The Old Woman's Question

This is a story which sounds too farfetched to be true: it has just enough drama, heroics and dubious logistics to make it unlikely. But there is a lot of value in the idea it conveys, so let me narrate it.

Once, an old woman needed major surgery to correct a life-threatening condition. While on the operating table, as the hospital staff prepared her for anesthesia, she started chatting away with the doctors and nurses around her. She asked each of them a question: What exactly will you be doing during the surgery? She got a variety of answers:

1.       I will be cutting open your chest and enabling the surgeon to access your heart

2.       I will be administering the anesthesia and making sure you feel no pain

3.       I will be fixing the problem you have with your heart valves

4.       I will be sewing you back up after the surgery

5.       I will be monitoring your blood pressure and other vital signs

6.       I am just here to watch and learn

Each of them had a precise answer to give her, perhaps simplified to ensure that she understood what was being said. But the lady was still not convinced. She had one major concern, which she blurted out, presumably in all innocence: “Which of you is in charge of keeping me alive???”

Technically, you can say that the most senior surgeon in the room was in charge of the success of the operation. Or you can say the anesthetist was in charge of making sure she was floating comfortably between consciousness and death, until he/she was ready to pull her back to fully conscious life. They all knew their roles well, and did their best to explain it to their elderly patient. But somewhere during that effort they had apparently lost track of her priority to be alive at the end of the operation. In losing track of her priority, they may have lost her confidence as well.

How often do we do this in business? Aren’t there times when we get so engrossed in the transactional activities we are in charge of that—at least momentarily—we forget the bigger picture?

 

A lesson in thrift from a tube of toothpaste!

A bachelor—who lives alone in his apartment—woke up one Monday morning to find that his only tube of toothpaste was almost fully flattened out. That was the point at which he would usually have thrown it out and taken out a new one, but it turns out he had forgotten to buy any more, and so he decided to make the most of what was left. He used the end of his toothbrush to squeeze out a portion big enough to serve his need for that morning. He forgets to go shopping that day as well, and again manages to squeeze out enough toothpaste from the same tube for that night. This goes on for another four days. Finally, the weekend arrived and he had time to go shopping!

A friend of mine was telling me this story from his own experience, saying how lazy he was getting to be. But I was wowed by something totally different: look at how a tough situation brought out the best in him in terms of efficient utilization of available resources. According to that story, he normally wastes about one week’s worth of toothpaste in every tube, just because another one that is easier to use is readily available! Now, look at toothpaste as a mere metaphor and think about how often we do the same elsewhere in life, especially in the office.

Let’s say you have two pages to print, that you usually prefer one page per sheet of paper, and you decide to print only on one side. But when you have just one sheet of paper left to print those two pages, you will compromise and print on both sides of the paper. You decide to use the available resources more efficiently.

So why don’t you just do that all the time?

Need innovation, but afraid of bad results?

An interesting perspective on leadership came up during a discussion recently. Most people would agree that it is important for a manager to give a significant amount of freedom to his/her team members. That freedom - the metaphorical “space” which people can use for innovation – can go a long way in building employee engagement, as well as producing fantastic business results. 

However, what happens when a manager is willing to give that freedom in terms of strategy, but does not follow through with that commitment on execution? For example, if a manager gives you a very rigid report template and says “Let your imagination run wild, but I want the report to look exactly like this” does it actually help you? This half-baked approach would falsely convince a manager that he/she is giving his/her people the freedom to innovate, without producing the desired effects on the team because the freedom they are being given is only cosmetic.

A manager who is prepared to give his/her team the freedom to innovate on the job should also be prepared to see some interim results that are very different from what he/she wanted originally. Give your team some time, and the opportunity to create value. With the right people on the team, the results are very much likely to be fantastic. But one (or even a few) instance of not-so-good results shouldn’t cause the manager to give up. Patience, and the ability to look at the bigger picture without hasty conclusions, would pay rich dividends. Effectively fostering innovation isn’t the result of an isolated action, but a well thought out process applied at the right places and times.

