5 Conversations that foster Teamwork in the Workplace

We know that the world moves based on #conversations and #decisions.

Here's a useful article on the kind of conversations that #leaders and #managers could have with their #teams to foster #teamwork at the workplace. You may even want to have some of these conversations as one-to-one sessions for specific effectiveness and outcomes.

From the article - "Consistent communication is essential for #collaboration and performance."

Contact me on ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com or send me a DM here if you want to learn how to make these conversations effective for your teams.

Workshop Action - Behaviour Styles for Leaders

This is the next part of the Learning Journey for the two batches of Leaders, where Behaviour (Social) styles, The Tuckman Model, and Team management were covered.  We also worked on how to make performance discussions effective and discussed how to make our teams more effective and productive.  This organization is in the field of HR outsourcing.

This was the participants first experience of a workshop where a PPT was not used.  Participants felt more engaged and enthusiastically shared their perspectives during the discussions - thus enhancing their own learning.  This was made possible through some facilitative processes and lots of simple interactive discussion questions.

Here are some pics of the action from the workshop with the HODs:

Here are some pics of the action from the workshop with the direct reports:

The workshops ended with participants committing to ensure that they do their best to create environments where their teams are able to perform effectively and have effective performance discussions.

Do contact me on +919820155778 if you would like to have Leadership Development Workshops for your organization.

Rethinking the Labor Market in the Wake of AI

Pic credit - pexels-tara-winstead-8849295

An excellent article on what happens to the #workforce when #ai is introduced in organizations.

From the article: "AI requires humans in the loop, so using workers with deep industry experience to a new purpose that complements AI would be the right thing to do, as opposed to getting rid of them and then later figuring out that while the tasks they used to do are obsolete, the #knowledge they have is very valuable and should have been deployed elsewhere."

Read the rest of the article here

The Reality of Carrot and Stick motivation

Both are temporary.

The carrot makes the employees adopt a kind of mercenary mindset. Nothing wrong except that it is too short termed for any sustained impact.

The stick makes the employees fearful, and kind of wreck the culture where you have more lip service than engaged and passionate effort.

The interesting part is that the employees first would feel the lack of energy to move, before any manager or leader.  The manager or leader sooner or later gets the feeling that things aren't moving as fast (a slightly vague term that doesn't always account for the environment factors) as they should, and so proposes more incentives.  

I recall a leader in one organization wanting to put sales people on PIP if they were at 70% of their monthly target. You can guess what those employees got motivated to do.

Surely the revenue an organization earns can be utilized in more effective areas than carrots and sticks?

Your thoughts on this?  What do you think are the best ways to improve performance?

 

Pics from Stress Management Workshop

 Here are a few pics of a workshop on Stress Management that I conducted for my client in the BFSI space.

The participants from the middle and junior levels from different functions of the organization.  I am thankful for their whole-hearted participation in the exercises and for their insightful questions during the workshop, which made the entire experience wonderful both for them and for me.  

While they identified the causes of stress on their own, I shared with them a guided meditation exercise, and a journaling method  both of which they found very useful.

Participant Expectations

Reviewing the Causes of Stress

Journaling

While they built their action play, they also shared on the sticky wall, specific things they will put into practice.

Learnings that they will put into practice

Action from IAF Mumbai Hub Session - The Art of Focused Development Discussion

Feedback as an activity, is not looked at with pleasure.  Try telling someone that you have "feedback" for them, and watch their expression and body language.  If you happen to be their manager, then you may get grudging acceptance.  

Few team managers and leaders are comfortable giving feedback.  This is mainly because they haven't been trained on how to do it.  I recall in my career, during the months of February or March, we in HR were running training sessions on the appraisal process. These appraisal sessions were for both managers and employees.  They consisted of a slide deck, and comments by the HR presenter - that was all. 

Employees were told how to accept feedback from their bosses. Bosses were given information on the Appraisal process, and feedback was considered a side effect. Appraisal Feedback anyway tends to focus on past performance, and little is discussed about future.  The employee is focused on getting the best possible rating for themselves and so any form of Development Feedback takes last place.  Bottom line - the development discussion is not given much importance for the future.

