People Management: Some strange issues

As a people manager I faced many issues in dealing with my team members. I was known as (as stated by one of my peers), some one who passionately supported the team. But more than this, I was also known as an aggressive manager. Either because of my concern about the career progress of each and every team member or because I was not happy with the kind of progress that the team members are unable to match to my expectations, I used to push the team a lot to deliver without providing much to relax. While there used to be a few team lunches and a couple of cricket matches more the team remembered were about the frank feedback I provided to them.


This is where I wanted to mention about the beautiful observation by my leader Sriram Papani. He very rightly pointed out that nowadays the youth are unable to digest the constructive feedback as they are not used to it.
The root cause is because they were regularly pampered by their parents, aunts, uncles and great parents at any age. If they paint a picture that is the greatest in the world. If the girl sings she is just another Latha Mangeshkar. If the boy writes a poem he is at par with Ravindra Nath Tagore. There was no feedback on how they can improve. There was also no mentoring from the parents on the fact that there can always be someone better than their kids. While this whole explanation looks quite simple, it was not acknowledged till Sriram stated in his own perfect style.

And when the kids go to school there is same scenario. In the name of keeping away sensitive matters the schools give only grades and no marks. And the teachers design the rewarding in such a way that every student gets some or other appreciation or distinction. One may get best singer award and the other the best painter. In all the cases no constructive feedback. I need to make a disclaimer that I dont say all schools are this way. But the outcome is same. My kid comes and shows an article and says she received a great pat on the back by her pricipal. The article looks ordinary even at my kid's standard and I felt like giving some feedback on how it can be made better. My kid didnt like. Probably I am too cynic as some people say. But even at smaller scale the kids needs to know that there is scope for improvement everywhere. right? and there can be some people who may perform better than themseleves. Right? How long can we cheat them?
Once I heard the theory of Sriram, I started observing what is happening in my surroundings. What he said was no exaggeration at all. And I am no exception. My daughter comes to me and shows something she made for a project work and she said the teacher did not like it. Immediately I heard my wife criticizing the teacher. My wife felt the teacher must have encouraged my daughter. I discussed with my daughter and understood there was some good feedback from the teacher and it was surprise because even in schools I am seeing Star ratings to my kids every day. The teachers were saying that the kids are getting disappointed if star is not given. In such environment I felt this is a different teacher who wanted to give some feedback but for obvious reasons my daughter didnt like her.

A sensitive issue but this atleast needs some acknowledgement by parents and others. And one couple cant resolve this,without the support of others. If we do not teach the realities how can these generations survive. The kids need to know that there will be some areas where compromization is needed while the general attitude need not be accepting everything. The kids need to compete but in right spirit and must learn appreciating the other's success as well.

Probably this is the reason why I see some of my team members unable to digest the feedback. I took the help of my HR and explained the need for HR to take it as a serious trend and must manage in the induction. Let me see how it works.

Common Sense: Is it really Common?

Common Sense: Is it really Common?

