A baby camel once asked the mother, “Why do we have a hump?” Mother camel replied, “We are desert animals and we need hump to store water.”

Curious, the baby asked further, “Why do we have long rounded legs and long eyelashes?” The mother proudly replied, “Long legs help us walk in desert and eyelashes protect us from desert sand and wind.”

The baby said, “Oh! We have everything we need to survive in a desert. Then what the hell are we doing in a zoo?”

Skills, knowledge and abilities are only useful if you are at the right place.

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Also Read: Other 100 Word Parables

In one of the podcasts I have, the host tells an interesting story.

While sitting on an airplane next to a gardener, she asked him for one gardening tip. The gardener replied, “My #1 gardening tip is: all plants/flower are only meant to live a certain amount of time. Try to make them live any longer and it makes you a bad gardener!”

All good things must come to an end, yet it is human nature to cling on to what works and stretch it till it breaks.

It’s okay if it ends because every end marks a new beginning.

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Also Read: Other 100 Word Parables

This may sound very simple but communication is all about transferring emotion and energy. Words are simply carriers of that emotion. Yes, choice of words matter, but that is not communication.

Consider this example.

The new sales director was on boarded with a lot of frenzy. In his first address to all the team members, he delivered a well crafted introduction. He spoke about himself, his past projects and then about how he intends to take this organization to new heights. If a transcript was created out of his speech, it would be a perfectly worded one. Yet, he was not able to establish the connection in this first address. At water-cooler conversations, people expressed skepticism. Even when everything he said was right, something was not right!

Clearly, there was a lot of focus on delivery and content and less on emotion, energy, intensity and conviction. His overall demeanor suggested that he was putting his own agendas first before focusing on others. He expressed his goals and desires without focusing on the need to understand the current context. He said it, but people felt that he did not mean it. 

Bottom line: As a leader, you talk to people more clearly through experiences you extend, not just through well-crafted words. Your words may be heard, but your attitude, emotion and intent are always felt.

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Photo Courtesy: KrossBow’s Flickr Photostream

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Other Related Posts at QAspire:

1. In Communication, Substance Comes First
2. In Praise of Comprehension and Meaning
3. Clearing the Fog in Communication
4. In 100 Words: The More You Tell
5. Graceful Leadership 101: Free PDF Book

Our communication at workplace needs a lot of simplification. Have you seen leaders who throw jargons and so called “hot words” that leave people more confused?

When a boss says, “We need to get this done soon”, people are left to wonder what soon actually means. I once observed a senior leader who was approached by his team member for some help on an issue. After thinking aloud for a while, the leader ended up saying, “You need to somehow close this ASAP.”  For a struggling team member who needed direction, words like “somehow” and “ASAP” added ambiguity and needless urgency leading to frustration.

In one instance, a manager delegated a report creation task to his team member with a note of “urgent and important”. The team member worked hard to deliver the report created the report in shortest possible time but then received no response from the manager for days. Was it really important? If not, how can it be urgent at all?

I have seen managers who request “quick calls” that go on for hours together. Meetings to “touch base” end up being meetings that “drill down”.

I see a huge need to simplify our communication – our words and our actions have to convey very specific (and congruent) messages. Jargons and hot words break the communication, creates barriers, robs understanding, adds clutter and leaves people guessing. “I need to get this report by 12:00 PM tomorrow so that I can review and send it across to customer by 4:00 PM” is much better than “I need it ASAP”. Next time you call something as “important”, make sure your subsequent actions also demonstrate the importance.

What if we stop using jargons where we need to be specific? If we clarify expectations relentlessly? Our work will be free of foggy messages and hence simpler. Clarity and congruence in thoughts, words and actions are first pre-requisites of being excellent at anything – more so if you are a leader.

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Photo Courtesy: Gavin Liewellyn’s Flickr

A retired weatherman was once questioned by a friend, “What kind of weather is it going to be tomorrow?”

“The kind of weather I am going to love,” was the instant response with a gentle smile on his wrinkled face. “How do you know that it will be the weather you will love?” the friend was curious.

