Learning from Zen: The Light of the Lamp

Here is a story that can be interpreted in various ways.  

In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me."

"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don't have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."

The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him. "Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can't you see this lantern?"

"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.

From a human relations perspective you can derive different meanings but the one I want to highlight is....

…if you are oblivious to something does not mean it is irrelevant to others.   What may be important to you may (at the same time) be of no use to the others.   Managers need this realization often in their day to day work.

You may have mastered the art but there are others around you who are at different levels on the learning curve and to each the way ahead will be different.  Apply that yardstick when you decide how to develop people.

Other interpretations I would leave to the discerning readers.

FRAME It for Success !!!

Given below is a quote of mine that I often reflect upon and have used in many of my workshops or discussions with my clients. Most of these opportunities and the learning's have come about in my role as a HR professional over the past two decades.

"There is more to do than what I've done, There's more to Go from where I reached, There's more to me than what I am."

Human potential is unlimited and most of us never reach any where near the potential we have. Below is a simple model that I use to explain the possibilities, the endless sea of positives that lie ahead of us in the journey of life. It is called"FRAME" it for Success. Below are the five things you need to do to reach where you want to go or achieve something you always wanted to or be the person you wanted to be.. The FRAME is not a sign post. The FRAME is like an illuminated pathway.

Focus: I would never emphasize less on this ubiquitous (there everywhere but quite often unused) concept that can bring direction, that can channelize attention (Read my blog on FOCUS). It is important to have a clear concept of where you want to be or what you want to achieve. When you focus all else gets tuned out and that is the best way to get your minds complete attention to doing what you need to do at that point of time. Focus channelizes your energy and sharpens the chances of success in what you want to do, where you want to go and how you can go there.

Reflection: Time to take a pause. Take a Look at your strengths. Reflect .... on what can take you there. It is important since your strengths were meant to be your fuel to success. Most of us have hidden strengths. For most of us a good reflection of what we are good at comes from having a conversation with a close friend and asking for feedback. This can be a colleague at work or a friend outside of work or even your manager. Try to see a pattern in a few such feedback messages you get. That is what you are really good at. Remember focus on strengths. Don't get overshadowed by getting your attention to weaknesses. When you are looking at a world of possibilities it is better to see what will get you there.

Articulation: There are two things here. First it is about how you would get there. It is important. It is like a plan you have once you know the destination. When you plan you put to rest unwanted pitfalls (or up your preparedness to overcome them) that may arise. You will surely achieve what you wanted. Most people do not achieve what the set out since they did not articulate it correctly. Articulating it correctly means you have to "express it" and do so openly. A stated goal, shared with those who mean something to you is achieved with much greater probability than one that was just written in the folds of your diary. That is why most new year resolutions are up in smoke by the time Valentines day arrives each year. Once you articulate the mind tries to channelize energy to ensure you live up to what you want to do or get.

Movement: Here it all about action. It is about hitting the road to start the journey. Even the longest journey begins with a small first step. When you are on the path to achievement you will have to keep constant look out for the pot holes and also navigate any obstructions. Pot holes can slow you down... e.g. someone trying to demotivate you, or lack of time to pursue your task of achieving the goal or even the lack of energy due to pursuit of multiple goals. It is here that the focus comes to your rescue.If you feel this way go back and re-look at the focus. Obstacles are things that will stop you. Fear is the biggest obstacle. Many a time they are like the invisible demons fought by the Little Prince in the classic novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. You need to overcome them and your plan is something that will help you along with the articulation especially the verbal and non private articulation that you need to live up to

Evaluation: It is about milestones, progress, achievement and fulfillment. Each of them is important. Defining milestones is important to ensure you are moving in the right direction and the right distances are covered. The anxiety and anticipation keep increasing as you move to the destination and crossing them makes you recognize progress. You need to look ahead and anticipate as well as look back and reflect as you move on in our pursuit of achieving what you set out for. Celebrating success and feeling a sense of achievement is very important.

The FRAME can completely change your outlook. It helps redefine your views, focus your attention and tune out disturbances. Your life is a beautiful canvas, give it life and vibrancy by the right FRAME. In hind sight it may look like a simple concept but it is mountain like when you try to adopt it and that's why they say human potential is still vastly untapped.

Being Relevant as a Manager

Relevant: The Oxford Dictionaries defines the meaning as...

"closely connected or appropriate to the matter in hand".

So what does it mean when it comes to a manager engaging with his / her team in work organizations?

If you are to be accepted as a leader manager you have to be relevant in today's context. The expectations, needs, desires and general view of life changes with generations.   Today's young people at work in their early twenties may never  realize that work was once done without email,  without digital systems, with type writers,  with ammonia duplication machines.  There were no scanners, no internet and also fewer cars on the road to the workplace.  Majority of companies did not provide a pick up and drop facility from and to office / workplace  in earlier decade.