Investing Your Most Precious Resource: 8 Unusual Tips on Maintaining Life Balance

There are thousands of metaphors you can use to illustrate the unending pursuit of balance in life. For instance, it is like chasing an outlaw who is the master of disguise. You think you’ve got him, but you never really know for sure. Or if you like sports, think of it as the goal post being left wide open and all you need to do is kick the ball in and claim what’s rightfully yours – the elusive trophy of Perfect Work Life Balance. As you run up to score, you are informed that the game has changed and so has your goal! You aren’t even playing for the same trophy anymore.

Whatever story you choose to relate to the concept, the facts remain the same. On one side of the world, we hear of a techie losing his life after a marathon 36 hour conference call, while in another continent, the average individual would kill for that kind of a career. There is no real agreement on what the average human wants in life, or what he chases all through it. In the beginning, you wouldn’t have had any real control over how these resources were managed. The choices were all made for you – whom you were born to, what name they called you by, whom you grew up with, which school you went to, and whether you had to work to earn a living. There were people around you who shaped your perspectives and convictions, whether you liked it or not. There is no second chance at growing up anyway. So let us try to fix things here and now.

1.     Stop calling it Work-Life Balance

 “Work-Life Balance” is highly inappropriate in today’s context, since it implies that “work” is not a part of life and portrays it wrongly as something that diverts your attention from life. Any sort of balance you hope to achieve in life must include “work” in some form or the other and it isn’t always in the most obvious manner. All through life you need to work – to earn a living, to sustain a relationship, to take life forward intelligently, or at least to utilize the resources you have at your disposal. “Life” as a term, as well as a model essentially covers “work” within its scope. So let us just call it Life Balance, and that is exactly what we should be trying to maintain.

2.     Be aware of the resources you have at your disposal

We are all born with specific amounts of certain resources– intelligence, energy, knowledge, creativity, money, influence, commanding power, popularity, credibility, respect and time to name a few. The quality and quantity of each depends on when and where the birth occurred, the genetics behind it, the star you were born under and of course, the manner in which you grew up.  Everything that happens to you later in life depends on how you manage these resources available to you. Work is only a process in which you spend resources like energy, time and at times money to increase one or more of your resources such as knowledge, skill or strength.

Investing the right amount of resources at the right places, based on your own priorities and objectives, will give you the returns you hope for. Some of them can be exchanged for others, but some of them are cost centers which need continuous investment. For instance, you can spend time to study and gain knowledge. The knowledge you thus gain, along with time, can be exchanged for money – that is what you typically do on your job. Similarly, you can spend time practicing a particular sport, and once you get very good at it, you are admired as a good sportsperson. Once you gather a good fan following, you have the credibility to make people believe what you say. When you use that credibility to sell products as a brand ambassador in return for a fee, you are in fact exchanging credibility for money. Respect and popularity are key enablers for most of the other resources, but they themselves depend on resources like intelligence, knowledge and creativity for sustenance.

3.     Recognize your key resource

The most vital resource you have at your disposal is yourself. You are essentially an amalgamation of several of the fundamental resources mentioned above, customized according to the conditions you live, work and spend time in. You are severely limited by time, and can also be only in one place at once in the truest sense. Yet, there is typically an intense demand on you, your time, your attention, your presence, your assistance and your efforts at all times. Intelligent spending of your key resource is a critical part of sustaining the business of life.

4.     Monitor how you spend your key resource

Typically, your life is divided between your family, your work, your social life and friends – each in its own way. Think of them as boxes, where you put a little piece of yourself in. None of them can be left empty.

 A very important box, which constantly demands a part of your life, is your own self. This box represents the time and other resources which you spend on yourself, either with the people you love or away from them all – whichever makes you feel better at each point of time. What should ideally go into this particular box is often divided amongst the others. But it is critical to give it an independent existence, and not merely as a pool to draw reserves from.