The weatherman went on to explain, “35 years in weather department has taught me just one thing: there is no bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. To make the most of everything that doesn’t go as planned is an attitude thing!”

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Also Read: Other 100 Word Parables

Quality you deliver has everything to do with how much you own your work, your actions and its respective impact on the other parts of the system you operate in. When you produce work that is useful, qualitative and something that others find valuable, it feeds your self-esteem and makes you a better individual. By consistently delivering better than you did last time, you raise the bar and grow.

It is a cyclic process and the one that starts with an intention to do better, not with just having better or superior skills. It is the same intention that drives the thing we call “ownership”. This means, unless you own your work, you will never be able to deliver better than you did last time. And when you do that, work becomes a part of your identity and you value it higher. You do well in things that you value more. In a knowledge world, your work carries your fingerprints. It tells a story about you. This is even more so if you are a leader at any level.

Downed by things like organizational hierarchy, our fear of failure, lack of trust with superiors, micromanagement and poor management, we often treat our work as a transaction. I do this and I get this. You do only that which is required by the job. Work like this for a few months and you will be indifferent, uninspired and if you are ambitious, stressed. Quality of your work will plummet down and growth will be stalled. Not a great way to work and live, particularly when this is the only life you (and we all) have!

Better alternative is to take charge from where you are. Acknowledge the problems, evaluate possible solutions and work your way out. This may not be easy, but on a long run, compromising on quality of your work because of these external factors and not growing through your work can be both painful and costly!

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It is easy for us to get into denial mode when faced with a change, challenge or impending danger. People call this “ostrich effect” because there is a common (and false) legend about ostriches burying their heads in the sand to avoid danger.

We often see humans behaving like ostriches in families, teams and in leadership positions. They lack courage to address apparent problems or do important work. When they are driven by fear, they expose their weaker side even more.

Here’s the catch: You blind yourself as much to the opportunity as to the fear of confronting the problem.

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Also Read: Other 100 Word Parables

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Interesting Stuff: There is a new magazine on personal branding titled “Me Inc.” and I am glad to have contributed to the first edition in form of my article “The Passion Equation” (read web version or read full article in magazine, page 24).

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Photo Courtesy: National Geographic

The book is filled with hard-won wisdom about executing projects and managing people for highest productivity.

Here is a real-life story from the book that underlines importance of the “human aspect” of our work; especially creative work that requires significant emotional involvement too.

In my early years as a developer, I was privileged to work on a project managed by Sharon Weinberg, now president of the Codd and Date Consulting Group. She was a walking example of much of what I now think of as enlightened management. One snowy day, I dragged myself out of a sickbed to pull together our shaky system for a user demo. Sharon came in and found me propped up at the console. She disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a container of soup. After she’d poured it into me and buoyed up my spirits, I asked her how she found time for such things with all the management work she had to do. She gave me her patented grin and said, Tom, this is management.”

Sharon knew what all good instinctive managers know: The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

Peopleware was first published some 25 years ago, and updated once since then. With such remarkable wisdom available to us, it is unfortunate to see many organizations and leaders still not getting the very essence of leading a knowledge-oriented and creative enterprise. Either they don’t read enough (which is dangerous) or they don’t practice what they already know.

It is all about people. As the book nicely puts it,

“The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.”

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As individuals, teams and organizations, how much we learn from our past is critical for our improvement and future success.

Hansei (meaning self-reflection) is an important part of Japanese culture – an exercise undertaken to look at past mistakes, outline the lessons and pledge to act on those lessons. According to Wikipedia, “Han" means to change, turn over, or turn upside down. "Sei" means to look back upon, review, and examine oneself. This may sound like common-sense but how many organizations/teams really do Hansei effectively? By effectively, I mean not just identifying lessons and feeling good about it, but putting those lessons into actions the next time.

Here are some common pitfalls that should be avoided in any form of reflective exercise:

Conducting reflection without addressing these common pitfalls will mean a waste of time. It will be a feel-good exercise and nothing else. I would like to conclude with a quote from Margaret Wheatley:

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Also Read: Using Kaizen for Employee Engagement and Improvement

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Photograph By: Tanmay Vora

In one of the TED talks, James Surowiecki shares:

“If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule: Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There’s this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.”