This whole digital age, when things are done at the click of a mouse or on pressing ENTER on a key board has resulted in a expectation osmosis towards forming a more generalized view for everything to happen even at work in a jiffy, therefore the need for quick resolution, quick feedback, instant gratification and so on.   Which means that managers need to be fast in all of these aspects- giving feedback,  providing responses, decision making and so on. 

The new generation of employees are tuned to their mobiles all of the time,  familiar with digital technology and more comfortable if there is a reciprocal response from managers. While a manager may ask "Why should I be the one to change"  the simple response is today you as a manager may be in a minority in organizations as there are several companies with over 50% Gen Y employees.   World wide the workforce may have about 36% of millennial generation in the workforce but in countries like India it is higher and in some sectors like the IT/ ITeS it is much higher.  Remember the old saying  :  "While in Rome, do as the Roman's Do." 

Today is the age of fast and not so lasting change, people expect and are so used to change happening all of the time so it is important for managers to also change and reinvent themselves.  You can always lean back on the fact that "It always happened this way.... here"  but not for long as your team will find their managers are not relevant.  Meetings and the way they are organized should keep changing now and then otherwise they become drab, boring, seen that before kind of rituals.

Today you can send and receive as many emails back and forth in a single day to close your communication... so more frequent connects are the order of the day when it comes to work. Which means you need to connect back with your teams more often than what you did in the past decade.  In short influences on the social side of personal lives need to spill over into the workplace.

Adopt latest technologies,  speed up things even in people management, bring more variety and flavors in your meetings,  connect more often, give more feedback,  get more frequently into connect session with your team(s) and keep giving them a thumbs up for good things happening every now and then.

What Gets Focus Gets Attention ! What Gets Attention Gets Done !!!

Here's an experiment I have tried with dozens of audiences at work, at colleges where we interact, at training programs I have run.  I figured out this as a very important and effective way to bring out the point about "FOCUS"

I ask the participants in the group to participate in a mental gym.  The task is simple - to draw the dial of their watch (not an artists view, but just the details) in about 2 to 3 minutes.  Most are able to remember the shape of the dial,  they don't mess up between round or oval or rectangle shape of the dial.  Almost everyone gets the color of the dial face right.... almost everyone remembers whether it was digital or analog display... The Problem starts beyond that and not more than about 5% are really able to capture details beyond this.   What kind of needles are there... Do they have a pointed tip, or is the date above or below the 15 minute line,  is there a concentric circle around the dial edge,  where is the name embossed.  

Most participants tell me that they have been wearing the same watch for several months and some even several years, yet they are unable to do the simple task of figuring out details of the face of the dial of the watch.  They have seen the face dozens of times in a day over the months or years, yet they remember so little.  Why?  The reason being that each time they saw the watch the focus was on the time and not to look at the face rather to know the time. Actually the whole process happens in your mind... The brain has an inherent ability to tune out what is not in focus and at the same time sharpen the attention to what you need out of several images that come flying to you when you see things.   So the periphery (the boundaries and everything around... including how your wrist holds to the watch) all gets tuned out of the mind and you only see what you want to see.  That's the FOCUS your mind brings to what is being seen. (by the eye)

Similarly we have a powerful ability to Tune Out what we don't need and focus on what we need.  This spectacular ability of the mind comes in handy in much of what we do at work and otherwise.  Only the stimuli of interest gets attention and everything else around the periphery gets tuned out.   But this is not always true.  If we are unable to focus attention on the work at hand then we keep shifting from one to another, get distracted and are unable to achieve what was intended.  Now imagine what would happen if while looking at the watch you kept getting your attention wavering to the dial color, the texture of the skin of your wrist and so on.  This consumes lot of mental energy and ability to focus.

In our work too, what gets focused, gets attention.  If you are able to direct the attention of teams to the goals the goal gets actionized.  There is progress and there could be closure.  If the same is not given attention other peripheral things get noticed and focused upon thereby losing track on the goal at hand.  So in case you need to channelize focus on the goals and find that after a period of time if no reviews were done nothing happens then you are not directing focus of your teams.   

As an individual if you find yourself unable to achieve some goal it could be lack of focus.  Remember several 1000's start learning the guitar and few dozen complete even a beginners course and maybe a few reach even intermediate levels.   Millions of people start blogging but give up midway in less than a month,   Remember how many new year promises you made only to realize the volatile promises by the time it is March.   So in case you want to really achieve something bring it to focus,  that way you'll be able to direct your attention to it and tune out other distractions.  So what gets focused gets attention and what gets attention gets done !!!

Narrow The Intent-Content Gap !!!