I thought of sharing peculiar inferences from some of my observations. They all concluded that common sense is something very rare to see or I can say the most uncommon.
A few years back I participated in a management game where we - a 20 member team were asked to say numbers from 1 to 100. Each person says the next number to the number said by the neibour but whenever the number has 3 in it, or if it is multiple of 3, the member needs to clap instead of saying. We failed to complete all 100 numbers continuously even after 5 attempts. The observation is that every person says only 5 numbers in this process, and he or she knows what is going to be the next number to say (by adding 20 to the number he or she said). There was no need to look at what each member was saying. All he had to do is saying his number (which he already knows) once his neibour finishes. After 2 attempts I proposed this, but there was such a strong reluctance that one member said it was quite confusing.
Same is the observation in the traffic. If every driver looks at front and right of the vehicle while driving, will there be any confusion? But if you say this, everyone says how can we forget left and rear ? What is the guarantee that the others also look at front and rear? If we needed to be safe, dont you think we need to look everyside? All are valid points but is it difficult to start when the traffic guides say this is the practice? Did we all learn driving properly? If not, can we atleast show common sense that it is less likely to meet with accidents if all our focus is limited only to Front and rear instead of all sides? If you look at 4 sides there is a possibility that you always miss 3 sides anytime. If all of us practice what traffic guides say, you may miss only 1 side that too partially. You still need to look at rear if you want to stop suddenly or if you are taking a turn, but not always. And I didnt invent this. This practice was what is taught and documented.
Third observation is about how we treat the sincere people. In any business how do you plan for your profitability? Take a case of Credit card services. They look at the costs of defaulters along with other costs like service costs, sales etc, while calculating the profitability and decide their charges accordingly. To make it more clear, they put the costs of losses from non-payment of customers and try to recover from the revenue received from other (sincere) customers. So if you are making punctual payments you are also making the component related to the loss from the other defaulting customers. Do you get any reward for being punctual or loyal? Not sure if every vendor rewards you. But it is sure you paying more for other's faults.
Similar is the case about how we look at punctual people. If I schedule a meeting to start at 10 AM, I may find only 50% of the people joining sharp at 10.00 AM. What is my default action? I will request all the people to wait for 10 minutes till others join. Who benefits from this? the defaulters who join late. Where as the punctual people are at loss. Did we ever acknowledge this
?
What happens in our domestic dealings? My wife attends my son more than the daughter because my daughter compromises and understands what we explain, but my son is adamant and wants what he asks. What are we conveying in this process to our daughter? Did we try to acknowledge our daughter's understanding behavior and reward her? In our case may be Yes, but we ourselves are not able to digest if she also refuses to compromise some times, and that was when we acknowledged her good characteristics and ask her not to deviate from them :)

There are many losses in our life at various degrees when we do many things just by not thinking and blindly following the patterns. Probably if we start thinking the world may change.

A Change for betterment?

Today I got an SMS from Loksatta the group in which I joined a few weeks ago, that the team is distributing clothes to the flood victims and requested all of us to cooperate. I spoke to someone and got the details of place where I can handover the clothes. I gathered the old clothes from my house and collected some from others in the colony. While going to the office of Loksatta, I was having my own doubts as this is a community which has support only from a few so called intellectuals.But when I went it was not that bad. I was not alone and there was heavy rush of people from many places and different professionals. I met one medical shop employee, a building architect and a plumber among many people who were all volunteering to help me in taking out the packs from my car boot. None of them belonged to the party but they were all helping. Someone asked if I can pay some donation as well. As I was not prepared for it, I said I will send the check and asked for the address. But he was kind enough to offer that he would come and collect from me. Again he is not Party member and is someone like me, who is hoping for a change and trusting loksatta as the change agent. there were just 2,3 staff who probably belonged to the office while all others from several places are enthusiastic to contribute for a good cause. I remembered the days when I worked for RSS and did similar work for flood victims in the 80's. RSS members were quite energetic, honest and effcient to reach the victims first while all others including the Government took more time. We in fact went with Roti's collected by almost everyone in the quarters and took them to the flood victims at our own cost. RSS never used the donations given by the people for their own travel nor food. Instead we all spent our own for managing our needs. Our leader told that the money given was for the victims and each paisa must be spent only for them.Those days we were all children of parents earning hand to mouth with little savings and all we had was willingness to contribute but without finances.Today I am seeing similar efforts but this time it is from more capable people with more financial strength and energy. Why cant I think it is a sign of change towards improvement for the country. I dont belong to Loksatta Party but I believe in some of their approaches. Who knows? This institution which I dont want to call as a political party, may be the agent to implement the real change the country wanted.

What inspired me to Blog?

Before I start anything, I need to mention that the inspiration to start the blog of my own came from Punchagan. Punchagan used the blog very effectively for organizing and presenting the thoughts instead of venting out at wrong place, provided me a hint on how I can take the direction.
Nothing is a wrong candidate to discuss in the blog, as long as it is presented well. In Punchagan's blog I noticed that there is a way to share everything and make some meaningful inferences.
An incident about a person in stretcher while travelling in the train, feelings about some awkward questions in the interview and a few more which I may not take the liberty to mention here as it is quite personal. But the point is that blog is a good medum when leveraged effectively.
Now let me exploit the power of blog.