Blind conformance to rules and beliefs without internalizing them can be as dangerous. It hinders your growth.

If you walk in another’s tracks, you leave no footprints.

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Also Read: Other 100 Word Parables

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Interesting Stuff: There is a new magazine on personal branding titled “Me Inc.” and I am glad to have contributed to the first edition in form of my article “The Passion Equation” (read web version or read full article in magazine, page 24).

Gross definition of quality is externally oriented – meeting and exceeding customer expectations, satisfying their implicit and explicit requirements, the degree of excellence, and conformance to specifications. They all refer to something outside of us.

At a subtle level, quality stems from what is inside of us. More than deliverance to others, it is deliverance to our own selves. If what we do makes us happy, it will make them happy too.

In his timeless classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Robert M. Pirzig captures the cultural correlation between ancient Greek and Hindu mythologies and quality.

Consider this snippet:

A lot of self-help material talk about “living up to one’s full potential” – in Greek mythology, that is exactly what arête or excellence means. And it starts from an intense desire to do whatever you do in the best possible manner – not for someone else, but for the self.

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My other attempts to understand Quality from a different lens:

1) Quality is Human. Quality is Love.
2) Quality? Excellence? What?
3) Quality is Happiness
4) Quality and Quantity – Compliance and Excellence

There is an old Zen story about a man riding a horse, galloping frantically down a path. His friend, who is sitting by the side of the road, calls out "Where are you going?" The man replies: "I don’t know. Ask the horse!"

We either lead our lives through the center of our existence or by simply responding to all external expectations; proactively or reactively; as a flame with its own light or as a mirror that only reflects.

Our goals when derived purely based on external expectations can become our horses. Don’t let them decide where you will go!

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Also Read: Other 100 Word Parables

Indifference in leadership can manifest itself in one (or many) of the following ways:

1. They are unable to decide: In difficult situations, people look for leaders to take decisions. Indifferent leaders rely too much on external validation before they decide. Sometimes, they also fall in trap on not deciding on purpose or delaying decisions.

2. They may have a vision but lack execution: Leaders are judged by just two factors: Productivity of a leader’s team (what they deliver and how qualitatively?) and by their people (are they learning, growing and becoming more valuable?). No execution = No results = No leadership.

3. They operate out of fear: They take decisions with an objective of covering all their bases to avoid blame and criticism. Fear paralyzes them and keeps them away from taking action.

4. They are not intentional about helping others: Helping others in getting stuff done starts with an intent. Leaders who try to help others without this intention, required knowledge and courage create more roadblocks than eliminating them.

5. They don’t accept what they don’t know: Indifferent leaders are unaware of where they can really add value and things they don’t know anything about. They reveal their indifference when they try hard to show that they do know.

6. Worst yet, they don’t attempt to learn: Not knowing is one thing and that is fine. We all take up higher roles when we may not be capable at some point. But we only grow when we try hard to learn quickly and be aware.

7. They don’t get into details: When leaders care about work, they also care about details that make up the work. Indifferent leaders talk broad but fail to get into details when required. They operate at a superfluous level.

8. They fail to ask: Questions reveal a leader. Indifferent leaders simply don’t ask; or if they do; they don’t ask right questions.

9. They don’t keep their promises: They say they will do something and then don’t do it. They care more about giving tall promises without worrying about keeping them. This alienates people more quickly than anything else.

10. They ignore the context: They constantly carry pride of their past accomplishments and keep harping about it. They fail to understand the current context of their work.

11. They focus on process more than people: For an indifferent leader, process is a great tool to hide behind. They will go by the books and push compliance at the cost of motivation.  

12. They don’t get results, or get them in a wrong way: When a leader operates with an indifferent attitude, their value addition is not clearly visible. Even if they do achieve results, they adopt wrong ways to get to those results.