When Content does not Match up to Intent,  you are likely to  lose credibility.  The writing on the wall is loud and clear.  If we fail to live up to the talk as HR professionals then we are seen as folks "throwing the cannon balls" at the party.

Have you experienced that people speak about some new concept they heard of,  bring in a whole lot of jargon and then quickly adapt and adopt what was working somewhere and which they claimed could be a cure all, a solution for tomorrow and then .... Bingo !!! it all fizzles out as quickly as it got created.

If this rings a bell then it is probably a case of intent-content gap at work.  What you wanted did not happen and what you expected did not turn out to be.  Here are four reasons why this happens.

a) The concept did not fit into your context:  Understanding the context is key to successful implementation.  What works for A situation does not apply to Situation B.   Try remembering the last time you tried a least common denominator approach to employee engagement.   Wont' work -  it has to be segmented if it has to work,  Not everything that motivates an employee in second year of his job career can motivate the one with a decade or more.

b) Concept not thought through:  If you tried an approach that resembles tunneling your way through the mountain then at best you can see the other side.  If you want to see the top you need to climb the mountain.  Ask few of your HR teams what a normalization process intends to achieve and see how much they can explain.... or even simpler ask what the philosophy for performance management is and if you have a common response you are doing well otherwise the concept is not clearly understood.

c) Rome was not built in a day:  Big Bang roll out without a prototype or a working model is a sure way to rework, or in all likelihood failed implementation.  Ever remember a day when your folks at work decided that you need a new process or system from the scratch, from the ground up to replace the current one.

d) You put the squirrel to do what the turtle was supposed to be doing.  Climbing trees is best done by the squirrel and swimming across the current in the river by the turtle. If you ever tried switching roles in the name of meeting goals of  job rotation then you will be in for a surprise. (Read More About This Here)

Urgent Versus Important

President Eisenhower once said "The Urgent Problems are Seldom the Important Ones".  This can't be more true even in today's context .  Incidentally life is much more complex, much more fast paced, urgent and demanding than earlier days.  

Further the internet boom has brought in so much information at our finger tips and at the click of the button that one cannot find time to focus on something without getting distracted. If you are working on a word document for an hour you must have felt the urging need to go online and inform your friends on Facebook or Twitter of how you are enjoying every minute of your writing or,  the tingling urge to browse the internet.   Coupled with those distractions is the temptation to respond to that beep on your hand phone or tablet alerting you of a message waiting or a update from one of your favorite apps. 

Given this urgency and sense of distraction how do you remain on top of your priorities.   These priorities stare at an average person every hour of the living day.  Be it a professional working in office, a lawyer, or even a script writer.  How do you handle your day to day priorities becomes the top issue many times.   Missed deadlines,  abandoned personal goals,  a fuming boss,  a irate customer are all downsides of not being able to keep pace.   This leads to more and more accumulation and you end up with a Himalayan task of prioritizing and re-prioritizing.    What would help is to step back and think about that long to-do list you have.  Just having one does not guarantee you are moving well on the tasks to be completed.   Are you effective or trying to be efficient in the process. 

Here are few things you can do to make most of the avalanche of items on your  to-do list. These simple steps will soon make you more effective in your daily tasks and can lead you towards improved overall performance and reduced urgency and stressful moments.

a) Pareto to the Rescue:  Use the 80:20 principle to segregate the list of your pending items into vital few and trivial many.   Pick up the top 3 to 5 things you want to sort as key priorities among the several awaiting your action.  Call them your Top Priority one's.  Remember the key is that it is not enough to know what to do but also know what not to do. 

b) Use those Ever Increasing Constellation of Apps:  Be it android or iOS you will find several hundred planning tools, to do lists which can help you with alerts, alarms and reminders.  Put these Top Priorities into the calendar and keep coasting along as you finish them one by one.  For the technologically uninitiated there's always the daily diary or the planner book that can come in handy.

c) Distance Yourself  from Those Digital Distractions: You need to put away these distractions like the SMS to waiting to be read, the latest Tweet from your rock star hero or the latest update on weather, or the email from office  all arriving incessantly into the digital device.  Keep a time window for such activity and stick to it.  If you follow that routine then it starts getting ingrained in your mind, in a few days the sub conscious sub system of the mind learns to rewire our brain circuit

d) Make Time for Reflection:  In the hurry and pace of daily life we rarely stop to look back on the day gone by.  It would be a good idea to look at how you had done on the things you did each day.  You would need not more than 5 to 8 minutes and this exercise also helps you to identify any priority items that you may have to focus on the next day.   The human mind has a uncanny ability to tune out what is not in focus and one could easily avoid missing out something which might fall between the no light hours that separate the two days.

e) What Are the Other Distractions:  Do you have too many things going on at the same time.  It is said that human's multitasking are more likely to make mistakes.  This is due to context switching leading to reduced attention.  However it is not impossible and people can be trained and become better at multitasking but that is only after training.  Otherwise several studies do show the down side of effectiveness while multitasking. So try to focus on the tasks one at a time as the brain needs to refocus as you switch between tasks making use of mental energy.   So this goes back to making a priority lists as in point a and re-look at what's important, whats not before you race ahead.   Some of us think we are experts at multitasking then you need to have a shared understanding - it is about doing two unrelated tasks.  Second the brain has an ability to switch rapidly between one and the other task so we should not confuse that with multitasking.

