Why "why"........

When was the last time you were faced with a question starting with 'Why'. A typical question we hear more often is "Why did you do this?" The moment we hear this question, we start by justifying. Earlier, I often fell into the trap of justifying unknowingly (Now, I fall into the trap knowingly). Sometimes I try to get away from this 'why' trap by admitting that I had made a mistake. But the tirade of 'why' continues with another question starting with 'Why' - "Why did you make a mistake?" You as an individual can do nothing because if you manage to miss one 'why' question, another is hurled at you. At some point we have no choice but to turn on our defense mechanism and start justifying. This gives a good opportunity to the person who hurled the 'why' at us to prove us wrong and bury us deep in the ground.

I googled for snappy quotes on 'why' and some of the first hits asked "Why nerds are not popular?", "Why software needs a platform?" I did not make an attempt to read the contents of these pages. Most likely these pages would contain multitude of reasons justifying the 'why' hypothesis in these questions. Abandoning the search for quotes, I searched my personal experiences with this word to explain it.

One of my earlier experiences with this question 'why' was during my Ph.D. Thesis Defence. The very fact that I had to defend my thesis allows or authorizes people to ask 'why' questions on my doctoral research. Some of the frustrating 'why' questions I faced were "Why is the sample size for the survey so small? Why have you not considered expanding the research into further areas? etc. etc" Obviously, if I had answers for the above 'whys' most likely I would have faced a different set of "why's". During that time, I was not aware of the 'why' trap. But when I look back, I realize that I fell into this 'why' trap unknowingly and the people asking questions had a really good time questioning. At those times, I was wondering why people ask questions around assumptions or constraints. I built a theory around assumptions during that time. The theory is "assumptions are the most fragile items (or without any support) and it is extremely easy to attack them." Even today this theory holds good. One of the first things I do while reviewing the work of my team is to go through the assumptions and validate the same. Returning to the fate of my doctoral research, I faced the barrage of 'whys' and defended my thesis successfully .

Another experience of mine with the 'why' word happened in the recent past (2 years ago) with one of my previous managers. He wanted me to do a dry run (practice session) on a training session which I was planning to conduct. Personally, though I found it irritating (I did this program numerous times earlier), I decided to give it a go. We went through the dry run and completed the same. Then he got into a rhetoric on why we had to do this dry run and so on. This sounded more like a confession which I never asked for in the first place.
In my experience, more often these 'why' questions are a product of various socio-cultural aspects which I will explore in a different article. The 'why' question, to me, is like a post mortem exercise and is reactive in nature. Very often managers can easily nail a person with a 'why' when they know that something has gone wrong. There is a good chance that the manager has got to know about it either directly from the employee or through client escalations. In all the situations, the justifications and explanations for each 'why' were plenty and you probably can write a book for each 'why'. In all the cases the value addition to the organization or individual is close to zero.

Another incident happened when I was working in my previous company. My team was responsible for maintaining the HR content in Intranet. The Holiday calendar for the company was one of the critical parts of HR policies. This document kept on changing because the organization was adding more and more state holidays into the holiday calendar because of rapid expansions. We kept an audit process in which each function should audit their intranet pages once a month as per the process. As usual, preventive measures were difficult to adhere to and none focused really on audit process. Eventually with so many changes, version management, one particular holiday was incorrectly stated in the intranet. Employees from the state that observed that particular holiday noticed it state and it became an issue. Finally the company had to include that holiday too in the holiday calendar. As the head of the systems team, I was at logger heads with the HR team and we went through the major 'why' process. As usual, each one of us, started justifying our position in this 'why' post mortem. Post that event, again we published the process, but in 3 months time the process was forgotten. Thankfully we moved the intranet management to a proper content management technology and hence the issue was resolved once for all. You can see, how 'why' triggers a reactionary justification process internally.

CMMI level 4 glorifies the 'why' thing by adding Root Cause Analysis as one of the requirements. Root Cause Analysis typically uses "why" question to understand what went wrong. I still support this because the intend is to use it constructively, but it can backfire if every piece of your work goes through Root Cause Analysis.

'Why' could be the reason for many scientific discoveries or accidental inventions. One of the greatest scientific discoveries, Newton's laws of gravity was an outcome of a 'why' and the accidental invention of Pencilin too was product of 'why'. But when it comes to human relationships and people management 'why' definitely triggers a reactionary defence mechanism leading to justification of the actions we have taken. This is not a desirable outcome because, the end result could be either the other person stops sharing with you any information or ends up disliking you as a person.

