It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change -- Charles Darwin, Scientist We live in an era of constant change. Take, for example, even the virus CORONA has changed itself so many times in the last 18 months. Business, economy and materialism are always on the change. As they change, expectations are that the actors in the system also change seamlessly. How is that possible? Yes, if you don’t, you perish. Thus everyone tries to change. Is that change easy? My straight answer is No, it’s tough. Why? What they are demanding is a change which is very personal. Competencies that are all quiet, innate to oneself. We refer to it as “Soft Skills”. What are they? Soft skills include your ability.
The list is endless. I know most of you would have heard all these comments at least once in a financial year. Yes, during your appraisal feedback. The underlying problem is that everyone understands that importance but does nothing about it. Neither the education system nor the society framework nor parental guidance act. They do nothing to inculcate these skills during the formative years of the person. I am tempted to blame the education system at large for this mess. They take pains to make me understand Newtonian physics. Also, Einstein’s relativity, the structure of Streptococcus. In fact, who killed Aurangzeb and when did the battle of Plassey take place. Yet do nothing to improve my soft skills. They need to invest in improving one’s soft skills at school or college level. It’s left to the student’s responsibility. In the rat race of marks, these obviously take the back seat. OK, I got the problem, but how do we solve it?
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To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup The people who work for you are the lifeline of your business. It doesn’t matter which industry you are, it’s the same. There is a very sacred relationship: employer-employee one. It has to be positive for both of them to be successful. It is a very sad state of affairs. This relationship deteriorates as the business stabilizes or scales to the next level. Might be that they get comfortable for their own good. They got distracted by other priority tasks. Whatever the reason, the worst thing they can do is to come across like organisations that don’t care. This is where the rubber meets the road, the employee decides on whether to stay or move on. The moment the employee exercises his veto power, the caring reappears magically. This does not come without a warning. There are several indications which come up. Let me list the top 4 and the most important one:
The list is endless; I accept, but these symptoms are easy to detect and stop the system from getting rot. Why should we do that? Isn’t it too expensive? In today’s cutthroat business world, Organisations do not care about you. They cannot take care of you. All the employee motivation and employee engagements are only on paper and theory. No one has time to put in place, even the first few lines of that policy. Let me take a very simple case, does the bank care about you. NO, they only want your money. They don’t care about you, it’s the plain truth. Neither does your hospital or your company cab service. Does your car dealer really care about you when they ping you for a service reminder? I am surprised that people get amazed when they discover this. Why this amazement? It’s because they are people, simple human beings. What does that mean, they can care. People care for people, but I do not think organisations can. It’s only when demands and regulations (Red-tape bureaucracies) get in the way caring fades. So do I mean to say that Organisations cannot care? No, I definitely say they can care. Then how? If the organisation can fill in caring people at sensitive posts. Simple, fill them in with people and get corporate out of the way. The caring culture will germinate and sustain for a long time. There is a simple way to get into this habit. When you free up your employee to behave like people, caring culture germinates. As opposed to looking at them as pure profit maximising machines. If done so, caring can’t help but grow. So let us put ourselves in the corporate shoes and think for a moment. In the short run, not caring saves money and brings profits. Don’t bother improving the facilities, let the cubicles become smaller. Don’t worry about those small customers, etc. It may seem to work, but only for a short time. They may be busy. Hiring people and improving infrastructure costs money, effort and time (Triple constraints) So what is my conclusion? In the long term, caring pays multifold by itself. Those organizations which put extra efforts, go the extra mile are always rewarded. Their reward is Sustainability and Loyalty. Finally, not to mention that caring makes us more humane, it’s worth it. Personality is only ripe when a man has made truth his own - Soren Kierkegaard (Dannish Philosophor) Before I start I wanted to check what is personality according to the Webster's dictionary. It states - "the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character". Then using logic I wanted to check if an individual's distinctive character can change? I looked all around me and found that it cannot change. (Yes, I looked at my wife - I rest my case) Can Tendulkar behave like Afridi or Michael Jordan playing defense or Arnab Ghoswamy doing a soft debate? I think you get my point. Of course some of them are constant and they do not change but then I looked at their personality and also found that they did not change. Tendulkar's personality was the same at 16, at 18 or at 40. So I decided to challenge this and see if I can prove otherwise. When I looked into research papers I got only this fact - It is believed that personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. I decided to get a little more deeper to see what makes up ones personality? Since traits and patterns of thought plus emotion play important roles which makes it easy for us to bucket them into 4 main categories:
With frustration of not able to prove what I initially assumed, I started to think that we are who we are - it must be constant and there is nothing that I can do about it. Then suddenly something hit me - S-L-A-P.(My wife woke me up) I remembered the fact is that we choose our personality and who we are. Hence it must be changeable. I got my energy back - our personality is shaped by the choices we make over time. If there was a choice available, then there is a possibility for change. (Thanks to my course on Statistical Methods which I never understood but is helping me now). Although we are to an extent hardwired in the brain, there is some amount of change possible. It is this change that I wish to elaborate today incidentally breaking certain myths on the way. Are you ready? The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt Any Rand Guilt has a very bad characteristics - it has an incredible way of popping up whenever we are barely doing anything. Most of us have learnt guilt throughout normal childhood development. Guilt clues us in when we’ve stepped outside the boundaries of our core values. It makes us take responsibility when we’ve done something wrong and helps us to develop a greater sense of self-awareness. The feeling of guilt forces us to examine how our behavior affects others and make changes so that we don’t make the same mistake again. That is the bright side of guilt, when we look into the other side it weight a very heavy burden on us even when we have not crossed over the Lakshman Rekha within us. It is like a negative energy that diminishes our life. So the main problem with guilt is that it can easily go out of our hands. In any feelings which we experience, we need to quantify it to know the effect of that on our minds and hearts. It is really difficult to measure any of the human feelings. With this constraint, I have come out with a mathematical formula to calculate the amount of guilt. It goes like this - "The quantity of a man's guilt is directly proportional to the feelings experienced by the party he injured." It's logical and hence cannot be mine, I wish to give the credit to its owner - Mr.Ryszard Kapuscinski (a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author). Now I have no guilt feeling. Many researchers and life coaches believe that If we’ve had a strict upbringing, as an adult, we may set our standards too high and judge ourselves too harshly. And that’s where the problems arise. This is what I generally refers to as the dark side of guilt. Excessive guilt diminishes our ability to enjoy many aspects of life. It can cast a gloomy shadow on our relationships with others. So how does guilt creep into us? Since guilt is a heavy feeling that too from your heart, it sometime defeats logic. We can get guilt in many ways. Maybe it is because we have performed well below our expectation, or we failed to live up to the expectation of someone whom we regarded as our idol. Or we did something which caused hurt to someone in some way or a mix of all of these or finally it's all about the self. You are feeling guilty because you didn’t keep a promise you made to yourself. The biggest challenge is to stay focused. It's to have the discipline when there are so many competing things - Alexa Hirschfeld The key thoughts of successful persons are staying focused and completing the task on hand. It displays lots of important benefits such as increased effectiveness, greater clarity, improved creativity, lowered lethargy, One final and important item is that it drastically improves your chances of achieving high lofty goals. With so many good benefits, why is it not an easy habit to acquire? In one word: Laziness. Going a little deeper, it is for the want of speed. Most of us tend to multi-task. What multitasking does is more likely to induce errors, struggles with creativity, reduces productivity. There are also studies that suggest that habitual multitasking may be impacting the physical structure of the brain in a negative way. Then why do all of us strive to multi-task? The only notional benefit of multitasking is in saving time. My simple question is why reduce so many parameters just to save one - TIME, rather put a bit more time and get greater productivity, quality and a sense of achievement. To do that we need to focus, Let us explore on why focusing is really hard? I believe it's a function of two things. Firstly it's the amount of information we now process, which our brain may not be used to. I read somewhere that The Hindu Sunday edition contains more information than the average 18th century Madras advocate learned in his lifetime. (Still trying to figure out where I read this ...) Secondly, we have all these new technologies which are very good at distracting us, which our human habits have not caught up to. Researchers are still trying to understand the true of cost of digital distraction. From the time apes descended to the ground, attention was a limited resource. Every time we focus our attention we use a measurable amount of glucose and other metabolic resources. The usage is specially huge for high-intensity tasks such as decision making or self-control tasks. Distractions are everywhere. Now what to do? |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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