13. They excessively use their positional power: A leader’s position only shows that they have higher visibility (and ability) to get things done. Indifferent leaders use their positions to push their priorities without empathizing with others. When you have to show that you are powerful, you are not.

14. They look at people through their position in the pecking order: They treat people differently based on their position in a top-down pyramid. They treat those who they fear differently than those who fall under them.

15. They take credit for the hard work done by someone else: Great leaders share credits generously because they care for people. Indifferent people do exactly the opposite.

16. They fail at basics of communication: They don’t listen; interrupt when others are talking. They don’t talk enough when they are required to. They come to meetings unprepared. They fail to set the context and build perspectives. Their body language shows that they don’t care. They talk too much on things that don’t really matter to others.

17. They tolerate low performance: and when they do that, they undermine those who really perform. This is the highest form of indifference that leads to lower morale and active disengagement.

18. They force change: They initiate changes often without thinking through the immediate implications of change. On top of that, they force change and expect people to adapt at very short notices. They often associate penalties for not adapting quickly.

19. They blindly push the priorities given to them by their bosses: Instead of explaining the rationale’ behind a certain decision or priority, they end up saying, “Boss wants it, so we have to do it.” They lack courage to question their bosses and then fail to command respect from their team members.

20. They keep denying reality: Denying the reality does not change it. Indifferent leaders don’t care for feedback from their peers. They don’t share feedback often. They use their self-derived versions of reality to hide from the real.

Your thoughts? Share them in comments.

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Also Read:

- Great Leadership: Beware of These Nine I’s
- Nine I’s and Great Leadership
- Nine Roles for Great Leadership

We grow through our struggles. They shape us a great deal. They bring out the best within us. Yet, most people dread when they are facing struggle. They complain, curse, doubt their capabilities and worst: they quit.

I had an opportunity to read Steven Snyder’s new book titled “Leadership and the Art of Struggle” this week. In this terrific book, Steve has shared a wealth of knowledge that he gathered, specially during his association as an early leader at Microsoft. The book shares some very interesting real-life stories about leadership struggle along with ways to navigate these challenges and grow.

Here are some of the interesting snippets from the book:

There are many books on leadership but a few talk about the struggle of leadership. This book does not attempt to provide a clear roadmap to navigate through these struggles. Instead, it outlines some key concepts that can help you in looking at your struggles differently, be adaptive, understand your leadership blind spots and grow through those struggles.

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Also read: Other Book Reviews at QAspire Blog

Compliance stems from our need to ensure certainty, reduce variability and adhere to a certain structure or model. Compliance may be explicit (e.g. to a certain process model like ISO) or it may be implicit (e.g. to a certain specific belief system, way of working or ideology). Focusing on compliance means that you have a direction to follow and it should allow you to focus on the nuances of work without worrying about the basics. Compliance is good because it helps us stay creative, allows us to be a part of community and gives us a direction.

The problem stems when focus is only on compliance. A friend who is a senior leader in IT organization narrated his recent experience. In his quest to fix a nagging problem on a project that he had just taken over, he ended up forcing compliance to a certain process without taking time to understand the real root cause. People initially raised their concerns but then succumbed to the force. They complied dispassionately, morale went southwards and quality dropped. It took him a lot of effort and time to get things back on track, though not as great as it was before.

He made a mistake that I like to call as “Compliance without Compassion”.

To be compassionate is to understand that every problem has many facets and every situation has a context attached to it. That people will only follow rules if those rules really help them in adding value. That people need to be understood first. That sometimes, you have to look at purpose more than how a task is performed. That it is important to be cruel to be kind – being tough for a greater good.That effective solutions are the ones that consider all the facets of the problem –the context behind it. To be compassionate is to tune the process or ideology such  that it yields maximum value with minimum waste. To be open to new possibilities and appreciate that others may be seeing things differently. To evolve and improve.

Compliance is always an external force. Compassion stems from within – from our desire to add value without compromising on human aspect of work.

Bottom line:

We don’t need plain compliance. Compassion alone may not help. What we need is compassionate compliance.

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Photo Courtesy: Sendai Eyes’ Flickr Photostream