Following is the approach I used in my personal behaviour correction in the last three years.

1. Remove the word 'why' from my dictionary. As much as possible, I try to substitute 'why' with 'what'. I get reasonably desirable results. For example instead of asking a question 'why did this happen', I would ask 'what are the reasons for this event'. With mere rephrasing I get pretty solution oriented responses than when I start with 'why'. Also I have seen people approaching me more nowadays compared to during my 'why' phase.


2. Second correction I made is to engage in "in process checks" instead of reacton oriented analysis. This way I do not get surprises and am on top of the things.

Of the two corrections, the first one made significant difference, because even earlier I was engaging myself in "in process checks". Post the removal of the 'why' from my professional dictionary, I could see a major difference in my people engagement skills.

Removing 'why' from the dictionary is hard initially, but we need to make a conscious effort to get there. Marshall Goldsmith, author of 'What Got you Here Won't get you There', suggests a game to remove bad and annoying habits. As a game, whenever you start a question with 'why' put a 100 rupee note in a kitty (for team party!!!). For sure.. when your pocket starts draining fast, you will stop using 'why'.

Meetings - The Trap!!!!

We all love meetings!!! Meetings allow us to fill time in our calendars and we can spend some entire days just attending meetings. As the Amerrican economist John Kenneth Glbraith once said "MEETINGS are indispensable when you don't want to do anything". More close to our Indian context, Iremember watching a Jaspal Bhatti (comedian) TV serial episode (those were the days we just had two channels Door Darshan 1 and Door Darshan 2) in which the people working in a Government department have a meeting to decide on the agenda for the meeting with the department head (it had interesting decision items, like whether to order Samosa or Kachori etc.).
Dont think that this is restricted to Government organizations. I was part of one of the IT organizations in which we spent a good amount of time planning the customer visits and their agenda items (this includes planning lunches and dinners as well). This was an entirely a new experience for me and I enjoyed it for a while. Peter Drucker says "MEETINGS are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer MEETINGS the better". I started realising this slowly as I learnt that attending meetings was not adding any value to my knowledge and skills. I started organizing myself carefully and started working on prioritising the meetings.
There are two real reasons for attending the meetings. Visibility and Impact to your team or organization. Even if we are attending the high visibility meeting, the impact we create is what makes the difference. If we are not able to make an impact, high visibility would automatically reduce to low visibility and low impact. On one side. it is important to categorize the meetings, but on the other, it is equally important to ensure that we get the intended results.
Like for all other items, here is my block on meetings. In case of meetings, I would like to use the combination of Visibility and Impact.

High Visibility and High Impact: This is a no brainer. We must attend meetings in this category and ensure that we make a difference. During the earlier part of my career, I used to be part of many meetings falling into this cateogory and I attended them all without a defined objective in adavance. Now I walk into such meetings with clear objectives and take aways. In my definition, high visibility meetings are meetings with people one level or above than yours either in your organization or across functions. Some of the examples of high visibility meetings are making presentations to senior leadership, attending workshops with a senior group, or even presenting a paper in a conference. These opporunties do not happen frequently and deriving the maximum benefit from such meetings benefits you and your team or function.
High Visibility and Low Impact: Some examples of these meetings are all- hands-meetings of the function, or generic meetings called by senior people or presentations made by senior people. These events may not have significant impact to your function or team, however these are opportunities to get noticed during early stages of your tenure in the organization. As Manager these are opportunities to groom your second line.
Low Visibiity and High Impact: An example of these meetings are technical discussions about a process which affects your team or function. This will have a signficant impact to the functioning of your team but having said that your time can be better invested. Identify the right person to attend the meeting from your team and coach the person to ensure that department objectives are not compromised. One of the best practices is to attend such meetings for the first time along with your team member and set the expectations right. Then onwards let your team member take the ownership. This again is a wonderful grooming opportunity and should be leveraged to the optimum.
Low Visibility and Low Impact: Some examples of such meetings are town hall meetings organized by the company, or generic meetings organized by other functions. These meetings are good for socializing and networking, but in terms of visibility and impact the returns are minimum. Attend these meetings only if you want to enjoy...

There is one exception, attend all meetings organized by your boss or delegated to you by your boss.

Do we need to establish long term relationships with our teams?

