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Losing weight & what I learnt - Intro

After a couple of half hearted attempts at losing weight, I finally decided to embark on a long journey to lose weight about 3 years back. This time I was very serious, since my extra kilos were causing some health issues. The first year was not so great as I lost only 2 kgs. Over the next 2 years I managed to lose about 18 kgs. Over a 3 year period I came down from an overweight 86 kgs to a correct 66 kgs. This helped me a lot to reduce or resolve my health issues. It also made me feel light. Sometime back, as I sat on the beachfront in Besant Nagar, I started to go over this journey. To my surprise I found a lot of things I learnt as person. My next question was could I translate or relate these to leadership lessons. The next hour at the beach was spent wondering how I could do it, if I could do it, and will it be useful to people. Over the next few weeks, I am planning to write about my learnings. How a journey to lose weight can contribute to learnings for a leader… 
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Communication and feedback...

This is the second part in my Communication series. In my earlier post, I talked about how communication is not just talking. I also mentioned that the key to communication is making people see and understand your point of view. For a leader to succeed, he / she needs his team to understand his goals and vision. For this, the leader needs to communicate and ensure that his team understands what he / she is trying to say. I had a problem of talking a lot, and also, by default accepting that people understood what I said. It took me a few years, to admit to myself that the default is not so. In the initial days, I felt the problem was with my team, that they did not understand what I said. I had to repeat certain messages several times, work with smaller groups to drive home the point, sometimes even questioning people in meetings to see if they are on the same page. After working with my team for a few months , I was able to get them onto my wavelength. I felt happy and satis
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Communication and talking...

Communication is very important aspect in our professional lives. More so for a leader. As a leader, you will need to communicate your plans, goals, vision etc to your teams. I always used to think highly of myself when it came to communication, the reason being that I was educated in English all along, reasonably well read, had interacted with clients who were non-indians both native english speakers and others, pretty early in my career with success. So when I became a lead, I thought it was but natural for me to be a good communicator with my team. As they say pride goes before a fall, I did fall but thankfully the fall was not from a good height to get hurt badly nor was visible to many people. As a lead, during my early days, I always thought that being a good communicator means that I need to talk well, fluently, convey my idea. That's it. During these days, I would talk a lot in my team meetings, talk about small and big things, talk about my ideas etc. I always
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Take a step back

Every leader goes through a period when he / she is stretched for time, having to do too many things in a short time, being in the trenches etc. During this period it is important to get the hands dirtied, understand the ground issues. But more often than not, even after this period some leaders tend to forget the necessity to take a step back. It is important that the leader should not forget the long term goal, while being in day to day operations. The learning for me came during a mid-year review, in the form of a feedback. My supervisor told me that while I did a lot of things well, I could have achieved more if I concentrated on a few long term goals. While I had my long term goals in my mind, being in the trenches made me to forget them.  As a leader, one should never lose the focus on the long term goal. It is very important to know what you want to do, where you want your teams to be in the long term, and every step should be taken keeping this goal in mind. But th
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Get off the Ivory Tower

A leader needs to be with the people. More often than not, without realising the leader gets onto the Ivory tower and rarely comes down.  During my initial months as a lead, I used to be with the team most of the time. To me, I was one among the team, and not someone who as a lead needed to maintain that posture. This was the only way for me, to lead the team. Over the next few months, as my responsibilities increased, my team size increased. But I still felt the need to be one among the team. I did this, even when it became a stretch on my time. I did this not because I had to, but because I loved it. I felt comfortable being with the team, rather than acting as a Manager, who came in only when required. I did not realise that it had its own pros and cons. On the positive side, my teams never felt the need to distance themselves from me, which meant I could really get the team behind me to support me in my endeavors. It also meant that I was too familiar to them, and some
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In a crisis, be with the team

Every leader worth his salt would have gone through a number of critical situations, each one seemingly bigger than the previous. To me, crisis presented a new opportunity to learn. It gave me an important lesson. I had talked about trusting people in one of my earlier posts. But as a leader, when crisis hits, the first thing they tend to forget is the trust in their teams. The lead tends to jump in to take control of things, starting from trying to understand the issue to communicating the updates to stakeholders. It does not stop there - the lead gets into the way of everything - the problem resolution, suggesting solutions, getting back to original state of affairs. In the whole process forgetting that there are / might be competent people in the team to do all this and more.  To top it all, the worst thing the leader can do is to add to the pressure that the team is already facing and showing in his / her behaviour the tendencies to put people in extreme pressure.
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Being tough with people

So far, I had written about lessons learnt on the floor, this week's post is all about an important lesson that I did not / have not learnt. Being tough with people. I was always considered to be soft on people - be it with my team, client or with my peers. In my initial years as a lead, it was important for me to understand my team and their problems and work with them to make the team a success. Once we reached a degree of success, which was accepted and recognized by my stakeholders, there came new challenges. My stakeholders started to expect more from my team. Deadlines became aggressive, workload increased, clients became tough - to handle all this, I had to be tough. Tough with my team to push them to close out delivery, with my client not to accept additional work, with my peers and supervisors to get the required resources I needed to deliver. But this was one lesson I never learnt. I could never be tough with my people. I could tell them to get things done, I cou
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