5.     Don’t use the clock to measure Life Balance

Achieving balance in life is not about how much time you spend at work, at home or elsewhere. How much time you need to spend at work depends on the kind of job you have. Some jobs need you to spend just a couple of hours a day or less, while others may need much more from you. How much time you need to spend with your family depends on the members in your family. If you are a single parent, you may need to spend more time with your children than if there was someone responsible to take care of them. How much time you get to spend with friends depends on the kind of friends you have and what you do together. If all your friends like to travel a lot, you may want to join them and that could take a lot of time and effort. If your friends meet regularly for sports or card games, you may want to join them in that too. How much time you need to spend for yourself depends on all the other things you spend your time on and how long it would take you to disconnect from it. There is no rule that says all these time intervals have to be equal. Just because you spend the same amount of time in office and home, don’t assume that they are both getting the attention they deserve. If your job demands more time than you can spare, then it may be time to look for another one. If your activities with friends are taking more time than you can spare, then it may be time to cut down a little bit and focus on other things. You want all of them to have an equal piece of yourself or your life – not an equal stretch of time!

6.     Confirm your priorities

There is no universally agreeable answer to the question of priorities of an individual. Only you are fully aware of your own priorities, and you can never be fully aware of another person’s priorities no matter how well he/she tries to explain them to you. This is because many of your priorities are decided by the subconscious mind, based on its calculations of investments required and the subsequent payoffs. Your conscious mind may not have a full grasp of this, and that is why explaining it to someone is not so easy. So the first thing you will need to do is to make a list of everything you want to do and get done – irrespective of the order of priority. Give yourself some leeway here and don’t bother too much about the “why” aspect of those priorities. Then, as a next step, you can apply your own logic to figure out which of those should be done first, what next and what last. At this point, feel free to bombard yourself with questions like Why should this be done now? What will happen if I don’t do it? Does this have more consequences for delay than the next one?

The biggest question you need to ask is: Is investment of yourself necessary for this task to be done; or can you have someone else do it with acceptable effectiveness? Saying No to this question in a few cases can make it much easier to manage your primary resource.

7.     Accept that there is a risk of retribution

In a perfect world, you would have the answers to every question that comes up and you would be able to happily cross off all items on your tasks list in order. But since we live in a more practical society, there may be times when you need to compromise on your perfect scores and settle for doing as much as you can. Of course, if you worry about having ten big things to do you probably will get nothing done. If you stop worrying and start on at least the little things, then you can cross them off the list and worry about fewer things left to do. But which ones do you do first?

Whichever tasks are most critical to the business (or the organization) deserve to come first on your list, assuming that you still want to be part of the organization for the long term. Next comes those tasks which will affect your personal credibility in case of delay or abandonment. The third and fourth categories depend entirely on the risk of retribution you are willing to take. Some tasks may create problems for you if they are delayed. Put them next on your priority list. Some other tasks are okay to be delayed, as long as you make sure you do them (or get them done). Let them take the last slot.

What happens to the other tasks? Do not abandon them! Just delegate.

8.     Visualize the schematic of life

Anyone who has learnt science in one form or the other would be familiar with Schematic Diagrams. Back in engineering college, we used schematic diagrams in place of more complex circuit diagrams, when we were unsure of what components went into each part. In the name of simplifying the illustration, we were able to hide the lack of thoroughness. What will a schematic diagram of life, as we know it, look like?

Think of yourself as a power source, or a generator supplying a finite amount of energy. Your personal life setup and professional setup are two engines that draw power from the source to deliver the critical outputs that you need to sustain life. If both the engines are turned on at the same time, the finite energy you have at your disposal is divided between the two engines and neither of them is able to work to its full potential and deliver to capacity. If you balance the loads, instead, and establish a good time-sharing/switching arrangement, both engines will be more efficient and can deliver the outputs you need.

Analogously, this means that if you try to think about work and personal life at the same time, you end up being unable to concentrate on either of them. If you set aside specific time frames for work and personal/social lives, and diligently stick to it by not bringing work home and not taking personal life to work, then you will be able to devote enough attention to both.

On the other hand, some people decide to avoid one of those engines altogether and try to keep the other one running all the time. True, that particular engine will run at full efficiency (until it is worn out), but you will have to settle for only half of the critical outputs you need to sustain life and do without the other half. Ultimately, this will take a toll on the power source itself, and eventually wear you out.

When bluffs and tantrums backfire

There are times when you meet a stranger and your exchange turns out to be less than pleasant. This can happen anywhere, like in a department store, a parking lot, a party or even on the street. The next day, when you walk into office, imagine your shock when he/she is introduced as a colleague who joined your office; or worse, your new manager! It isn’t entirely fictional, I happen to have heard of a couple of cases from the ‘victims’ themselves.

