When it comes to leadership, one's actions speaks louder than words

Last week, I was involved in some interesting conversations on issues that slows organizations down and the role leadership play in leading to or resolving of these issues.

One such teething issue was how to get employees/new leaders understand the meaning of cultural fitment and further to avoid people/culture misfit cases early in their lifetime at the company. Not an easy problem to define, let alone attempt to solve it.

A group of us talked about specific cases (people/instances too confidential to be called out in this blog) on how early stage employees (in some cases, the ones in system for a long time too) just failed to align to cultural norms, behavioral expectations, leading to poor impression (about them) being formed. In some of these cases, their managers being in a remote country/site which gives them a very thin window to recover from these slip-ups and thereby shortening their spans in the teams or even in the organizations.
We did try and delve into root causes and solutions to avoid these situations from happening. One root cause that emerged prominently was that employees or leaders themselves don't get enough feedback timely.
Feedback mechanisms mostly are under-leveraged in most of the organizations. One could argue that for the feedback mechanisms to work, there really are 2 players. One is the feedback seeker, other is the one who provides the feedback. This division just about, sounds right.


But if we broaden our view for a moment, there's another crucial consideration. In addition to these 2 players there's also an invisible element called as intent. Simply put, if the intent to provide feedback or to receive feedback is missing then the feedback mechanisms won't serve the intended purpose.
Feedback without intent really is like human being without a heart or a life without purpose. Without appropriate intent, feedback mechanisms are reduced to check list items. One may get the task done but still be far from reaching the outcome.

If intent is so important, then who is responsible for ensuring that it's presence in the organization culture. It has to be the leader of the organization.
I was recently reading this book 'Trillion Dollar Coach'. I was fascinated by the story of how Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) conducted his staff meetings in the presence of his coach, Bill Campbell. Below excerpt from the book:

To balance the tension and mold a team into a community, you need a coach, someone who works not only with individuals but also with the team as a whole to smooth out the constant tension, continuously nurture the community and make sure it is aligned around a common vision and set of goals. Sometimes this coach may just work with the team leader, the executive in charge. But to be most effective-and this was Bill's model-the coach works with the entire team.At Google, Bill didn't just meet with Eric. He worked with Jonathan and several other people, and he attended Eric's staff meetings on a regular basis. This can be a hard thing for an executive to accept-having a "coach" getting involved in staff meetings and other things can seem like a sign of lack of confidence. A 2014 study finds that it is the most insecure managers who are threatened by suggestions from others (in other words, coaching). So, conversely, publicly accepting acoach can actually be a sign of confidence. And a 2010 article notes that "group coaching" is effective but generally underused as a way to improve team or group performance (which the authors call "goal-focused change").

Eric Schmidt did a few things impeccably well:
1. Being open to being coached by someone requires one to break the barriers in the mind. Eric was super-successful but still chose the path that could expose his vulnerabilities. A courageous thing to do for a leader.
2. He let the effect of Bill not being restricted to his own self-development but extended the benefits to the entire team.
3. By inducting Bill in his staff meetings and by agreeing to be publically coached by him, he broke the traditional norms such as: the leader is always correct, one doesn't need a coach after being super successful and likewise.


In short, what Eric did with his actions was to inject the necessary intent in his team that spelled almost like:
1. It's ok to be corrected if one is wrong.
2. It's ok to receive feedback.
3. It's ok to give feedback.
4. To build successful communities in organization, real-time coaching is a huge enabler.


He could have just stood in front of all the employees and given an inspirational speech but he didnt take that route.
He didn't put up the fancy posters to express his intent, he did so by being an example that his team could emulate.
In a short run, people get impressed by the words and but in a long run, it's simply the actions that matter.