With this knowledge, Varsha Chitnis and myself decided to put together a session to enable a Focused Development Discussion.  Our experiences told us that individual biases and trust have a huge impact on how a development discussion can be conducted. So we incorporated these aspects into our session design and called it The Art of Focused Development Discussion.

Here are some images of the action on that day.

Desired Outcome for the session

Our Session Flow

Harvest from our First Activity

Clustering of behaviours

Clustering of biases and behaviours

Connections made between biases and behaviours

The Blueprint for the FDD

Learnings and Feedback that we received.

The enthusiastic learners

We thoroughly enjoyed designing and running the session. Our sincere thanks to the International Association of Facilitators - Mumbai Hub for the opportunity to do this session.  We are grateful to all the participants who took the time to attend and contribute their experiences into the session.

The Power of Meaningful Recognition Using CliftonStrengths

 Great points in this article about #recognition of employees. I like how there are links to #maslow's model. Here are some quotes from it that resonated with me:

"Positive reinforcement indicates for people exactly what you value -- what benefits the team and the organization -- and how they can do more of it."

"Employees want to know that their unique impact has been seen and valued. Writing “great job” in an email is not individualized #praise."

Read the rest of the article here.

It's not OK to feel desperate at work

Workdays that are constantly stressful can  be overwhelming.

If your week (or past few weeks) have been more #stressful than usual with a recurring sense of #dejavu, then take a pause and have a look at this article.

In case you want to have a chat, don't hesitate to message me.

#strengthsdecoder #performancecoach #performancecoaching #careercoach #careertransition

Three Key Competencies to Showcase When you apply for a Leadership Role

Well, actually - Four Competencies!.

But let's turn back the clock a bit.

You feel you are read for a Manager's position or a Leadership role (internally or externally) and want to apply?  

Why? Because you have the work experience and have ambitious growth plans. You feel you get along well with people, including your colleagues.

Great! You have some clarity about where you want to go career-wise. 

But what happens is that you apply many times internally or at different organizations, but don't get through.  You have no idea what you are doing wrong since there's no real feedback for you to work on.

Based on my HR experience in the corporate world and having coached clients who are applying for senior roles, here are my thoughts that may help you understand where the mismatch might be.

When applying for a Leadership position, whether in your own organization or in another organization, here are the key competencies / abilities that you have to showcase in your cover letter, resume and interview:

Finance - Particularly, how the business makes money and awareness of the critical cost areas beyond your department.

Why this is important? - As a leader, you will be in charge of a finite budget (size doesn't matter). Your strategic utilizaiton / consumption of this budget will impact EDBITA, as well as meet your goals. It's an opportunity to showcase application of your knowledge of finance.

Marketing - This includes understanding the product / service, customer and how the product / service is marketed and sold (based on your industry, this could include how the product is made).  This means that your industry knowledge should be as upto date as possible.

Why this is important? - Customers come to our organization because of the products / services being offered. As a leader, your work directly or indirectly impacts this.  So showing your understanding of how this works will be a major plus for your candidature.  After all, the business survives and thrives because of the spending habits of it's customers.

Human Resources - This means showcase how you manage people, groom them for higher roles and lead the team to deliver value consistently. If you are able to also inspire people, that is a bonus.

Why this is important? In today's world, one person cannot do it all, but a team can (conditions apply of course, and a lot of those conditions depend on the leader).  This means knowing in clear detail the capability of your current team members, and the skills necessary to hire (so that you can leverage these) in your future team.

Now, suppose you have specialized expertise in one of these areas and think that it is enough to move to a leadership position (especially in today's times), then I can say that leadership roles will not suit you as you will be an incomplete candidate for the role.  You will find yourself getting skewed while executing your duties, leading to an imbalance in execution.

You don't need to know everything in great detail, but you must know more than the basics.

What's The Fourth Competency - you must have sufficient expertise in your own functional area, and consistently deliver value to the organization.  

What does 'sufficient' mean, you wonder?  It means you know enough about the job to train new team members effectively, hire and groom a new employee with little work experience into understanding and delivering the requirements of his / her role within three to six months.  Additionally it means you can manage the ambiguities of the role you are currently handling.

