Managing People

Never Skip Those 1-1 Meetings

August 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The weekly 1-1 meeting with direct reports is usually the first casualty of managerial overload. A few email exchanges or ad hoc encounters aren’t a reliable alternative for the open line of communication set forth by a regular 1-1 meeting, especially if an employee needs a problem addressed or priorities adjusted in changing situations.

Idea for Impact: Keep your commitment to do whatever is feasible to preserve your 1-1s with direct reports—in both schedule and content—even if it means having an abbreviated meeting or adjourning to later in the week.

Competitive vs Cooperative Negotiation

August 24, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Does a competitive person make a better negotiator than a cooperative person? Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s insightful Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (2006) contends there isn’t a straightforward answer.

Competitive people don’t mind interpersonal friction and thus initially have the upper hand over less aggressive personalities with little appetite for friction. However, competitive people generally lack skills in managing relationships, which gives cooperative people an advantage in situations where interpersonal trust over the long term is crucial. It’s easier to negotiate against someone who has a similar personality. Negotiation gets dicier when different personality types mix.

How to improve your results? Practice. Prepare through information-gathering and setting achievable but optimistic targets for the negotiation process.

Listen and Involve

August 22, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

All too often, leaders live in a culture of telling. They see their role as instructing others what to do, to plow through by compliance. But true leadership is eliciting commitment.

People want their thinking to count. If there’s a better way to carry out a task, they want to be able to identify it and put it into action. They’re more spurred to prevail at a challenge if they have a commitment to their work by their own volition. Hence, leaders should engage their people in choosing the goals the group needs to accomplish.

Idea for Impact: Leaders who play a participative management style derive enormous rewards in efficiency and work quality. Find opportunities to have direct conversations with individual employees and teams about what can be done to improve effectiveness.

How to … Deal with a Colleague Who Talks Too Much

August 18, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If a coworker has a habit of talking incessantly—mostly about his personal life—and doesn’t heed when you hint you can’t be distracted from work at the moment, address your frustrations directly and respectfully.

When you think he’s ready to listen, have a chat privately and make him aware of the issue. Say, “I like conversing with you, but sometimes you keep talking even after I tell you I need to get back to work. Often, I feel pinned down. Could you please heed when I say our visit impedes my work?” You may add, “I’d always be happy to talk to you when I’m less busy or over a drink in the evening.”

This talk may be briefly awkward for both of you, but so are most tough conversations. Often, problems are best nipped in the bud.

Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

August 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Take any corporate scandal or the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and you’ll find lower-ranking voices that tried to be heard within these organizations to prevent or minimize the consequences of the excesses or the accidents.

Some leaders are too isolated from reality and establish an “all’s-good” guise whereby anything other than affirmative becomes an undesirable—unwelcome even—answer to a performance-related question. Such leaders foster a “good-news culture,” where any truth-teller or devil’s advocate is quickly dismissed. Queries such as the cursory “Is everything okay?” elicit information-free, non-answers like “yes” and “great!”

When leaders are disconnected from reality, they become incontestably right. Employees know the rule of the game is to say what’s safe to say. To not tell the truth. To tell the leader just what she wants to hear. Employees would instead go with the flow rather than speak truth to power.

Consequently, business pressures often lead to shortcuts that go overlooked. Risk is normalized. Leaders who cannot tap into the truth get blindsided when the problems blow up because they didn’t nip the problems in the bud. Leaders have only themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Idea for Impact: Insightful leadership isn’t about the privilege of position but the privilege of information flowing upwards. Wise leaders dare to seek information they don’t want to hear. They know how to ask the right questions, look for revealing details, and set up a culture of openness that makes it easy for employees to tell the truth.

Tips for Working for a Type-A Boss

August 4, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Type-A bosses tend to accomplish great things, at least short-term. But their high intensity and impatience could make them hard to work for.

If you’re more of a laid-back employee, realize that most of the time, Type-A’s intensity isn’t about you. It’s the way she relates to the world around her. Type-A is what Type-A does.

Here’s how to deal with the overly amped-up style of the Type-A boss:

Speak up. Do your homework and anticipate needs/wants. Be proactive and take the initiative on everything. Bring solutions, not problems. If you disagree with something, communicate directly.
If nothing you do seems perfect enough for your boss, don’t assume the worst and put your guard up. Be more receptive to evaluation. If you’re constantly being challenged to add “one more thing,” seek specific feedback on how she’d like you to refine your work.
Set boundaries on what she can expect from you. Ask for clear performance goals. With Type-As, it’s always about them; you can’t hold yourself accountable for their personality. When it gets tough, try not to take it personally. Ask for what you need, but choose your battles wisely.