Images source:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trillion-Dollar-Coach-Leadership-Handbook/dp/1473675960/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?adgrpid=65127244262&gclid=CjwKCAjwq-TmBRBdEiwAaO1en84PeZmQv962SSk1XFH3utvvroepT89eOlTmamA86tDOT9SCiowimBoCbWkQAvD_BwE&hvadid=337116057808&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1006598&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t2&hvqmt=e&hvrand=1531809190943809151&hvtargid=kwd-664806428822&hydadcr=18492_1772498&keywords=the+trillion+dollar+coach&qid=1557766579&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

Express gratitude for what you have than regretting what you lost

I started running in late 2007. I remember my first running event was a 7 km run Bangalore, which I managed to finish huffing and puffing. That start, though not perfect, gave me the mental fuel and focus to sustain and make running a part of my life.

In May 2008, I ran my first 10 Km run in an event called as Sunfeast 10 k run. I remember to have received a completion certificate (yes, there were no medals then) for this feat. A successful finish in this run really kicked off a series that I managed to stretch for long. From 2008 till 2018, I ran 11 consecutive editions of this run. In between this phase, I gradually built the strength, stamina and hunger to run longer distances, up to 100km a few times and full marathons 15+ times.

If my memory serves me right, I think post 2011 the sponsor of this run was changed to TCS (from Sunfeast) but what didn't change was my participation in this run. Year after year, for 11 years my routine was almost ritualistic. I prepared in the months leading to this run and enjoyed the phase. I take immense pride in all the efforts I managed to put in towards accomplishing strong finishes.

So what happened now ?
Due to unavoidable priorities that came up this year, this sequence is getting broken. In 2019, I won't be able to participate in this run- for the first time in 12 years!

How would you feel when faced with an event like this? Obviously, disappointed and distraught. And this is what I am feeling right now. Having to forego such an outstanding sequence is not something I desired for, planned for or am happy with but I am having to face with this situation nonetheless.

All said and done, I do believe that I cannot control how I feel but I could control my reaction to that feeling. Being humans, our feelings simply come unannounced and that's one of the things that makes life such a mystery. But life does render a bit of control back to us. The reaction to life's situations and events are firmly within our control.

When I thought about it, I really had two choices:
1. I feel disappointed and just let that disappointment control me and my reactions.
2. I accept disappointment but I choose to be grateful for the fact that I could do 11 consecutive years despite the uncertainty in schedules and all the responsibilities that comes with a package called life.

I might or might not be able to emulate this sequence again but I am extremely proud of last 11 years of participating in this event. I am thankful for everything that lead me to this. From being a non-runner in 2007 to now has been a journey I would cherish, no matter what I do or cannot do in future.

I am still learning to be thankful of what i have especially during the unfavorable situations that life throws at you. I feel better making this choice today.

Being Grateful is a Choice

Here's a beautiful story that I came across in the book 'The Trillon Dollar Coach'. The book is a tribute to Bill Campbell, who is widely regarded as the best coach Silicon Valley ever had. He coached the likes of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and several other execs like former CEOs  of eBay and Twitter.

The story was about Apple spinning off the software division called Claris and offered Bill Campbell the position of CEO, which he duly accepted. Bill stayed the CEO till 1990 when Apple decided to bring Claris back in it's fold. Bill decided to leave Claris for other opportunity.


After hearing his decision to leave, several Claris employees came together and published this ad in San Jose Mercury News. In our careers, all of us probably have worked with good bosses and not-so-good ones. While the latter more often dominates our mind and gossip table discussions, how many times do we come forward and choose to return the dues to the good bosses. This example of Claris employees running an ad thanking Bill is first of a kind I have seen.

If we scratch the surface of this act of Claris employees, it becomes evident that they chose to be grateful for the value Bill added to their lives.

They could have simply chosen to send a thank you email and shook hands (like most of us would ha e done), but they chose to go an extra mile to express their gratitude much like Bill would have done while coaching them.
Look at the choice of their words
"You taught us how to stand on out own. You built us to last. And even though you're no longer coaching the team, we're going to do our best to keep making you proud."
This story lead me to search for the true meaning of being grateful. I found the expression of gratitude in this article beautiful, hence sharing

What does it mean to be grateful? Thankfully, it doesn’t mean convincing yourself of some bogus notion that everything’s fine and dandy. Living your life with gratitude means choosing to focus your time and attention on what you appreciate. The goal is not to block out difficulties, but to approach those difficulties from a different perspective. Appreciation softens us. It soothes our turbulent minds by connecting us with the wonderfully ordinary things, great and small, that we might otherwise take for granted.