When you present yourself as someone who is familiar with all these areas, then you become a strong contender to take on the critical role of managing, developing and perhaps leading people.

Now that you know this - what next?

As a candidate applying for leadership positions, prepare your responses to questions in these areas, as well as other aspects of the job. Take same time to understand how these tasks are aligned with your strengths. The reality is that not all of them will be aligned to your strengths.  In which case, please explain that you would manage those out of alignment areas (i.e. possible weaknesses) by collaborating with your colleagues, and that you are a  great team player by lending your strengths to complement their weaknesses.  Integrity, of course, is non-negotiable. 

If you need help to prepare for your interview, get in touch with me at +919820155778 or write to me at ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com for a discussion.  

As an organization looking to hire for leader / team manager roles, please ensure that you evaluate the candidate on these criteria in particular, amongst others that are important to the organization's growth and culture. Integrity is non-negotiable. Use psychometric, behavioural interviews, special assignments or assessment centers to evaluate candidates.

Should you wish to enhance your existing hiring process, contact me for a discussion on how my BEI Workshop "The Selection Discussion" can be effective in improving the quality of people hired for your organization.

Conversations that Leaders must have with their people

Here's an indepth read about the #conversations that #leaders need to have with their people.

From the article - "three key conversations for leaders will be : career conversations, performance conversations and engagement conversations."

Some of the questions mentioned in the article can definitely be used to build a #strengthsbased organization.

Read the full article here.

Participant Action and Feedback - Managerial Effectiveness for First Time Managers

I recently got to design and deliver one of my favourite workshop topics "Managerial Effectiveness for First Time Managers" for recently promoted employees for a financial institution.

This was a two day workshop, with a followup plan.  The participants were energetic and full of questions - as they agreed to as part of the Ways of Working they created at the start of the workshop.  I loved the way in which they participated in all the discussions and facilitation processes.

For me, I did my best to incorporate different facilitation processes (and an Improv exercise) into the design for both days, and didn't use a PowerPoint Presentation (much to participants surprise).  Here's some of the action from the two days.

The participant learning expectations which they wanted to apply immediately after the workshop

Sorting out the competencies of the leader

After a detailed discussion, the competencies of a leader, as they defined and understood it.

What they picked up from Day 1

And here's the overall learning from two days.

I'm thankful to Mr. Rajesh Almeida, Head - HR, for the opportunity to work on this assignment, design  the session and his team who supported me during the workshop.

I'm looking forward to more such assignments with those organizations that want to build their leadership pipeline.  Please connect with me on ryanbbbarretto@hotmail.com or +919820155778 to schedule a discussion.

Meritocracy and Performance Management Ratings

https://www.iedp.com/articles/the-road-to-meritocracy-at-work/

If you ever wondered why performance ratings don't mean what they are supposed to mean, and make everyone unhappy, read this super article.

From the article "different managers can have significantly different views of what is meant by merit—based on their individual evaluation experiences when they were employees, and this can in turn influence how they perceive #merit  in their employees."

Read the article here.

 

Create a Growth Culture, Not a Performance Based One.

Superb article on the need for a #growth #culture instead of a #performancebased culture.

From the article- 'A performance culture asks, “How much energy can we mobilize?” and the answer is only a finite amount. A growth culture asks, “How much energy can we liberate?” and the answer is infinite.'

Read the entire article here.

Little Ways the world works

This is an outstanding article about finding ways to excel in your field, that is more relevant to the world we live in, than the field we are in.

From the article - "John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Fields are studied individually, but there are so many common denominators across topics. The more fields a lesson applies to, and the more disparate those fields are, the more powerful and important the lesson becomes."

Read on here! 

Building a culture of Accountability.

 https://situational.com/blog/building-a-culture-of-accountability/

Here's a super article on how to bring in a #culture of #accountability within your organization / #team.

What I particularly liked from here is the lucid articulation of the distinction between accountability and #responsibility

Your Employees want Your Feedback

 

Pic by Pexel - Ann H

Have you ever hesitated to give someone #feedback ? It may surprise you to know that "People underestimate how willing others are to receive feedback."

Read on... here