The setting: A quintessential Mumbai local train. This particular coach was pretty much packed. As the train labored its way ahead, with its heavy burden – the crowd inside, rocked back and forth in their seats to its steady rhythm. Most faces wore a blank resigned look, perhaps contemplating their day ahead or perhaps catching up on a moment of quietness, amidst their bustling lives.
Tag: communication
Imagine this: After years of planning & promises – you finally manage to take your family to the nearest Disney World, which is in HongKong. The children are besides themselves in excitement. They just can’t wait to get there and meet – who else, the delectable Snow White with her seven dwarfs! Out there at Disney World though, the cast who is playing Snow White is having a not so good day – she is feeling grumpy & tired. Spying a moment when nobody is around, she decides to light up a cigarette and take a quick puff. As luck would have it – that is just the exact same moment when you with your children land up there. The first sight the excited children have of Snow White is of her puffing a cigarette!!! Egad!! …. Can you imagine what would happen? Something shattered silently …. And that was the “dream” and “vision” that children had of Snow White for so many years!
Ahead of a terrorist attack – the “chatter” in the air increases!
The below article has also been published by THE REDIFF GET AHEAD on November 22nd, 2012
Just because you are talking does not mean you are communicating.
Think about that sentence for a minute.
It’s perhaps something to do with the way we are taught at our schools. We are taught to read, write, pronounce and spell – but we are never taught how to listen. The unsaid message seems to be – if you make yourself heard, you are communicating! How wrong that can be! Whether it is in close personal relationships, in organizational contexts or in any of our human interactions – the implication of this untaught lesson can be very costly.
Continue reading “How To Communicate Efficiently?”
Of late, we have had an increasing trend of clients requesting for Team building sessions to be conducted in Hindi or that interesting mix of English & Hindi, popularly referred to as Hinglish.
A few months back, I had this enlightening experience in Singapore. I was just heading out to join the group, when one of the organizers, a Singaporean Chinese, walked up to me and asked me in a worried tone: “Sid, do you know Mandarin?”. I guess the answer was very self evident from my very Indian looks, because before I could answer her, she spoke again and this time sounding deeply worried “Sid, we have a situation. There are two ladies in the group who don’t understand English at all. They are only comfortable with Mandarin. Since all our staff understands Mandarin, will it be possible to get someone else, who could do this session in Mandarin?”. And then, perhaps so that I wouldn’t take it personally, she added: “We don’t want anyone to feel left out, you know. I hope you do understand”.
Continue reading “How To Facilitate In Vernacular?”
This article from McKinsey Quarterly looks at identifying some of the common issues that plague top management teams across organizations and also offers honest insights into actions that can kick-start the development of a good team at the top.
Organizations across the world have identified the importance of having a strong team at the top but fail to set down criteria for identifying key leadership talent and developing them once recruited as leaders.
Source: Pexels
Continue reading “Article on “Teamwork at the top”: Mckinsey Quarterly”
Recent times have seen the development of virtual teams across many organizations, owing to massive geographic expansion plans and clustering of specific competencies. During workshops conducted across the country, I have had the opportunity of observing team members of different organizations spread out across vast geographies. They did not possibly fit the bill of the conventional definition of a virtual team – the image coming to mind that of different clusters of individuals working across offshore/onshore locations in a software development firm. But organizations, with operations spread across a country like India with its cultural diversities are as much a virtual team as the former case. We got a first hand experience of this, when we were speaking to team members in one particular location, whose manager happened to belong to a state which was as different from the team’s as could be, right from the language spoken to understanding of their roles! Such scenarios are becoming exceedingly common, and it becomes important to examine some of the things we can do better while managing these “virtual” teams as well, separated by distance and culture. Below are some of my thoughts on the subject
Continue reading “5 Tips for managing “Virtual Teams””