Continue reading “Book Review : Mind The Gap by Simon Taufel”
Whether you like him or not (which is rarely the case), you can’t ignore him, because he is trending 365 days a year through his comedy shows and anchoring. Comedy is a serious business and he has mastered this art with his wit, wisdom, and sheer awesomeness. He paid income taxes of INR 15 crore to the Government of India recently and his show “The Kapil Sharma Show” has an IMDB rating of 8.6/10 (as of March 2017). He has a following of 7.72 Million on Twitter, equivalent to several popular Bollywood actors and actresses and he is on his way to becoming an international comedy star with his popularity.
Riding is my passion. It has always been my dream to be a professional rider. By God’s grace, I have been very fortunate that I am living my dream. Recently I bought a sports bike. At most times, I used to ride alone. That was until I met my first riding group “ROAR” – Riders Of Assorted Rides. Since then I have been to many places with this bunch of enthusiastic riders. I did find it a bit awkward riding with them initially – however, after few rides I realised that riders project the best team spirit. Most of the times, we ride with unknown riders. However, the bonding, trust, and openness they demonstrate is something we don’t often find in a lot of corporate teams, even though they may have been working together for years.
The City Race Challenge – what an incredible mix of sight-seeing and team building!
Are you the proverbial employee or the owner of your company?
It requires enormous courage to treat people working for you like owners instead of machines . Machines do their jobs but owners do whatever is needed to make their organisation and teams successful. Google has made fascinating discoveries on how to find, grow, and keep people in an environment of freedom, creativity and play. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to create a company where work was meaningful, employees feel free to pursue their passions and people and families feel cared for.
As per their values, when you try to change the world, you are working on important things. You feel excited to get up in the morning. You want to be working on meaningful and impactful projects and that’s the thing which is in shortage in the world.
Many of the meaningful , effective and beloved people practices currently followed by Google today sprouted from seeds planted by Larry and Sergey.
Here are some of the finest and relatable (for us, at FocusU) examples –
Larry and Sergey, both deliberately left space for others to act as founders. They wanted brilliance to work free from the scrutinising eyes of management. At FocusU, we resonate with this attitude. After long hours of search, telephonic chats, we call our probable team players and subject them to meeting many of us. While skills and experience is hygiene, a values match is just as important for us. People who pursue interests apart from work always have an affinity with us.
Our search process takes long. But we rather get it right than making a mistake by rushing into a hire. Not that we get it right all the time! We have had instances where skill or values mismatch have shown up into 3 months of working with us and we have had to call off the engagement. Everyone at FocusU is a hero…here to play a unique role. Each one is encouraged to give full play to their potential, focused on meeting their goals. Yet we are stitched together to play as one team.
At FocusU, display of ownership is recognised. Hunger to learn new things by way of reading books, knowledge sharing, creating new program designs, pursuing learning outside the strict purview of their roles (and which could enhance their capability at FocusU)…all find traction here.
We recently worked with a senior team which had a new leader. The fact that the leaders working style was very different from the previous leader and the added fact that nearly half of the members were new to the team, made it necessary for the team to get into an offsite – to try and construct a cohesive team identity.
They say a team is as good as it’s weakest link. When I got into the details to understand this more, it made me realize that there is an I in team. It has been two fantastic years for me working as a facilitator at FocusU. This has enabled me to interact with teams that represent different demographics and has taught me that recognizing individual efforts is very critical to success.
What does it require to make a team?
Teamwork makes all the difference.
Slowly but surely, the wisdom of this statement seems to be seeping in, into corporates. This has reflected in an increasing number of companies now applying thought, effort, resources and time into attacking this challenge of building high performing teams with gusto.
Continue reading “Team entertainment is not the same as team building”