Idea for Impact: One of the best ways to handle a Type-A person is to try to be Type-A yourself. You don’t have to morph into an ego-driven jerk, but try to be more organized and keep on top of everything.

Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’

July 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From The Telegraph over the weekend: a Leeds-based “woke dance school,” the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, “drops ballet from auditions as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist'” as it “reviews ballet art form as part of a diversity drive.”

Many other performance arts are rooted in other cultural traditions, so should we expect that white folk refrains from performing those because that would be cultural appropriation? Shun yoga, not wear cornrow, and drop taco nights?

Should everyone else avoid trains, cars, computers, and much else because they’re white European originations?

Should people not be allowed to wear clothing, cultivate hobbies, or pursue careers that aren’t reflective of the culture they were raised in?

Look, works of art incorporating racist clichés and caricatural images (such as in The Nutcracker) should be reassessed with a different consciousness. Appropriation is elastic and ill-defined. Not all cultural appropriation is harmful or exploitative, certainly not innocuous cultural appreciation—where elements of other cultures could be used to pay reverence and highlight the historic oppressions of those cultures. Appropriation is but offensive when what’s being appropriated brings problems to the people to who the cultural artifact belongs.

On embargoing ballet, let’s stop denunciations of white pride where it doesn’t exist before. Let’s not fuel resentment with our shrill accusations and ill-thought overreactions and contribute to the rise of white supremacy.

Idea for Impact: Raise cultural hackles only for a good cause, i.e., when there’s real offense intended. Don’t stigmatize valuable cultural interchange. Delimiting features of cultures is contradictory to our goal of creating a diverse, melting-pot society. E pluribus unum.

Is The Customer Always Right?

July 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No matter how finicky or rude a customer is, many businesses make employees treat bad customers with unquestioned respect or risk reprobation—even getting sacked.

Per the well-worn business adage, is “the customer is always right?” No, they’re not. Sometimes they’re wrong, and they need to be told so.

Your goal should be to do business with people that you enjoy doing business with. Some customers simply aren’t good customers. They don’t follow directions and complain irrationally. They have unreasonable expectations, and they treat your people rudely.

Idea for Impact: A prudent maxim is, “the customer is usually right.” Put the customer first, but don’t get mistreated by them. Putting the customer first doesn’t mean putting employees second. As a business, you must let customers be wrong with respect and dignity; but employees should be authorized to caution some customers, “After due consideration, we believe your actions are unacceptable. Persist, and we’d choose to lose your business.” Some bad customers are just bad for your business.

Almost always, though, unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning; they can especially offer an honest assessment of the expectations you’re setting. Customer satisfaction with a transaction depends on their expectations going into it.

The #1 Learning from Sun Tzu’s Art of War: Avoid Battle

July 11, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Art of War, Chinese strategist-philosopher Sun Tzu’s treatise on military strategy, is studied not so much for the advice it gives but for the state of mind it encourages. Developed in only six thousand Chinese characters and 25 pages of text, this way of thinking has held vast sway in such fields as military planning, strategic management, and negotiating. “Every battle is won or lost before it is fought.”

Something exceptional about the Art of War is the extent to which it’s devoted to methodically avoiding battle altogether. War isn’t something to be entered rashly or for petty reasons. “A sovereign should not start a war out of anger, nor should a general give battle out of rage. While anger can revert to happiness and rage to delight, a nation that has been destroyed cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life.”

Nor is war’s dominant purpose to cause physical destruction to an enemy. Instead, the pinnacle of military skill is to conquer one’s opponent strategically—by penetrating his alliances, rattling his plans, and coercing him diplomatically—without ever resorting to armed combat. “Why destroy,” Sun Tzu poses, “when you can win by stealth and cunning? To subdue the enemy’s forces without fighting is the summit of skill.”

Sun Tzu’s insistence that an enlightened strategist can attain victory without fighting echoes the foundational Taoist doctrine of “non-action (Wu-Wei.”) Armed conflict, therefore, is the last resort. War in itself represents a significant defeat. As a matter of course, Sun Tzu allocates a good chunk of the Art of War to the line of combat and attack. A savvy general must, however, take every accessible measure to gain victory swiftly, with minimal casualties and suffering for both sides. “The best approach is to attack the other side’s strategy; next best is to attack his alliances; next best is to attack his soldiers; the worst is to attack cities.”

Again and again, through implication, Sun-Tzu’s war document posits peace and restraint—the avoidance of battle—as the utmost victory. To fight at all, Sun-Tzu insists, is already a substantial loss, much worse than losing in war.

Idea for Impact: The Art of War is a worthy course on conflict management because avoiding confrontation requires more remarkable skill than winning on the battlefield.

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