Another possibility is when a bluff/excuse you successfully pulled off once turns around and bites you at a totally inconvenient time. For instance, a Software Engineer had excused himself from a particular assignment away from his hometown saying he had to take care of his mother, who wasn’t in the best of health. Barely a few hours later, when an onsite assignment came up in the UK, the same person expressed interest.

A brief conversation took place soon after:

HR: Are you sure, don’t you want to stay back and take care of your mother?

SE: That’s ok, my sister is there at home. She can manage.

And believe me, this was a true story, narrated to me that same afternoon by the HR manager involved. Don’t ask me which company!

It is surprising how things turn around as fast as they do. And of course, I am not trying to preach you into a life of 100% honesty where every lie you tell needs to be accounted for. Just make sure you have nothing to be ashamed of.

You may be right. But as a manager, your job doesn’t end there

Do you remember the first time you became a manager? Or at least, do you have some expectation of what it will feel like when you do become one?

Suddenly, you are responsible for the actions of a lot of people. Your job is expanded from "get your job done" to "get your job done, ensure your team members do the same, co-ordinate all those jobs and deliver the result expected". Of course, that is putting it mildly!

They say the problem with most managers lies in the fact that they do not communicate well enough. When there is a conflict or a disagreement, chances are one party will be right in his/her observation. When a member of your team is right, his/her duty is to inform the manager and possibly show him/her how. The decision is then left to the manager. But when a manager is right, his/her duty doesn't end there. In addition to informing team members, they have to be convinced that this is the path to take and ensure that everyone is on board. Just knowing you are right does not add any value in the big picture.

The key here is to over-communicate. One cannot sit back and assume things will be agreed upon and followed by everyone on the team just because he/she was told to. It takes a lot of cohesion and understanding for a team to reach that level of maturity. That could tend to infinity (call upon those math memories). Until then, lack of adequate communication by a manager is the perfect excuse for employees to slack off!

Who is to blame if the client doesn't understand you?

At a recent client visit to our offshore center, a senior executive at the client side had a very far reaching suggestion to make for the business: To develop a common language, to describe the workload in terms of a tangible unit, which can be understood by both the client as well as the service provider

Let us consider a parallel example. Say you need to get your car fixed, and you take it to a garage. The mechanic studies it thoroughly and tells you the following problems:

1.       The engine needs some work

2.       The tyres need to be realigned

3.       The air filters need to be cleaned

4.       Etc

5.       Etc

At the end of a 10 minute long list, you nod your head and politely ask your mechanic, “So you think I can pick it up tomorrow?”. Expect a blank stare from him and at times, an expletive to follow depending on how exasperating you have been. The problem there is a lack of this common language. And of course, the mechanic is assuming that you know enough about cars to know how long each of these tasks would take to be completed.

And so, to cut a long story short, it is all about setting the right expectations…and a common language just makes that easier. Do you have one with your customers? Perhaps it is time to take the lead and work on one.

It would be unintelligent on the part of a mechanic to expect a customer to know what exactly his car needs. At the end of the day, a customer would want one thing – his car must run well, and should not have any problems. It is up to the mechanic to convert this need into the equivalent list of tasks. This is very much similar to how a team of software engineers translates a client’s business requirements into a list of technical requirements.

For this same reason, a customer cannot be blamed for wishing that his car be delivered in perfect condition at the shortest time possible. He just doesn’t know what is involved! It is up to the mechanic to explain to him that it may take more time – within reasonable limits. But the key is to have clarity in the expectations set. A customer doesn’t necessarily expect the mechanic to deliver the car in 5 minutes. But he would expect the mechanic’s expertise to be good enough so he can make a reliable estimate of the time to be taken and thereby set a clear expectation.

Similarly, when a client talks demands a particular deliverable be delivered within, say X number of days, the team can always inform him/her if that is not a realistic schedule. But this must be conveyed at the earliest point of time possible and not at the eleventh hour, so there are no unnecessary expectations. And of course, there might be technical experts on the client side who could blow the whistle if your schedule is too lax – so beware of that.