One of my previous managers had made an interesting statement during my one on one meeting with him. He said, "We should achieve the professionalism to a level that our managers should always want us back". Though I agreed with him completely, a question started working in my mind Do I have any manager for whom I longed to work for in my career?. Most interestingly, the answer was pretty much blank with an exception of probably just one. Without getting into reasons behind my story, let me focus on the approach I take when functioning as a Manager.
When I started my career as a Manager, I started understanding the need for having people who will work for me anytime. This resource base is not that easy to build as there are two people involved. We as managers should challenge the team intellectually, adopt a compassionate approach to the team and most importantly be able to provide a clear path to an individual's success. Besides whatever we do, we should ensure that the individual has visibility to the support you provide. Through this step, the trust between you and the team/individual is established. One important aspect a managers should recognize is that they can build the long term relationships with people who have similar needs.
In the Indian context, an individual recognizing the need for having long term relationships with Manager is not that straight forward. Today's market conditions too do not make it a mandatory step for success. Unlike in the western world, a typical Indian takes the first job at an age between 21-23. Prior to this, they have no experience or exposure to the corporate world or have any work experience. By the time they understand the corporate world and the need for building long term relationships, a few more years pass by. Many of these young people go through a few shocks in the mean time. In this process, the trust component (confidence in Manager/Organization) takes an erosion.

Most of my hires have at least 3 to 5 years of work experience and I have seen the trust component missing in some cases. In some cases they do not have the level of confidence that is expected at their level. It could be either because of the shocks they have been subjected to or lack of self belief. Another interesting observation is that many of them are quite happy in the their current state. This is quite puzzling. But slowly I have come to realise that it has more to do with Indian culture. We have large families (I personally have 18 uncles and aunts and probably more than 50 cousins). Work is just one part of the life and we derive satisfaction from life outside work. In many instances family takes higher priority than work.
Employees having no trust in organization/Manager and with priorities not exactly aligned towards building long termrelationships because of a combination of reasons mentioned above makes it imperative to build a framework for me as a Manager. A Manager should channelize his/her energy towards building relationships for mutual successs.

Like with other issues, I would like to put my perspective in the four blocks and analyze them.

High on Career/Work Priority and High on Trust category people are great to have in your team and you as a Manager would definitely aspire for building long term relationships with these people. One of the observations I had about the Indian context is that most of the people I met in this category have good background in education. Interestingly these people will succeed with or without you as a Manager. The kind of relationship you as a Manager establish will go a long way as chances of crossing paths with each other in the long career is very high. Treat these people as friends and constantly challenge their intellectual apetite. This is the way you can build long term relationships with this group.
Low on Career/Work Priority and High on Trust: Most of these category people I have met happen to work in operations environment. These people have settled down in their lives and the priorities are usually different with family coming first in most cases. These people know their priorities well and they also know very well that they need the support of their Manager to sustain them. Unlike in the previous case, here, the individual will make efforts to build and sustain the relationship. Personally, I always like to have these people in my team because of theiy score very high on dependability. However, we should be careful on what kind of tasks we assign them (avoid assigning aggressive deadlines and mission critical tasks to them as there is a chance that you would be disappointed).
High on Work/Career Priority and Low on Trust: This is an interesting combination. A good number of people whom I have met in my career belong to this category. This combination could be a result of the initial struggles they had in their career. This category of people are highly independent and quite capable. However, they believe in their ability than relationships. If we have people in this category, there is a good chance that you may have problem with their organization alignment as well. If majority of the team members are in this category, it is a perfect recipe for failure for you as a Manager. As a Manager, we should make our efforts to bring them into the top category and try to establish long term relationships. Personally, I have had some successes in this effort.
Low on Work/Career Priority and Low on Trust: This individual is a non-starter to begin with. I have not come across any employee in this category. Hopefuly I will not face one in the career. If by any chance you find someone in this bracket (among experienced professionals), the best option is to separate.

Honesty and Integrity - My perspective

This week I was having an interesting assessment of the kind of managers employees like, with one of my colleague. Dimensions such as thought leadership, technical knowhow, fun-loving, approachability, counselling skills, giving freedom in decision making etc are very important. These are the levers through which mcan connect with the team. However, more often I encountered problems in two areas - Honesty and Integrity.
Let me first explore Honesty. Honesty can some times equated to truthfulness and sometimes it is also equated transparancy. Suppose, you as a Manager has to make a hard decision on an employee, how often, we have given heads up to that employee. One of my colleague told me that, the organization requested him to relocate to a different city for a two month project (of course as project managers we sometime hope that the projects do get extended). This information was not shared with him, the better part of the story is that he got to know that he is not on the project through client and not from the Manager. Whatever may be the business reasons, the Manager was definitely not honest with the employee in this incident. Another thing, we believe many employees do understand that they are given opportunities and so on. In reality that is again not true. In most cases, I as a Manager had to sit with the employee at the beginning of the assignment to set expectations. A honest expectation setting discussion definitely helps in such situations, rather than giving a surprise at the end of the assignment.

