People deliver their best work when they are fully engaged with the purpose of their work. In an organizational setting, people only deliver their best when they are engaged with the purpose, vision and values of the organization they work with. Businesses can conduct an employee survey to determine engagement levels. They look at their […]
John F. Kennedy said this (one of my favorite quotes) – “There are risks and costs to a program of actions. But they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” Comfortable inaction is the state where the immediate implication of not doing something is not visible, but in a […]
Rapport building isn’t just something you do when you first meet someone or as a part of a sales call or a negotiation. As leaders (and human beings) one of our goals must be to build better and deeper relationships, and one of the tangible ways we can do that is through an ongoing other-focused […]
If you are a leader, you will invariably face situations where: People will criticize you for doing something. People will criticize you even for not doing something. Your decisions will go against you. You will face a lot of resistance in your initiatives. Roadblocks will be encountered People will closely analyze your decisions. You may […]
A few years back, I was facilitating a team that was responsible for pulling off a project in a completely new technology. This also meant that each one of the team members had to take initiative and explore new areas of the technology. While the project had a designated project lead, we saw many team […]
Jack Welch said, “An organizations ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the greatest competitive advantage.” Continuous learning and its respective implementation to generate desired business outcomes is at the core of successful organizations. Peter Senge defined a learning organization as the one “where people continually expand their capacity to create […]
When we run a business or execute a project, we set clear goals of what we want to achieve, create detailed plans, devise strategies and set up milestones. But leadership, just like life, is ambiguous and paradoxical. People default, conflicts happen, clients change their requirements, demand/supply suddenly flips, things just don’t work as expected, delays […]
I have been a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi – one of the greatest leaders India has ever produced. I recently visited Sabarmati Ashram, one of the residences of Gandhi, where we got a glimpse into Gandhi’s life as a national leader. One thing that really struck me was the simplicity of his life and […]
Problems, challenges and inefficiencies (in one way or the other) are a part of any organization. How organizations deal with them makes all the difference. In my career so far, I have (broadly) seen two kinds of organizations. First are the ones who know the problem areas, but are not willing to invest in having […]