anup.sharma@einfochips.com
Monday, September 12, 2016
Sunday, September 11, 2016
The Last Lecture: lessons in living
Hi,
I will be writing all the chapters of this book here so that you can read.
I will be writing all the chapters of this book here so that you can read.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Key to Great Leadeship? Be a Gardener, Not a Mechanic
A first tendency of many business people is to fix things. After all, they’re paid to solve problems, so the metaphor of the mechanic seems natural.
Unfortunately, some leaders then try to “fix” people.
How many of us want to be fixed? Not many. We may be open to persuasion or influence, but we don’t want to be “fixed.”
Rather than adopt the role of mechanic, great leaders adopt the role of gardener.
What does a gardener do?
A gardener creates an environment that encourages growth. An environment full of light and nourishment. An environment with sufficient space for stretching and expanding.
Leadership—and gardening –are all about creating positive change.
Great leaders—and great gardeners –resist the temptation to micromanage. They know that flowers cannot grow if you keep jerking them out of the ground to check the roots.
Great leaders don’t get hung up on position or titles. Like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: “Being a leader is like being a lady. If you have to remind people you are, you aren’t.”
Great leaders invest their energy in creating devotion to a worthy cause. They are more interested in getting a job done than in who gets the credit.
Let me illustrate: I worked with a CEO of an organization that had lost $156 million the previous year. He was brought in from the outside to turn the company around.
On his third day on the job he went out into the employee parking lot behind the headquarters building. There was a row of “privileged” parking spots closest to the building. In front of each parking space was a sign with the name of a senior executive. The CEO took a can of spray paint and sprayed over each name. He knew that many employees were looking out their office windows, likely wondering what the CEO was up to.
After spray-painting over all the signs, the CEO went inside and got on the building intercom. He said he felt like the high school principal making morning announcements.
He began with something like this:
“Some of you saw me spray over the names of our executives in the parking lot. You may be wondering, ‘Is he firing the executives?’ No, I’m not firing the executives. We need ‘em. We need everybody. We’re all in this boat together and we need to row together. Last year this company lost $156 million. We can do better. We must do better.
“Beginning today we’re going to break down all these artificial barriers … we’re going to be less concerned about what title you have and what parking place you have. Beginning tomorrow, if you get here late and it’s raining, you’ll get wet. If you get to work early, you can park anywhere you want. All that matters is what will each of us do to make our team stronger and build our business.” Then he said: “Thanks a lot. Have a great day.”
This CEO was demonstrating what it means to be a gardener and not a mechanic.
He did dozens of things like that. The cumulative effect was that he created an environment where his people felt involved and obligated regarding the needs of each other and the needs of the organization.
He helped his people see themselves in a fresh light. He helped them see each other in a fresh light. He helped them see their marketplace potential in a fresh light.
Rather than smother his people with constraining rules and policies, he gave them elbowroom to try new things and experiment in new directions.
Rather than cut his people down for past poor performance, this great leader chose to lift them up toward future great performance.
He created an atmosphere that had absolutely no tolerance for blaming or any kind of “victim-talk.”
He created an environment full of encouragement, collaboration, and personal accountability.
So what was the result? In only 12 months that company harvested a $207 million improvement in profits. It’s now a case study at the Harvard Business School.
Now, was this guy some sort of flower child? Did he sing “Kumbya” and other camp songs in the employee cafeteria?
No. He’s actually one of the toughest-minded business people I’ve ever known. And he’s one of the most effective leaders I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.
Great leaders know that you can rent a person’s back and hands. But you must earn a person’s head and heart.
Great leaders know that organizations are living organisms with many interrelated elements, capable of extinction or growth.
Great leaders invest energy in growing rather than fixing.
They are gardeners. They create a nurturing environment—or culture—and they cultivate with care.
Be a gardener, not a mechanic. Don’t try to “fix” people. Create an environment that affirms and encourages people. An environment that places a premium on solving problems and getting results. An environment where blame is weeded out and people feel free to stretch and grow and produce.
