potentials. All this- in a day’s work!
Thanks once again for organising a workshop high on energy, and the ‘fun’ quotient: It resonated very well with our core value of ‘Fun at work’!”
Thank you for the feedback on the previous post on values, quite a few of you had come back with questions on the impact of values on organizational performance. One of the other popular questions that we hear is “Our organizational core values are not clearly defined. How do we go about doing that?” Let’s try to address that. First things first, core values are not what you want your organization to have, it is what the organization already has – as part of its fundamental structure. Jim Collins talks about a few interesting value defining exercises in his website, Aligning action and values. You can also watch some very interesting video/audio on the same subject here. It is good to have your people practice the core tenets of integrity, collaboration and teamwork, but if those are the organization’s core values, there is a need to drill down deeper to understand how these represent what the company stands for in its most fundamental form.
Continue reading “How Shared Values Can Empower A Team?”
“How Stella Saved the Farm” – is a metaphorical take on how disciplined change management and innovation can enable organizations to move into the next S – Curve. The most engaging element in the book is its ‘fictional’ Windsor Farm, with not so fictional characters and situations. The farm, which is run by animals, faces the risk of becoming redundant. It must make the decision of whether it should continue the way it has been working (faster, stronger, more efficient) or take the risk of exploring unchartered pastures. The keys themes of the book have been articulated in the diagram below:
Employee engagement is one of the most important aspects of HR departments and management teams in many successful organizations. And, why shouldn’t it be? When employees are engaged and satisfied, it leads to better productivity, increased revenue, and reduced turnover, amongst other things.
Continue reading “How To Improve Team Engagement In Your Organisation?”
Of course we know what “situational awareness” is. Who doesn’t?
Many cutting-edge software businesses, such as Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon, use cross-team collaboration to grow rapidly. If you still rely on isolated departments, you should reconsider. Collaboration among cross-functional teams is a fantastic thing. When teams from several departments cooperate, your work will take on a more global perspective.
Continue reading “Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Is Essential for Your Company”
