Random Notes for Corporate Leadership

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If you join a recurring meeting occasionally, do not praise or blame in that meeting.

If you are joining a recurring meeting occasionally, then refrain from praise or criticism during those meetings. The simple reason for this is to avoid inconsistencies. Let us imagine a situation where you are in a meeting and one of the team leads mentions how their team performed beyond expectations the previous week. As a leader, you may be praising them. But if that praise is anything more than just part of the flow of conversation, you ought to be cautious. What if another team did something great during one of the previous meetings that you were not present and hence you did not get your praise or attention. It will be perceived as being unfair. Even if the team members can logically accept the chain of events, morally it may be demotivating. Try to make it a part of your job to regularly collect positive feedback from your team leads and appreciate the team members. Doing this consistently and genuinely will help avoid any chances of misperception.

Understanding and managing constraints for success

We all know and acknowledge that all situations and challenges come with their own set of constraints. All solutions to the problems have to be compliant to those constraints. However, as leaders and managers it is important to understand the nature of constraints and juggle them well. Constraints can be mainly of three types: time, money, and knowledge. As you can see, there can be multiple combinations of these three resource constraints that act on a challenge differently. If your situation has equal amounts of all the three constraints, you have to strategically arrive at a trade-off. Otherwise, set clear priorities to your team as to what are the constraints and what is the levy. Some managers are apprehensive about giving levy in any resource for the fear of abuse. However, it is important to articulate so that teams do not get demoralized by an unachievable goal. As a leader, it is also important that you have clarity on the ratio of these three constraints so that your de

Along with productivity and efficiency, encourage improving competence

It may appear that improving efficiency automatically improves competence. But that may not be the case. Either for an individual, team, or a system. While the other way is true; that is,. improving competence improves efficiency. Let us say there is a task that a team member takes one day to complete. Let us say you can buy a tool that can do it in one hour. The net result is increased efficiency of both that team and that member in terms of overall productivity. However, did that increase that team member's competence? That depends on what that team member does with the gained time. I encourage leadership to focus on competence and treat it as capital reinvestment. With new technologies emerging every day to solve various problems, it is important to invest in training and continuous learning. More importantly, it is important to have competence in your metrics for success. Otherwise, it is easy to miss that contributing factor.

Assigning clear ownership of tasks

We understand that many tasks in today's world require great collaboration. A complex system will have many components, integrations, and sub-systems managed by many members of a team. However, that does not mean everyone knows everything or everyone can "get it done" when it comes to a specific item. As a manager, when assigning tasks, or, as is more common, asking for things to be done, it is essential to establish ownership. I am sure you have seen emails exchanged with many people in the To field and with single line delegations like, "Can we fix this?" "Can we make sure this does not happen again? "Can we find the root cause?" etc,. The issue with such shared allocation of responsibility is the bystander effect. No one seems to know who is taking up the task or at least some part of it. Furthermore, it gets worse when managers randomly start asking questions to one team member about why "we did not do that" referring to su

Starting the sales meetings right

I think it is important to be sensitive to how you or your sales team are connecting with your potential clients. One common issue happens during initial sales meetings, when teams are still warming up, is that the nervousness leads to strange introductions and crazy declarations. This derails the whole meeting. It is possible some of the audience may not notice, but it is also possible some do. This could also lead you to miss out on the nuances and details of certain line of inquiry or miss the context behind the words. It might help to take few deep breaths before the meeting, recollection your true intentions, your faith in your experience, and determine to be genuinely interested in listening to what your clients want. Nervousness and anxiety are contagious.