In the end, we are sum total of choices we make. Choosing to be grateful is one of the finest things one could do to add value to one's own and the lives of others in touch.

Be mindful. Be grateful.

Images source:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trillion-Dollar-Coach-Leadership-Handbook/dp/1473675960/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?adgrpid=65127244262&gclid=CjwKCAjwq-TmBRBdEiwAaO1en84PeZmQv962SSk1XFH3utvvroepT89eOlTmamA86tDOT9SCiowimBoCbWkQAvD_BwE&hvadid=337116057808&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1006598&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t2&hvqmt=e&hvrand=1531809190943809151&hvtargid=kwd-664806428822&hydadcr=18492_1772498&keywords=the+trillion+dollar+coach&qid=1557766579&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

Nandan Nilekani's Playbook of Building Things

I was recently listening to this amazing podcast: Outliers with Pankaj Mishra in conversation with Nandan Nilekani.

I listened to first 7 minutes or so but got so much out of it that i had to stop listening and blog about it.

I am reproducing some of the contents right from the podcast (full credit to Pankaj Mishra and Nandan Nilekani) for this.

Nandan's thoughts on dealing with ambiguity:
My upbringing made me deal with new situations very easily. I am quite comfortable embracing change. I am also quite comfortable trying out something that is not in my comfort zone.
Very often what we do is because we become successful at doing something, we just remain in that space. I can embrace situations that are full of ambiguity.

Nandan's thoughts on how to build things:
My nature i am a builder. Creating new things is what interests me.

• Is there an enough momentum and opportunity ?: First i look for an opportunity where there is something to be built and there is enough momentum to make it happen.

• Do I have a role to make a difference ?: Second is i want to be in a situation where i can do the building. I need to have the role.

• Have I defined an audacious goal ?: Then i define the goals. Usually the goals that are quite audacious because audacious goals often enthuse people. Good people would want to come and work with you when they are sure that they can make a difference. So having an audacious goal is important.Other advantage of having a audacious goal is that it submerges the difference in the team. When leading Aadhar, one of the challenges i had was to get the best people from bureaucracy and from the techno-private sector. They had different personalities, one is hierarchical and other is freewheeling and not as focused on process. There were strengths and weaknesses at the both sides. My challenge was to bring it all together and synthesize a team out of that. One way to do that it to have a big and an urgent goal. You are so busy chasing the goal that you don't have time for any internal disagreements. You still have disagreements but you agree on something because you have to move forward.

• Have I thought through the process of driving change ?: Thinking through the whole change is quite important.Driving change is about changing mindsets, changing behaviors. Looking at the incentive structure, who is for the change, who is against the change. Having allies who want the change to happen and deflecting any threats from those who want to block it.

Inages source:
https://www.talentism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/bigstock-Business-strategy-businessman-67467796.jpg

Should I Embrace a Non-Linear Career or not ?

This is in continuation of my last post on conversation with a dear friend of mine Ashok Thiruvengadam (founder and CEO of Stag Software). Ashok had reached out to record a video on the theme of  “Reinventing yourself in these changing times”


[Ashok] It is seen that people deepen their knowledge/skills in their work area as a means to achieve career growth. Is such a unidimensional approach good ?
Do we need to break this linearity ?

[Anuj] I would like to put the answer to this question in 2 buckets. One is non-linearity aspect that you called out and the second is the unidimensional aspect.

Should I embrace non-linear career or not ?

Lets talk about non-linearity in careers. I have worked in a few organizations and know about the practices in a lot of other organizations, one thing that i find common is most of the organizations

(keeping start-ups out of this discussion for a bit) is that most organizations have a career path.
Two of the key characteristics of a career path are:
1) Career paths have an entry role. Any person who joins the organization right from college joins at the entry level.
2) Career paths have an end role. The end role usually is the department head or a VP or something similar.

