Footprints on the Mountainside

In every organization, we have the odd success story of a person who rose through the ranks like a comet. As a trainer, the most popular question we get asked is how people can be made to perform at full potential.

Unfortunately, there is no answer that can be an instant solution - do this, and every person in your organization will be a genius. It just doesn’t exist.

So what is it that these stars have that others don’t?

For one, they have passion. When they find something they want, they go for it. When they find something they don’t like, they give everything in them to change it. Is it any wonder that they are on the pulse of whatever it is that they handle? They either are in love with it, or have created it, or know it in and out in their efforts to cause a change.

Another thing these people have is self-driven ambition. Being better than the next employee is irrelevant. What they are really competing with is their vision of how they could be at full potential.

How can this be brought into training? A simple answer would be - “It can’t”. However, that is not true either. People change. I believe that this is one shift that could at the most be inspired by someone, but the urge to walk the road is from the person walking it. It is not even a decision that a person can make, but a need inside. All the training in the world can only create some dream of this. Whether the dream fuels action when the person is on his own is what separates the stars from the masses.

Where could this journey begin? Right here. Right now. There is no rocket science to it. All it takes is being aware of yourself. Being aware of where you excel, what could be better, asking for feedback and absorbing it.

The most difficult thing in this journey is probably recognizing failure. Most corporate employees today have an inherent phobia of failure. When a situation doesn’t work as expected, a blame game follows. The brief was inadequate, time fell short, so-and-so goofed up, we didn’t have enough people…. and so on. Yet, there are also stories filled with pride about old successes where the brief called for guesswork and tarot cards, the project was due “yesterday”, everything that could go wrong went wrong, resources were short…… but the job was done. There is a reluctance to come out and say “the job was not done”, even when it wasn’t, where the simple statement gets replaced by miles of explanations, excuses and jargon, till the original subject of conversation is safely forgotten. This is an option - a comfortable one, but it doesn’t work for one who wishes to be a self-coched climber, because until you know what to fix, there is no “climbing” possible.

A difficult but necessary move is to strip the sugar coating and speak of the results as they are. Explanations have a valid place in the reflection and planning for changes - NOT in measuring results.

Another difficulty is in relating with people. The more we want something, the easier it gets to forget that others around us have things they care about too. One possibility is to step on toes, but unless you don’t need any relationship with them (work or personal), its going to come right back and step on yours. It is a conscious choice to explore how things different people want could fit in together and work out in a way that helps everyone. And guess what, the person to initiate this would be called a leader, no?

And so on. Its really about being aware and fixing what doesn’t work, and experimenting and taking risks and owning the results. Everyone goofs up. Its the risks that work that make you a star!

Just back from a training programme for Prolite Autoglow. This company manufactures emergency signs. A family run concern, it is now expanding into a limited company and the family wishes to include their original staff on this journey. Needless to say, its a big shift. The organization has a strong hierarchy, even though there is great warmth.

As a facilitator, it was a challenge for me to get people to see beyond their roles. Yet, the flexibility with which the participants adapted to the training programme, and their willingness to experiment, once they realized its value had me humbled.

As a professional, this was the greatest change I had witnessed from the start of a programme to the end. It served to reinforce my belief that as long as there is a will, change will happen and it will be for the better.

The group began with a very strong sense of roles and definite boundaries between the “labour” and the “elite”. The people lower down the ladder were not used to providing inputs and contributing to the progress of a task, while they excelled at following directions exactly as told. The ones higher up the ladder were not very experimental in their approach and very often the first option to occur to a “leader” was the one the team followed without exploring possibilities.

It was difficult to get people to explore their potential beyond what they were used to doing. Yet, with the coming change in the organization, their roles were headed toward a change.

We experimented with discussions in small groups, examining contributions and their relation with the satisfaction derived from success and a variety of approaches. By the end of the next day, the group was functioning far smoother, and had got used to being aware of how they functioned, resulting in escalating change and eagerness to take their new learnings even further.

In India, the corporate scenario rarely uses outbound training as a genuine organizational intervention and objectives are mostly “fun and excitement” with little, if any focus on objectives beyond that. This programme was a low budget programme conducted with an objective to help employees function more “professionally” than their usual family run scenario. It was a low budget programme and a leap of faith. This difference is what contributes to results.

It is the intention that leads to results, and I am very happy for this group, for they have gained something of far greater value than many of the 5 star programmes with jaded participants eager only for their dose of adrenaline and organizers who would like to justify training budgets while keeping employees relaxed and unchallenged.

Just returning from another programme for Patni Computers. It went well. Far better than we expected actually, considering the size and difficulty in managing the group we had experienced the last time.