Integrity talks about fairplay and unbiasedness. Integrity deals with consistency and using the same yardstick to measure all the employees. I had a project manager as a colleague in my previous company. He was biased to a specific part of India. It made it extremely difficult to work together. Integrity should be visible to the employees. Many a times honesty and integrity go together because honesty helps the manager to show the visibility of integrity. But both are not the same.

You all know that i like blocks. I tried put again things in the blocks and see what type of managers preferred over others.

Needless to say if you as a manager high on honest and integrity, then results are best. Though one thing i learned, being honest with employees who are not open to feedback could be tricky. Managers need to be careful from that perspective. As an employee i would love to have a manager in this segment. At least, my last three managers were in this block. It does not matter whether i liked their style of working or not, but I am better off overall because i got managers in this quarter.

If you are in the second quarter - Low on honesty and high on integrity, it might still work for you. All employees would like fairplay more than honesty. Sometimes brutal honesty may backfire. I have seen many managers in this quarter, and employees love this manager equally well. These managers are typically very nice to employees (if you are honest, you cannot be nice all the time) and you know that you get fair deal.

High on Honesty and Low on Integrity is a bracket you never want to be in as a manager or employee. More often than not, you would shoot yourself on your feet. Have not really come across many people with this combination. The best example i heard was, a manager had employees both within his project and outside and a honest admission that he needs to take care of his employees inside the project than people reporting to him outside the project. I would put this manager in this category.

Low on Honesty and Integrity: Have seen many managers in this segment. The best person i know was my first PhD guide. At the beginning of the semister he told me that complete all the courses and then let us start the research. When i finished my courses and went back to him, he said he never told that to me and he also said the i can find alternative guide. But he was hell bent on throwing me out of the institute. Luckily there were more honest and integriy people in the academic circles and they fought for me and i finished my degree with ease. In the process i met the best manager in the life (my new PhD guide) and learnt everything about honesty and integrity through him.

My advice to both employees and managers is simple, be honest and have very high intergrity. You will be a winner in the long run. Career is not about what you achieve at that point in time, it is about where you go in the long run and what footprints you leave on the way. These two dimensions take you miles in your career. On a lighter note, i missed a meeting recently because i overslept. I could have given 100 reasons, but simply said i overslept.. after all we are humans. No one really killed me!!!!!

Why Managers like some people more!!!!!

This is an intriguing question I had throughout my career. Most of us would have seen some of our colleagues as favorites to the manager. These colleagues were preferred over us leaving us wondering as to why we aren’t the chosen ones. Personally, I have been in both in the places, blue eyed boy as well as not-that-wanted entity. It may hurt your pride as an employee when you are in the second category.

We once asked the Managing Director of one of the companies I worked for as to what is that makes him trust or distrust an employee. The answer was a deceptively quite simple one - dependability. This is a key factor most of the employees seem to ignore or at least the manager perceives so. Dependability is often confused with loyalty. Loyalty is a sense of blind faith. Today's managers however, are not focused on loyalty. They are concerned about dependability.

This answer and a few other incidents in my career got me thinking. What contributes to dependability and how can we score high on this? Let’s analyze this issue of dependability from multiple dimensions. My personal preference has always been to analyze a situation in a two-dimensional framework. This does not mean that other dimensions are not unimportant or irrelevant.

A resource is expected to have qualities like Honesty; Integrity; Technical know-how, and No-politics. As far as the manager is concerned, these qualities are basic and prerequisites to be a good resource. Once this basic foundation is set, the question arises as to whether a resource is “dependable” or not.

The dependability framework is based on two dimensions. 1. Alignment (read as organization or alignment with Manager) and 2. Execution (ability to execute, this is completely different from having the technical know-how and is more about the drive to get things done). Both these dimensions are interlinked in a way because if we are aligned, there is a good chance that we will have a higher drive to get things done. But it is not true always.

