Leadership Competencies

I was fortunate having received an invitation to participate in a novel one day brainstorming session on leadership competencies 2020. Participated through skype shared my thoughts on leadership competencies in next 5-10 years.

It was indeed a good feeling taking questions from the audience on other side . It was fun , learning and great interaction.

This is the Pic from other side !

Invest in Yourself - Build your Career

The career escalator is jammed today. It is not anymore the same situation as it existed a decade back. The industry and markets are changing at rapid pace and so are the expectations. The professionals are experiencing growing expectations and diminishing returns. It is all happening at a rapid pace. The work life balance is impacted & have you noticed that people have stopped complaining about it. Why, one would think? Perhaps there is a realization that nothing much can be done or controlled in this area. Perhaps people think that there compensation factors this. The problem does not go away and it manifests in different forms impacting health and relationships. It becomes a vicious cycle. It will come to fore one day. We know it but hope & wish that such a day or moment does not come too fast. It does and then we end up thinking, if only!  

Answers, are there any?

An awful lot of our current challenges at work place arise from lack of career planning & investing in ourselves to build contemporary and relevant capabilities.

Having said that, rather than look at what could have been in the past, building the career, we must begin from where we are. I would therefore like to extend a perspective, which most of you may know, but as they say perhaps it is relevant now much more than ever. There are more , but I am saving them for my next blog on “ building networks” to build careers.

The perspective is “Be in permanent beta”. If one browses through any resume of professional, it is structured to share accomplishments in particular role & company. Assuming you have stayed in same role & company for 4 years, your resume will talk about all you did and achieved there. If the interviewer seeks to know what have been accomplishments unique to each year of these 4 years, my guess is the professionals may not be able to say much. At best, he/she is likely to say achieved the KRA’s & targets year on year. 

In this situation it may be a worthwhile question for the professional to ask themselves “Do I have 4 years work experience” or do I have 1 year work experience repeated 4 times”. Think.  This is where the concept of “Permanent Beta” makes sense. Borrowed from IT industry, when a solution is launched for customers it is called “Beta Phase”. In this phase there is close look at customer feedback and solutions effectiveness. Based on this there are improvements brought about and over a period this beta phase is completed. I understand that popular GMAIL was in beta phase for close to 3 years after launch. Beta phase is a period when you focus on the product / solution ‘s success through feedback and make it achieve the intended objectives for organization and end customer.

In the professional careers, it is seen when we have our job ( even a dream role) one tends to be limited by what needs to be accomplished . However the new approach of staying in Beta phase means that each year you acquire a new and unique capability & your accomplishments stand out based on your own new initiative, innovation and creativity. It could be a new skill training, certification program or plain simple education/ course.  It could be seeking new roles, or geographies or challenges in the same company. Just that focus has to be what I have acquired uniquely each year which propels me, encourages me to make my journey towards my long term career goals. Invest in building your capabilities even when the organizations are not supporting you. At best they would invest in training you to be capable to do the job / role you have with them.

No one else is interested in building your career. It is you & it should be your interest only. That’s how it is now. Face it. Get in to “BETA”, son. !!! & stay there. Lifelong.

Give yourself credit

We all tend to be hard on ourselves. We create results, we accomplish. Yet we believe there was nothing exemplary about it. The less we reward ourselves, the more stress we create on accomplishing something different, something dramatic. The stress impacts our ability to think, unless we learn to handle it creatively. Most of us are not at our best creatively with new ideas, when we are under stress.

In coaching assignments, as we work towards the goals, actions agreed are reviewed with the coachee. In doing so we seek from coachee the feelings and learning’s these actions throw up.

In one of my coaching assignment, I observed that there was not enough energy & excitement with my coachee, a young man in mid 20s. (Son of the promoter of company). As a coach I brought up my observation, with his permission, and sought his feedback. He surprised me. He told me that he suffers from low self-esteem. I must add here that a coach builds trust with his coachee which makes him comfortable to share almost everything. I asked him to tell me about the time or event which made him feel proud, something he had accomplished.

At first he thought hard but could not come up with anything. I kept pushing & persuading him. He almost apologetically shared that he had few years back lost 5 kgs through a disciplined fitness regime. He enquired whether it could be considered an accomplishment. “Yes! That’s quite an accomplishment.”

He had a surprise look on his face. He never thought of it that way. No one ever told him that. He never thought that it was actually a big deal. He said “ I just decided one day that I must get into this “Diesel” brand of Jeans. So for that purpose I started walk and gym and shed these extra kilos which helped me reduce around my waist to fit into my jeans”. He did mention, at home, no one really noticed it as an accomplishment. He was reminded of a remark by his father that this weight loss was something due to his eating habits & it was more a correction.

As his coach I again reminded him that it was the effort, the action & the discipline which was exemplary. It made him smile. I appreciated him and asked him to go and ask  people who struggle with their weight and even knowing what to do are not able to get into a regime and correct their weight / fitness.

My Coachee smiled & shared few more examples of what he has done so far. Believe you me all his examples were accomplishment and needed appreciation and reward. He perhaps never bothered to share with anyone close for fear of it being seen as bragging. Perhaps he shared and was told it is no big deal. Perhaps he was told you have done well, but we expected more.

Well you can imagine when we met next and reviewed his actions, his energy levels were infectious. He was smiling all through. Thinking freely. He was committing more, he was stretching more. I felt great for him. That’s where a coachee should be to accomplish his goals

We can address such issues quite early in life as parents for our kids. We as parents could be hard on our teenage kids. We all are good intentioned parents, we want them to do better. As parents we must celebrate and reward the efforts of our kids. It helps build their self-esteem which transforms their thinking and their ability to work out things in mind and then execute. The key is to find them doing things that they feel good about, and give them credit.

What each of us do has value. Do not forget to give yourself credit too. Don’t be hard on yourself. Reward & Celebrate.