It was a two day thing. We had gone in expecting a recreation programme, but when we spoke with their representative, we discovered that there were specific expectations from the programme and it would be need to give it a training slant to the proceedings.

It was a difficult call for me to make, as it being a fun programme, participant expectations would not be toward learning. Particularly considering that some of the senior members seemed determined to take the whole thing as a joke. Honestly, I have no clue how we managed it, but somewhere down the line, we figured that fun and learning are not mutually exclusive, and then we took off into true experiential mode. I had a blast, and from the feedback we received, so did the participants.

And it was productive. For a quick two day thing with limited time, we managed to go through quite a bit in terms of behavioural learnings.

And I learnt a new lesson. An unruly but enthusiastic group may be difficult to handle, but once channelized, the potential for learning, even amidst chaos is huge as compared with a obedient but cold group in terms of energy.

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You have to answer 12 questions related with your brand identity and you then get scores based on how well different aspects fare. For example, see the above screen shot. Those are my results. You are also offered an hour long free consultation.

Other areas of the site relate with important aspects of improving your brand identity and promoting your business. Paid, of course.

I liked the perky feel of the site. Very well designed - obviously, these guys know how to make an impact. But a flash site…… I wanted to see what happens when I don’t have flash. I got a blankish page with some links, and a small notice (that is also there in the flash page) to click here if the page is blank. Me did it, and went to a bizarre orange and white page with the same information, which clashes horribly with the previous and following pages to the text version. Oh my eyes hurt! I wonder why that one page is sitting there in those garish colours.

On the whole, a colourful experience. I love the purple of the site, and hate the orange of the solo page (normally I like orange, but not orange and white combination immediately after purple - thank you. I liked the flash version for its perkiness and the text only version for its readibility (except that page), and the test was fun and brought my attention to aspects of my business I need to consider, even while answering the questions and the results made them even more clear.

However, I discovered nothing at all that I didn’t know in this experience, so I wonder what I will gain if I were to pay them.

Ugh. I think it is an occupational hazard for a consultant to feel obligated to have a say on everything, regardless of how inane it sounds. The more broke the consultant, the more desperate he is to say something, anything, as advice. I found this article on CiteMan.

Overcoming Office irritations

My response to this was of such magnitude, that I thought comments wouldn’t suffice, and dragged the whole thing here.

The article opens with seeming to be about employees being unlucky in their employers and suffering from an unhappy work life. Ok, so far, so good. Looks like we have a subject.

Then, we get into generalities about the employers practices and how they are not all bad and also say, “they will definitely not turn ones workplace a place where one wants to be for a long time“!!!???!!! Does that really mean that the employer will want to leave?

Then the whole article does a nose dive and turns into that “ten tips for career success” tone, with a whole load of advice given without any qualification of circumstance whatsoever. What is happening?

We have “An employee must get himself assigned to a project.” Come again? Do employers really leave employees idling around until they get themselves assigned somewhere? Why work at all? Just sit around and enjoy the salary. Then “An employee can tell the employer that to keep ahead of competitors he wants to do research and find out the need of customers and solution to solve their problems. This will give a chance to step out and speak to people and the employee can interact with people on line or simply get busy on the telephone or go and meet them.” No comments.

And, hold-your-breath “Sometimes it is just not the day when one feels like going to work. If that’s the case and if ones work permits then all one has to do is work from home. Do the work in the same fashion as watching TV or play with ones child and send in reports twice in a day. If ones boss resists, explain that this style of working is helping him get the work done efficiently and could not attend work because of minor health problem.” Have I missed something about the corporate world completely? Is being a well taken care of employee about working from home if one doesn’t feel likegoing to work? Does the author realize how condescending it sounds to be explaining to a boss “resisting” this working from home thing? Particularly when speaking of efficiency as the explanation, while doing the work like watching TV or playing with a kid - as in, not with any major effort or concentration?

I’m not continuing with this nonsense, because I just realize I’m copying almost the entire article - each sentence is a masterpiece of “teenager-playing-dream-consultant”, and I just suggest you hop over to the article to believe it.

Is this a training article or what? It sounds more like something from Cosmopolitan - “Ten things to do when you’re bored at work“

It is really a pity there is no author here to quote, but the link leads to the CiteHR. Honestly, I would have expected far better from an HR site, but that just goes to show how the better consultants mint money with competition like this.

I have news for you, Mr. Author, whoever you are. If the employee can genuinely think of working from home, opting in for projects when he feels like it, exchange assignments in the name of multitasking and do any of the many of the things you recommend, it is the employer, not the employee that is unfortunate.

I have just one reply to any whining employee following this nonsense, and even more to the “trainer” who wrote this - If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.