Sensing this pattern, i asked myself 2 questions:
1. What is the highest role in the organization ? It's invariably the CEO or Managing Director or any other fancy name organization chooses to assign.
2. Why doesn't the organization's career path show the path right till the CEO ?

Ever wondered why the career paths stops after reaching a certain level. Its not a question with binary answers, so let me provide a perspective here:

1. Few years ago, i got a chance to speak with the CEO of Citrix (my current employer). Mark Templeton is a respected figure and a tall leader, a rare individual who won over almost everyone he got in touch with. He said something that stayed with me. In his words
"The path to top in any organization is never linear. It's always a zig zag path.".
What Mark meant was that people who reach the top of their profession know how to hack the ladder. And one cannot hack the ladder by simply following the career path.

2. Career paths, though they provide comfort, often return a very predictable growth. In some sense, career paths are self-limiting. Even if you may be good enough to be three levels above your current role, the career paths will always restrict your thinking to just think of one-level at-a-time.

3. While i may have said a few not-so-favorable things about the career paths but i do believe that whether to follow career paths or not, really is a choice. There is nothing wrong if you follow them. Not everyone is comfortable with non-linearity and it is fine. HR processes exists for a reason and that is to serve broader employee population and there is nothing wrong with it.
Personally, I am a proponent of non-linearity in careers.

Shall i go deep or go broad ?

Now putting start-ups into the equation. When the start-up is in early stages and the product-market
fit is not achieved, people play different roles. Your roles are not limited by your designation. You may play a role or engineer, product manager, marketing and technical support- all at the different times of evolution. Embracing diversity of roles is the need of the hour in the start-up scenarios.
Consider a situation when an organization is looking to scale. Having achieved sales take-off and looking to next steps of evolution, that's when specialization matter the most. If you have 100 customers to serve, then Technical Support cannot be a part time job. Organizations invest in specialization when they have to scale.

That leads us to 2 broad spectrum when considering the geometry of the roles:
Deep specialization or broad generalists.

Flexible generalists are the people who not only master how to learn any skill in a shortest possible time but also determine the path to value swiftly.

My hypothesis is that the careers of future would be that of Extreme specialization or Flexible generalists.

If you choose to be a Extreme specialist, just 2 points of advises:

1. Choose a field that will have an impact in the future. I am sure the people who choose Artificial Intelligence 15 years back are reaping the benefits of the foresight.
2. Strive to be in top 10-20% of your chosen field to reap real rewards. Yesterday, i was watching IPL and a thought came to my mind. I was really seeing top 2-3% of T20 cricketers in India in action. These are the players (though some of them are plain lucky!) who chose cricket as a field and specialized in 1 or 2 disciplines in it and are now reaping the reward of their foresight and hard-work.

I see the future of work consisting of a lot of Flexible generalists and a little less Extreme specialists.

Image source:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*uZ8Bmx9PY1kmY6aNC_Dyqg.jpeg

Innovators have a Bias for Action

This post is in continuation to my post on 'My Talk on Innovation'. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization.

IPL season is on (ok, about to finish today as i write this). Of the many memorable sporting actions, one was narrated in quite a modest manner in this post. Shane Watson is a veteran opener of one of the most successful teams in the franchise, CSK. He went through a lean patch and couldn't score runs good enough to give his side a decent start. He experienced failure after failure in consecutive matches. MS Dhoni, the most successful captain, persisted with Watson and didn't drop him from the team. Watson eventually paid forward and scored a massive 96 runs in team's victory at the league stage and later 50+ in a crucial semi-finals match. During the phase Watson was struggling but Dhoni chose to show faith in Watson. As the author of post, Inder Kumar R sums up:

The biggest lesson for us as leaders is sometimes, no action is a powerful action'

I had read and heard (audiobook!) Prakash Iyer's classic 'The Habit of Winning' many times . Some of the stories that Prakash narrates, just stays in your mind. One such story was that of a study done

by scholars from Israel where they studied 250+ penalty kicks. The intend behind this study was to assess the best chances for goal keepers to stop the penalty. What the scholars found out after plotting goalkeepers movements was a revelation. The best chance of saving a penalty, as the scholars found out, was when the goalkeeper simply stays still and do not commit to dive in any direction. So why do goalkeepers still commit to a dive ? Because if they don't then they would they would have to deal with barrage of criticism, dealing with questions like 'he didn't even try', 'that was so simple', 'why did he stand still'. 