Is this just warm and fuzzy, touchy-feely stuff for “soft” people? Not at all.
It’s the key to the hard realities of high performance in a tough and fast-moving world.
Believe it. Practice it. It makes all the difference.
Originally published on:
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Are you a Likely CEO?
Most of the people today are having the dreams of becoming entrepreneurs and CEO. Take this small quiz to know whether you are a likely CEO?
http://www.strategy-business.com/feature/Are-You-a-Likely-CEO
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
A Google recruiter sent this hilarious email using the exact skills listed on someone’s LinkedIn profile
Recruitment emails from big companies are notoriously
impersonal and packed to the gills with corporate marketing-speak.
So Paul Fenwick, a programmer in Melbourne, Australia, was
surprised to receive a message last summer from “People Operations” at Google
that sounded remarkably human, even funny.
According to tweets from Fenwick, the recruiter appealed
to his listed interests on LinkedIn, including his love of Nyan Cat costumes
and telling people they’re wrong. (It appears he has since updated his
interests on his profile.)
Fenwick tweeted that, since recruiters on LinkedIn are
often so lame, he had ignored the message until recently.
It seems Weston Fillman, the Google recruiter, has
thoroughly read the rules and still won’t give up:
He writes to Quartz: “I sent [the email] to Paul in a
creative effort to get in touch and play off his apparent sense of humor which
was found on his LinkedIn profile. It took him almost a year to respond, but
I’m glad he did.”
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How to know the percentage of Highly Engaged and Highly Disengaged employees in your country
Many of us would like to know the people around us. We want to know how many of working professional are satisfied and how many are dissatisfied with their jobs. Also, we want to know the reason behind it. So here is the report which tells us all in the detail.
The Steelcase Global Report suggests that
28% of Indian Employees are Highly Engaged and Highly Satisfied while
4% of Indian Employees are Highly Disengaged and Highly Dissatisfied.
To get the detail report about your country, please visit below link:
http://info.steelcase.com/global-employee-engagement-workplace-report#engagement
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Winning hearts and minds in the 21st century
Leaders must consider new ways to change the attitudes and behavior of employees.
The psychological contract that traditionally bound employees to their employers has been fraying. Many of today’s workers, having experienced the pain of the economic downturn and large-scale layoffs, no longer feel as much loyalty and commitment to their organizations as they did even a decade ago. Job hopping has been described as the “new normal,” and millennials are expected to hold 15 to 20 positions over the course of their working lives.
To counter these problems, it’s more important than ever for companies in transition to invest time and effort in changing the mind-sets and behavior of the workforce. Almost 15 years ago, we introduced the idea that four key actions could work together to support such initiatives: fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing change through formal mechanisms, developing talent and skills, and modeling the new roles. New research has since reinforced the significance of these four priorities.
The challenge for executives now is that they must learn to apply the model in new and imaginative ways that would not have been possible when we first published our research, at a time when the world was a very different place (exhibit). Back in 2003, the iPhone had yet to be released. There was no such thing as Facebook, much less Chatter, Twitter, or Yammer. The more fortunate millennials were off at college and still dreaming of the success they would eventually have from launching start-ups like Box or Instagram. Uber was just a German word. We rented movies at Blockbuster, drove around in Hummers, and read Newsweek—all of which have since folded.
Two key features of the modern workplace are particularly important in the context of change. One is the increasingly advanced technological and digital landscape, including mobile connectivity and social media, that has opened up exciting new possibilities for influence. The second is the new generation of millennial employees. On the surface, at least, they seem to have different needs and respond to change in ways that set them apart from their more tenured coworkers—though we’d echo our colleagues’ view (see “Millennials: Burden, blessing, or both?”) that their attitudes, in some ways, reflect those of the workforce as a whole. In the face of these interrelated opportunities and challenges, here are some ideas on how to win hearts and minds in the modern era.
