Random Notes for Corporate Leadership

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 ...

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 thre...