As we saw in both these examples, 'Bias for action', though is an essential trait for the leaders but at the same time knowing when not to act is equally important. Not all situations demand us to really commit to an action. 

The story, however, is a bit different when it comes to Innovators. Innovators, by default, should have a strong bias for action especially in the early stages of innovation cycles. More an innovator tries, accepts and rejects ideas, the high odds are to succeed. Taking about Innovation in the context of organizations, the employees that succeed eventually are the ones that choose to participate in hackathons and other innovation showcase opportunities than the ones that don't choose to act.

Innovators should have a strong bias for action. Do you agree ? Do you disagree ?


Images source:
https://www.amazon.in/Habit-Winning-2nd-Prakash-Iyer/dp/0143420860

How Intense is your Entrepreneurial Stamina ?

(draft blog, editing in progress)

A few months back, i was speaking with an entrepreneur friend of mine. He was dealing with the challenges of an early stage start-up. During the course of conversation, he made a remark that i found intriguing. He said that engineers from IITs (premier institute in India) have far more stamina to slog and do hard yards needed to pull off difficult job tasks. I didn't contest his observation, but i did find his use of the word 'stamina' fascinating. I had often used this word in the context of running but to think over it, it matters a lot in the work context as well.

Yesterday night, i was reading the book 'Why I Stopped Wearing My Socks'. The book delightfully captures Alok Kejriwal's journey as an entrepreneur with the key learnings summarized for the readers. Given that the book is written in a story form, autobiographical in style, I chose to read not at a stretch but a few pages each day. I am sharing the extract that caught my attention:

...a classic blunder of mine, something I would remember forever. Abhay nodded at Ajit, then softened up as he looked at me and said, Alok, you have be something great going for you. The passion in you to create contests2win.com is undeniable and infectious! We don't want to disturb your momentum by making you a part of rediff, just you have lots to do, and prove and we think you deserve to do it on your own terms.
Then Abhay said something that I have never forgotten. He said, Alok, you've just begun to run this race a few months back. I want to see your entrepreneurial stamina. Let's see how long you run this race and the distance you go. What sounded a bit provocative was the most inspiring advice I had ever heard.

The scene of this conversation was the intent of India's premier portal (in early 2000s) rediff.com acquiring Alok's contest2win.com. The acquisition did not materialize eventually.

This snippet of experience also clearly suggests that stamina matters at work. In the earlier example, it was about an employee staying with problem long enough, spending the necessary hours. In Alok's example, it was entrepreneurial stamina. The senior executive of rediff.com (Abhay) who made this suggestion to Alok seemed to co-relate entrepreneurial stamina with ability of entrepreneurs to outlast challenges, of consistently demonstrating resilience over a longer period of time.

In my experience of working with intrapreneurs, i have seen entrepreneurial stamina as a make-or-break trait. A lot of people enthusiastically work to sign up for Innovation programs. Among those who choose to participate, a few get selected to work on their ideas. But what is more disheartening is that a lot of people tend to leave their innovation pursuits midway when they are faced with issues like priority conflicts, inability to spend time in a short turn, inability to make a compelling pitch presentations etc.
On the contrary, the teams that did well in innovation programs were the ones that had this special muscle to deal with adversaries, who didn't get bogged down by temporary glitches and found a way forward.

In summary:
1. The innovators who eventually manage to make a dent are the ones with more entrepreneurial stamina than their peers (everything else being equal).
2. Not everyone possesses entrepreneurial stamina equally. But this is a trait that can be built, it's not an in-born trait.

What differently would you do today to intensify your entrepreneurial stamina ?

https://www.amazon.in/Why-Stopped-Wearing-My-Socks/dp/9387578704