Lessons from the Field — Leading People to Execute Projects

Having Spent more than 15 Years at a Top Indian IT Services Company I thought I could share some of the learnings on my journey of Leading Projects and Empowering people. My Inspirations have been Ram Charan’s ‘Execution’ and The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment I’m not going to write paragraphs round each of them since they are mostly self explanatory and it is for you to dig deeper if you would like to. It would give you the experiential learning. My inspiration to ‘put it out to the world’ came from watching Kamal Ravikant’s talk.  Love and Entrepreneurship

You never know who can benefit from this. So here goes.

1. Ask Critical Questions of People. Make them think of the Answer .

2. Really Empower your team to decide within a framework of what’s accepted. Give them a Framework of ‘What’s Accepted’.

3. Monitor to the extent necessary and set expectations of non-monitoring.

4. Relax with your team — even get down and dirty (involved).

5. Don’t take non-sense from Management to the extent possible. Challenge them.

6. Read Books that others are not reading eg — Lynchpin by Seth Godin, Execution by Ram Charan & Larry Bossidy,The Art of War — Sun Tzu, Any work by Peter Drucker. It will expand your toolset & widen your thinking.

7. Learn about Emotional Intelligence and Use it. The Benefits will astound you.

8. Take Care of your Physical Health — it has a very great Impact on all Areas of your life.

9. Always Give and Encourage others to go beyond the expectation and excite the Customer.

10. There is nothing wrong with a healthy spirituality and it can improve your Performance. Eg Power of Now (Living in the Present Moment)

11. Leadership is way beyond Management — get to Leadership.

12. Constructive Dissent brings out the best in people — Encourage it while balancing the Power.

13. Acknowledge your faults and failings — it ain’t so bad after all. Nobody deliberately seeks failure.

14. Be Impeccable with your word & action — Its about Integrity.

15. Above all — Love who you are and what you do. You are the best you there is — Right Now.

Profits with People

Strange as it may seem most business specially those in people driven business seem to forget that the reason for their profits are the people who drive it.
Take the case of an IT company, any college graduate would question the validity of management decision where a choice of letting an experienced hand go rather than finding a creative way to recognize that person - financially. Basic Maslow,Basic Common Sense - a distracted mind will never work optimally thereby increasing both Management overhead of supervision and potential costs of new hire, customer dis-satisfaction etc.

Make Profits with People and your shareholders will benefit too in both short and long run. What does it mean for an Organization?
1. Don't hide behind Policy. Be innovative in rewarding people.
2. Generals trust your Commanders. In the battlefield they need to be able to act quickly.
3. Encourage leadership empowerment with Accountability.
4. Ensure team is aware of both long and short term expectations.
5. Take action on lessons learnt and move on quickly ensuring impact is understood.
6.Acknowledge that most people are acting on their best levels of knowledge/awareness at the point in time.
7. Celebrate and ensure the team spirit prevails - while recognizing brilliance of individual performers.

Our Company has a pillar 'Alternative Thinking' . Hope this qualifies.

Leadership in the Moment

 

Everything that we ever learn when it comes to the time we spend at work on our job contributes to our experience ‘in the moment’ . All decisions that we make are made ‘at a moment’ . We may spend hours deliberating and then comes the ‘moment’ of decision. It all comes down to what happens within that ‘moment’ and subsequent moments.

Leadership is ‘moment by moment’  - strategizing,executing, planning, taking feedback,trusting,nurturing and much more. Its the quality of ATTENTION that we bring to those moments that determines the kind of leader that we will be and be remembered for .

Lets ALLOW our MOMENTS to count/make a difference. Let’s bring in SPACE (the pause)

I love the slogan that my ex-chairman made as a corporate slogan

“Every Satyamite is a Leader” ….I would like to believe  “every HUMAN BEING is a leader” in some way or another.