Leadership

GET LEADERized

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Many of you likely know that I’m in the middle of writing a book on leadership. It is month number six on this book, and I am nowhere near the finish line. The working title of this book is called GET LEADERized Hopefully, it should be out sometime this year.⁣

Last week, one of my colleagues walked into my office room, and he was curious to find out why I post #LeadTip on my blog and social media frequently? What made me become a published author with my first book, Don’t Coast? When I started thinking about his question, I immediately recollected an interesting observation I made many years ago.

One of my friends and his wife loved hosting dinners at their home for many years. Once every month, they invite a few of his friends to join them for a weekend dinner party. Most of their friends, including themselves, had young children. Once the dinner was over, kids would usually start running around in the house and the front garden area. They yell and make noises as any kids do.

But as soon as a child fell and began crying, the correct parent would quickly get up from the seating area and go running to find their child even without seeing the face and from which part of the house they are crying. My point is that people know the voice of those important to them amid huge noise. The right voice always cuts through at the right time and reaches the right person. 

My strong belief is that right people always hear the right voices amid all the social media noise when they need it. I believe someone is always listening for the right voice, and my posts and blog are meant for myself and that someone specific who is eagerly listening.

My mentor once told me that we write books that we need ourselves. I wrote about growth in Don’t Coast because I made growth as number one priority in my life. I am now writing about leadership in this book because I am learning and practicing leadership for few years. I consider myself the first reader of this book. I was hoping you could read it and be transformed through it once made available later this year.

Regards,

Kishore.

 

The Ant Philosophy

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We tend to look for big people for lessons on how to get better. We are always keen to learn the secrets of success. But we forget that sometimes the biggest life lessons come from the smallest things around.  Take ants, for instance. Jim Rohn – the great motivational guru – developed what he called the ‘Ant Philosophy.’ He identified four key lessons from ants’ behavior that can help us lead better lives & improve daily.

# Be an Ant

One of the core values of EnergyTech Global is “Be an Ant.” Like ants, we never stop; we always go the extra mile to show an “all-you-can” attitude.

Ants never quit. (Never give up)

If ants are headed somewhere and try to stop them, they’ll look for another way. They’ll climb over, they’ll climb under, and they’ll climb around. They keep looking for another way. No matter how many times you squish their little ant hill, they build it again. No matter how many times you flick them away from your food, they come back. Ants can lift 20x their body weight.

Ants think winter all summer. (Look ahead)

You can’t be so naive as to think summer will last forever. So ants are gathering their winter food in the middle of summer.

Ants think summer all winter. (Stay Positive)

During winter, ants remind themselves, “This won’t last long; we’ll soon be out of here.” If it turns cold again, they’ll dive back down, but they come out the first warm day.

Every day, the objective is to become a better version of ourselves this year than last year.

Ants think, “all-you-possibly-can.” (Do all you can)

How much will an ant gather during the summer to prepare for the winter? All he possibly can. They don’t gather a certain amount and then head back to the hole to hang out. If an ant can do more, it does.

Ants thrive at teamwork (Experience the collective power)

Ants have two stomachs, one to hold food for themselves and one to share with others. How cool is that? If a worker ant has found a good food source, it leaves a scent trail to find the other ants in the colony. A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust and help each other.

They do whatever needs to be done to get the job done! Just like the ants at EnergyTech Global!

Before you go…

If you enjoyed this post, you would love my book, “Don’t Coast: Accelerate Your Personal and Professional Growth.”

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Leaders & Remote Work

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As a leader what are you expected to do to establish good remote work culture within your teams & organization? 

It seems there are more than 10,000 books available on Amazon on remote working. No wonder why remote working is considered difficult. Here are some of the things leaders can do to create a good remote work culture.

1/ Ensure that your staff has the right infrastructure, which includes but is not limited to laptops, network connectivity, and software to dial into audio and video conference calls, remote access to everything that they need to carry out their day to day work, etc.
2/ Develop routines and help teams to have a disciplined way of managing the day. For example, in our company, all teams will have a brief stand-up meeting at the beginning of the day and end their day with an evening daily scrum meeting. Have a rhythm. Things will be much more fluid in remote working, and managers should trust that employees will do their best to get their work done.
3/ Make sure that team members constantly feel like they know what’s going on. You need to communicate what’s happening at the organizational level because they feel like they’ve been extracted from the mothership when working from home. They wonder what’s happening at the company, with clients, and with common objectives. The communication around those is extremely important. So you should email more, share more.
4/ Ensure that no staff member will feel like they have less access to you than others. At home, people’s imaginations begin to go wild. So you have to be available to everyone equally. Finally, when you run your group meetings, aim for inclusion, and balance the airtime, everyone feels seen and heard.
5/ You need to be much more visible right now — through video conferencing or taped recordings — to give people confidence, calm them down, and be healers- or hope-givers-in-chief.