So next time think when you are overwhelmed by a long list of to do items.  Remember that efficiency can be in contrast with effectiveness and the choice is in our hands.

Bell Curve in Action: It isn't about Belling the Cat

Some time back I wrote about the  Bell Curve and how employees resent it when not used in right manner.  It is interesting to know how people see red when it is not implemented properly or done with the sole  intent of letting go of people who fall in the lower tail.   It is not about "belling the cat" but rather the bell curve is about driving  high performance and managing expectations towards that objective.

Interestingly in the past week there were two well known names in the news for their tryst with the Bell Curve for managing performance.   Microsoft apparently is moving away and Yahoo is moving in with the Bell curve.   So the pendulum continues to swing one end to the other.

While Jack Welch used the Bell Curve process at GE in the 1980's  it is said that it worked well.  Reason being that people understood what relative performance meant, what it meant to be in bottom 10% and what it meant to be in Top 5% and so in the context of the organization.  This has to be a deliberately discussed and understood concept. 

Recently it is reported that at Yahoo Inc.,  there has been a lot of noise about the bell curve being brought in just to get rid of people.   If this is not the case then the CEO and HR teams should have handled the objective,  implementation and rationale on how to approach the bell curve very sensitively.   If not it fires up an environment of mistrust and loss of faith in the HR process.   You can read the Yahoo Story here. 

In fact a well managed bell curve process actually can be used to distribute pay rises by linking payout to the position on the curve.  Managers can also understand where people fall on the curve and in case of extremes (outliers) managers should use it to find reasons as to why someone is performing at extremes which can be both over performing or under performing.  This can help moderate the employees performance with suitable action to improve or to move the employee to more challenging roles.  

It is sadly understood from the article link above that most high performance companies no longer use the bell curve.  Perhaps they don't understand it well or have implemented it badly and giving up.   However many of those who are using are fine using a flexible normal curve based on how the company performers with skew changing to left or right depending on how the company fared. 

The Bell Curve is not a fad that came and went but is still around and companies like Yahoo are only paying attention to it.  Managed well it can be a very useful tool to drive up performance and take the organization to the next level of performance.   In a later post we'll discuss how this can be one. 


Other articles on PMS

Is Promotion a Reward for Performance Part I

Is Promotion a Reward for Performance Part II

Narrow the Intent-Content Gap !!!

When Content does not Match up to Intent,  you are likely to  lose credibility.  The writing on the wall is loud and clear.  If we fail to live up to the talk as HR professionals then we are seen as folks "throwing the cannon balls" at the party.

Have you experienced that people speak about some new concept they heard of,  bring in a whole lot of jargon and then quickly adapt and adopt what was working somewhere and which they claimed could be a cure all, a solution for tomorrow and then .... Bingo !!! it all fizzles out as quickly as it got created.

If this rings a bell then it is probably a case of intent-content gap at work.  What you wanted did not happen and what you expected did not turn out to be.  Here are four reasons why this happens.

a) The concept did not fit into your context:  Understanding the context is key to successful implementation.  What works for A situation does not apply to Situation B.   Try remembering the last time you tried a least common denominator approach to employee engagement.   Wont' work -  it has to be segmented if it has to work,  Not everything that motivates an employee in second year of his job career can motivate the one with a decade or more.

b) Concept not thought through:  If you tried an approach that resembles tunneling your way through the mountain then at best you can see the other side.  If you want to see the top you need to climb the mountain.  Ask few of your HR teams what a normalization process intends to achieve and see how much they can explain.... or even simpler ask what the philosophy for performance management is and if you have a common response you are doing well otherwise the concept is not clearly understood.

c) Rome was not built in a day:  Big Bang roll out without a prototype or a working model is a sure way to rework, or in all likelihood failed implementation.  Ever remember a day when your folks at work decided that you need a new process or system from the scratch, from the ground up to replace the current one.

d) You put the squirrel to do what the turtle was supposed to be doing.  Climbing trees is best done by the squirrel and swimming across the current in the river by the turtle. If you ever tried switching roles in the name of meeting goals of  job rotation then you will be in for a surprise.