New tools for influence
Digital advances can turbocharge efforts to foster understanding and conviction, thereby helping employees to feel more involved in change efforts and better able to play a role in shaping them. Consider, for example, how modern digital communications make it easy to personalize messages, tailoring them to the needs of individuals and delivering them directly to frontline employees. We take such personalized communications for granted, but they are significant in the context of major change efforts: they help to prevent a break in the cascade when a message trickles down from the CEO through middle management. For example, a global pharmaceutical company engaged in a major change program used its internal social-media platform in exactly this way, sharing different messages with different groups of users and ensuring that communications stayed relevant.
Technology also can help identify obstacles to change, such as overconfidence in your abilities or knowledge. Consider the popular FitBit and other activity trackers: these small devices provide an accurate (and sometimes surprising) picture of individual activity, expose the truth, and hold users accountable for their performance. Rapid-fire online-polling tools make it relatively straightforward to take an organization’s pulse, identifying differences in outlook and understanding between top management and the rank and file. Research based on McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index suggests that management frequently overestimates the impact of its messages on employees (for more, see “Why frontline workers are disengaged”).
Social platforms are more than just tools for communication and for building skills and a sense of community. They provide a sophisticated analysis that reinforces role modeling and builds up a momentum of influence. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a growing number of companies use social-networking analyses and similar techniques to help identify hidden influencers: people whose attitudes may command respect among their colleagues and whose role might be critical for the success of a change program. Having identified a few dozen influencers across regions, functions, and roles in this way, a large manufacturer we know enlisted the support of these employees to help communicate the changes it wanted to make, role-model the desired mind-sets and behavior, and fight skepticism.
New employees, new challenges
Indeed, the power of the group may be the most potent influence of all. Today’s increasingly connected digital world provides more opportunities than ever to share information about how others think and behave. Millennials typically take their cue from positive reviews on Instagram, SnapChat, or Yelp or from “Twitterati” with many followers. It’s no surprise that users of social media can “buy followers,” thereby boosting the popularity of a person or brand when it starts trending. Millennial workers, sometimes described as “hyperconnected globally,” may be especially open to persuasion through the collective voice and expect real-time communication from everyone, not just top management.The potential of technology to inspire action is good for would-be change agents, because today’s employees are increasingly skeptical. A generic change story won’t cut it now, if it ever did. To change hearts and minds, a story must be personally meaningful to the listener or reader. That’s particularly true for today’s younger employees. Recent interviews with hundreds of high-potential millennials, for example, revealed how, in many cases, their decisions to stay with or leave a company depended upon their ability to find meaning and purpose within it.
Technology’s new transparency, though, can be a double-edged sword. In today’s world, sites like Glassdoor take the mystery out of salaries and increased job mobility. That makes it easier than ever for employees to judge when they are unhappy with the direction of a company or decide that they are not getting an equitable deal. Remember, some twentysomethings recall how their own parents were mistreated in previous bouts of cost cutting, and many jaded older employees remain in the workforce. Organizations hoping to win over such employees need to do what’s necessary to neutralize compensation as a source of anxiety and focus instead on what really matters. For some workers, extra flexibility and telework may be more alluring than a bigger paycheck. Leaders directing significant change efforts should look at all the formal reinforcing mechanisms at their disposal.
Finally, don’t overlook skill building as a means of fostering commitment in the younger generation; millennials, after all, appear to be particularly hungry for opportunities to develop. The previously mentioned McKinsey research on this generation found many who were eager for advancement opportunities and receptive to various learning programs—from entrepreneurial challenges to more traditional rotational programs. In the past few years, organizations have started to tap into this mind-set, and some are exploring discounted education as an employee benefit. Starbucks’s college achievement plan, for example, now pays tuition fees for part- and full-time workers taking Arizona State University’s courses. Other organizations, such as Anthem and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, have since launched similar programs.
Millennials may seem challenging. Yet their search—for diverse role models, meaning beyond a paycheck, equitable treatment in an increasingly transparent and transient world, and leading-edge skill building—is one that many employees, regardless of age, industry, or nationality, are undertaking today. Leaders who understand both the changing workforce and leading-edge digital tools and have a well-tuned grasp of the building blocks of organizational change should be well positioned to break through the noise and inspire these employees.
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