#leadtip #remotework #HBR #TsedalNeeley

The Power of Process & Culture

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Mumbai Dabbawala

As a leader, I am always a process improvement enthusiast. I strongly believe that leaders must continuously look for ways and means to improve the organization’s processes. Leadership commitment and support are critical for successful process improvement initiatives in any company. I also strongly believe that organizations don’t need extraordinary talent to achieve extraordinary performance when the right system is in place.

For some time, I am researching a quintessential and ingenious Indian jugaad called Mumbai Dabbawalas and the leadership lessons that one can learn from them for one of the chapter in my next book. The wonders created by a semiliterate 130-year old Indian team of 5000 members called Mumbai Dabbawalas, backed up by a well-defined process and work culture of service excellence mindset, is mind-boggling and fascinates the world.

With the popularity of mobile apps such as Swiggy, Zomato and Uber Eats, many cities in India and the rest of the world now started enjoying the privilege of ordering specially prepared food being delivered either directly at their home doorstep or the work desk.  But dabbawalas have been doing it for 130 years – and the newcomers have much to learn. Also, the new-age digital rivals couldn’t match the low-cost and high-performance service provided by dabbawalas. By far, the Mumbai Dabbawala Association is one of the best case studies of Six Sigma and ISO 9001:2000 certified, process-driven, error-free, low-investment business from India.

Their mastery of supply chain management in the world’s 4th most populous city with a jaw-dropping accuracy level without using technology and the complexity of the process by which 200,000 plus tiffin boxes (800000 transactions) were sorted, transported, delivered, and returned each day by people who were mostly illiterate in a white outfit and traditional Gandhi cap with a zero percent error rate are mind-blowing. I am looking forward to sharing my leadership learnings from this team with you all soon.

Inside Out Leadership

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Let me share what I learned from my mentor John C Maxwell this week.  This week John taught us about Inside Out Leadership.

The inside influences the outside. Great leadership is always an inside job. 

When you’re better on the inside than the outside, and when you’re bigger on the inside than the outside, over time, you will become greater on the outside. In other words, when you’re better on the outside than the inside, and bigger on the outside than the inside, over time, you will become less on the outside. 

Better on the inside deals with character, integrity, authenticity, honesty, trustworthiness, walk your talk, showing more than telling, being more than doing. With a better inside, we may have a slow start, but it eventually shows up. 

The number one criterion for success is the ability to connect with people. Connecting is the ability to identify with people and relate to them to increase our influence with them.

Characteristics of inside-out leaders: 

  1. Inside-out leaders value more than position. 
  2. Inside-out leaders inspire others because others inspire them. You cannot inspire others unless you get inspired yourself.
  3. Inside-out leaders are secure enough to appreciate and acknowledge others.
  4. Inside-out leaders do not abuse power. 
  5. Inside-out leaders extend grace and forgiveness to others.
  6. Inside out, leaders acknowledge and apologize for their mistakes. 

Often, leaders mistakenly believe that they must be considered great to do only the right things. Apologizing is an act of humility. Humility attracts and inspires. Arrogance does not. 

Connectors live what they communicate. During the first six months, your communication overrides credibility, and after six months, your credibility overrides communication.

Skillful leaders constantly uncover their true selves, manage their emotions, achieve great goals, and are conscious of their unique talents and how to maximize them.

John C. Maxwell offers these eight questions to assess one’s level of self-leadership:

  1. Are you investing in yourself?  This question is all about your personal growth.  How can you teach what you do not know and take others to where you have not been?
  2. Are you genuinely interested in others?  Are you more concerned about other’s agendas than your own? There is nothing worse than a self-centered leader.
  3. Are you doing what you love, and do you love what you do?  Passion provides the fuel that provides you with the energy to be a great leader.
  4. Are you investing time with the right people?  Leaders surround themselves with talented, inspired people who want to make a difference.
  5. Are you working in your strength zone?  Leaders are keenly aware of what they are great at and what they love to do, and they spend most of their time doing these things.
  6. Are you taking others to a higher level?  Leaders help others unleash their inner talents.
  7. Are you taking care of today?  Leaders are natural visionaries, and they also know how to focus on the daily agenda and priorities at hand.
  8. Are you taking the time to think?  Great leaders love action.  However, they also are talented at disciplining themselves to stop every day and think creatively.

Change the world around you by changing yourself. Regularly retrospect your self-leadership abilities to grow and evolve.