As a resource, once we cross the basic skills, we start getting evaluated in the above dimensions. Below is the interpretation of the four blocks in the above framework.

High on Organization Alignment and High on Execution: You are the star. Your managers love you and you are unstoppable. This does not mean that you do not have a mind of your own. Great executions can make a difference to a bad strategy. We take away one major requirement of a resource (it happens all the time) – effective communication. The timing and the method of communicating makes a significant difference to contain the noise levels. As a resource one needs to focus on Execution rather than spending effort on questioning the strategy. You know the famous Dell model - Selling directly to customers (though now they are changing the strategy). Whenever they entered a new market (Europe; Asia, etc) everyone said it will not work. But with their great execution skills, they made it work.

High on Organization Alignment and Low on Execution Skills: These resources are the trusted resources and are generally good to have in any organization. None of us want to be in this category but I have seen people in this block, occupying managerial roles in various organizations. Juniors may not understand this rationale, but organization needs these resources because they are the hands and feet of the organization.

Low on Organization Alignment and High on Execution Skills: A majority of the people, I have met in my career, particularly in India, belong to this category. They have wonderful execution skills and high intellectual capabilities, but many a times they are not aligned to the organization’s goals and visions. Some times significant effort from the manager is required to bring these resources to an organization’s track. Organization needs these resources, but they will always be suspects in the organization’s eyes. With guidance and direction, this large talent pool can be made into valuable assets of the organization. Most of the time, organization do not have the time to educate these resources on the organization’s philosophy. As soon as the organization finds some other resource in the top quadrant, the shelf life of these resources in the company will expire. There are quite a few examples of people landing up in this category. The most famous example is Kiran Bedi.

Low on Alignment and Low on Execution: This is a bad quadrant to be in. More often people from the third quadrant find themselves in this quadrant once their shelf life is over. It is written on the wall. Normally many organizations clearly manage out such employees.

Start looking at yourself and see which quadrant you will fall in. We can even make a nine blocker on it. It will only bring in more comfort for us. I prefer to face reality all the time.

My first Manager -- An Experience to Share

There is a first for everything. We all know the legends, great leaders, and great champions in the world. All of them had a mentor or manager when they started their career. How many of us know that there was a manager who has helped Elvis Presley. His name is Winfield Scott Moore III. He was responsible for managing the first part of Elvis Presley's career.

How may of us do remember our first managers? These are the people who help you to cut your teeth in your professional career. For some strange reasons we are more comfortable to learn from friends than managers. This is not bad. I myself learned more from friends than managers in my career.

When I look back at my career, I can recollect my experience with my first manager. He was a Tamiliatn, he was around 40+ of age at that time (now he is probably retired). When I remember him, one of his characteristics strikes out - a permanent frown. Smile was something very difficult to come by for him. In my first meeting, he said "Oh. You joined. OK, for the next three days spend time in the machine shop. Everything else OK?" I just mentioned, that there is no fan in the guest room. He arranged for it in less than twenty four hours. The personal officer came running to me asking why I mentioned about the fan to him. Actually the personal officer had put in his personal money to get the fans. Then I realized that my manager was a terror in the company!!!

So I spent my next three days walking around machine shop, observing various things (being a civil engineer, a machine shop was pretty much Greek and Latin to me!!) and not understanding pretty much anything. The only thing I understood was the scheduling and queuing concepts because of my industrial engineering background. After three days in machine shop, I went with another colleague to my manager to give my report card. I had actually written three pages regarding my observations. The first question he asked (of course in his frowning way) "What is the make of the milling machine installed?" Actually a milling machine was getting installed when I was doing my rounds. I was watching the foundation construction part more rather than the make of the machine was being installed. I was totally dumb stuck...as i was supposed to be... His instruction was “OK, go back and spend more time in the machine shop.” So I spent two more days in the machine shop, noted down every machine make, capacity, utilization levels, all and sundry information. I also prepared a long report and went back. He looked at the report in a frowning way and said “OK now go and spend time in assembly shop.”

That was my first week with him as my Manager. Things never got better anyway after that. He was aloof and frowning all the time and never tried to understand people (read it as me). But he was brilliant technically and was doing very well in the company. If my colleague was not there, I would have been completely lost in the company. I learned a lot from the colleague (he was five years senior to me) and he became my mentor. Every experience has its positive side teaching us something. This experience with my manager taught me about how to manage tough managers. Now I can manage even the most difficult managers with ease and a smile!!!