This one's really a blast from the past. I had attended a Leadership Summit back in 2010, which had a positive impact on me. I remember this conference for a couple of reasons.
First reason was obvious- various sessions at this conference were chaired was industry leaders including a few luminaries. In addition to the learnings i gathered, it was a sort of fan boy moment to hear them live.
A more inconspicuous reason was related to my note taking skills. I remember that I managed to note most of the stories and key points I gathered in this conference. It may sound like a routine thing to many and you may wonder why I feel proud about it. I have a perspective on this and I
I feel note-taking is one of the most underrated yet most effective skills. The fact that almost 9 years later I am reproducing my learnings via this blog is a reason enough to consider note taking as a serious skill. Without these notes, I may have had these learnings hidden at some corner of my mind but that wouldn't have helped me nor the readers- just because of sheer inability to reproduce them at the moment of need.
The session notes that I reproduce here from a session on risk taking. A cool thing about this panel session was that it was chaired by country heads of my current and the former organization.
Risk taking is an often talked about virtue and at the same time one of the least understood one too.
Here are some nuggets from the session that I made note of. Hope you enjoy going through these as much as I did re-reading these again.
Great
Leaders take Risk
Speakers:
Sridhar Jayanthi, Senior VP, Engineering & Managing
Director, McAfee India
Rakesh Singh, VP, products and Managing Director, Citrix
R&D India
My
assessment notes:
·
This was again a panel
discussion and quite enlightening of all.
·
This session was again not PPT
driven and involved sharing of real life experiences around risk taking. This was
moderated by Sridhar Jayanthi.
Key
Takeaways:
·
Both panelists seem to agree
that one of the biggest risk that a professional can take is deciding to start
a Start-up operation.
·
In Start-ups, the major risks
are around constraints and having to manage your new born business around those
inevitable constraints.
·
In a Leadership team, Risk is a
way of life.
·
There was a reference to the
book- “Design of Business” in one of the discussions.
·
One striking quote- “If you
don’t take risk, you are stagnant. And if you are stagnant, you are not going
linear but falling back literally.”
·
Take risk to grow people and
help them take your place.
o
One such risk story was
narrated by Sridhar Jayanthi. In one of his previous organizations, they I
think hired a person (who was a construction worker) to take care of
cleaning/housekeeping stuff. This guy had not even completed his schooling but
was quite passionate. One of the tasks that he was involved in doing was
collect the printouts near the printer and ensuring that the place was clean.
One of the things, he observed was that during every Friday, there were many
printouts (around 100s) that were fired and the printer invariably used to give
problems in printing the jobs on Fridays. This guy was a keen observer and he
could figure out the problem and not only fixed it but suggested a very
productive way of doing the routine job that not anyone else could think
of. Foreseeing his talent, One of the
bosses there spotted him and took a risk of training this guy on programming languages
and computing stuff. This person picked up the stuff quite steadily and started
contributing a role of Engineer very soon. Within few years, he scaled himself
as a Manager of Development and by the time Sridhar left the organization, he
had scaled up as a Director of Development.
o
An Amazing story of a
construction worker who turned out to be an immense success in technology
areas. This happened primarily because some took a risk with him and considered
him suitable for a technical role.
·
Building Risk culture requires-
o
Risk Enablers
o
People who are grounded having
Inner peace.
§ Rakesh Singh narrated a story of founder of Runners High,
Dr. Rajat Chauhan, who showed tremendous guts to leave the job (after a
successful higher education in US) to do something he found more meaningful for
life i.e. become a running coach. It takes great deal of peace with inner self
to do something you really want to do especially when going against the tide.
o
Sense of humors
§ Rakesh Singh again illustrated an example of a Pakistan cricket
player- Shahid Afridi.
During the recent Test cricket series with Australia, he was faced with barrage
of lightning fast bouncer deliveries in an over from Mitchell Johnson. One
after the other, he was faced with balls that just whizz past his head, ears,
nose etc. and he was all clueless about what was happening. After few such
balls, in an unusual gesture, he took off his helmet and just laughed out
loudly with mouth wide open (without worrying about millions who were seeing
him) to calm his nerves. The lesser mortals who have succumbed to pressure but
here was a rather unorthodox action to deal with adversities. What better way
than to just laugh off the problems and face what coming next.
·
Create a risk environment in
the organization-
o
What you rewards and how you
handle failure determines the risk taking appetite of the organization.
o
There was a talk of
organization which used to reward the Best failure. How many organizations do
that ?
·
How can Managers become risk
takers ?
o
First and foremost- One got to
be a risk taker.
o
A lot of times success and
failures in career is because of what opportunity one picks up. Great leaders
grab the opportunity when they find it.
o
Get buy-in from the people.
What people say about you and way they perceive you is important.
o
Be genuine and be visible-
§ People should be high skilled communicators.
§ Don’t be arrogant or boastful but be visible and market yourself and
your achievement in a right manner.
§ Quiet achievers are very hard to find in an organization.
Images source/credits:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--AZwD7vqA--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/18m5vfjl1jqjmjpg.jpg
https://i1.wp.com/www.thejumpingplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/529232_10101720562241321_209875322_n.jpg?fit=841%2C561
No comments:
Post a Comment