Search Results for: people skills

How to Manage Overqualified Employees

September 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Some employees are overeducated and overqualified—or think they are—for the jobs they are doing.

Such employees will find their roles not demanding enough to keep them occupied. They may not feel fully engaged in those tasks and responsibilities that they judge “beneath” them.

Toffee-nosed employees can create team tension. They can develop negative attitudes, such as a sense of entitlement about their skills (remember the FedEx “Even an MBA Can Do It” advert?) or resentment through boredom. That frustration and disillusion can ripple out and bring everyone else in the team down.

Here are two guidelines for managing overqualified employees:

To keep overqualified employees engaged, allow more autonomy, and assign them more creative assignments. Delegate longer-term projects or have them collaborate with other teams within the company. Though, be mindful that this may create even more resentment in the team towards the perceived overqualified employees. Discuss with the team why some people have been chosen for those special assignments.
Work together with the human resources staff and help the overqualified employees chart out individualized paths for climbing the corporate ladder and reach their potential. Find ways to help them acquire new skills and get exposure to other parts of the organization. Coach them to apply for roles that possibly do not yet warrant their experience and expertise. Expand their leadership capacity by assigning training and mentoring responsibilities.

Idea for Impact: Nurturing and keeping overqualified employees can create a strong foundation for tomorrow’s management team.

How Can You Contribute?

June 22, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The celebrated management guru Peter Drucker urged folks to replace the pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution. To him, the existential question was not, “How can I achieve what’s been asked of me?” but “What can I contribute?”

Drucker wrote in his bestselling The Effective Executive (1967; my summary,)

The great majority of executives tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than with results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors “owe” them and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they “should have.” As a result, they render themselves ineffectual. The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in a person’s own work—its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts; in his relations with others—his superiors, his associates, his subordinates; in his use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports. The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results.

Peter Drucker: Focus on Contribution - How Can You Contribute? Pursuing contribution versus—or as well as—success pivots you away from self-focus and helps engage in meaningful relationships with your employees, peers, and managers.

In his celebrated article on “Managing Oneself” in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review, Drucker clarified,

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself—as it was for the peasant or artisan—or by a master or a mistress—as it was for domestic servants.

There is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Idea for Impact: Take Responsibility for Your Contribution

Focusing on contribution instead of efforts is empowering because it compels you to think through the results you need to deliver to make a difference and identify new skills to develop. “People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves,” as Drucker remarked in The Effective Executive.

Leo Burnett on Meaning and Purpose

June 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Adman Leo Burnett (1892–1971) founded a global advertising agency that ranks among the titans of the trade. Burnett and the company that bears his name produced such famous brand icons as the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Jolly Green Giant, Maytag Repairman, and Pillsbury Doughboy.

Burnett pioneered the ‘Chicago School’ of advertising, wherein product campaigns centered on the inherent appeal of products themselves. Burnett’s advertisements used meaningful visuals to evoke emotions and experiences. This approach contrasted the time-honored use of catchy catchphrases and clever copy describing the products’ features. The models in Burnett’s campaigns resembled ordinary people rather than celebrities.

“When to Take My Name Off the Door”

After 33 years at the helm of his company, Burnett officially retired at age 76. He delivered a remarkable valedictory (film clip,) reminding his colleagues of his advertising agency’s core values and its high creative standards.

Let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.

When you lose your itch to do the job well for its own sake—regardless of the client, or the money, or the effort it takes.

When you lose your passion for thoroughness…your hatred of loose ends.

When you stop reaching for the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produces the fresh, the memorable, and the believable effect.

When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is all about.

When you begin to compromise your integrity—which has always been the heart’s blood—the very guts of this agency.

When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism—for the sake of a fast buck.

When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big—rather than good, hard, wonderful work.

When you lose your humility and become big-shot weisenheimers … a little too big for your boots.

When you start giving lip service to this being a “creative agency” and stop really being one.

Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man—the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big black pencils—or working all night on a media plan. When you forget that the lonely man—and thank God for him—has made the agency we now have—possible. When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of—for a moment—one of those hot, unreachable stars.

THAT, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door.

Idea for Impact: Leaders are Meaning-Makers

Burnett’s valedictory is a potent reminder of the power of meaningful organizational values and a leader’s role in upholding his company’s principles-based DNA.

Organizational values are at the heart of the long-term success of a company. When these values grow fainter, the company may no longer reflect the intended culture. The organizational values will no longer clarify, inspire, and bind the company’s customers, employees, partners, investors, and other stakeholders.

As the steward of a company’s culture, a leader is responsible for institutionalizing—not merely individualizing—a sense and meaning in the workplace. And, as Burnett demonstrates, an effective leader passionately expresses what the company stands for and shares personal lessons learned in that process.

Burnett’s name is still on the door.

Everything in Life is Perception

May 18, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When J. K. Rowling wrote the novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) and published iu under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, she sold less than 1,500 copies in print in three months. When word got out that J. K. Rowling had written the book, The Cuckoo’s Calling immediately jumped to the top of the best-seller lists. In just a few months, the book had sold 1.1 million copies.

When the internationally-acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell played his famous 300-year-old, $3.5 million Stradivarius violin at a Washington, D.C. metro station in 2007, only seven out of the 1,097 people who walked past him during his 45-minute performance stopped to listen. Dressed in street clothes, Bell made just $32.17 in tips tossed into the open violin case at his feet—plus $20 from one person who actually recognized him. People otherwise pay hundreds of dollars to hear him perform at fancy concert halls around the world.

The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works (2010,) has described,

When we get pleasure from something, it’s not merely based on what we see or what we hear or what we feel. Rather, it’s based on what we believe that thing to be.

And so, someone listening to the music of Joshua Bell is going to hear it differently and like it more if they believe it’s from Joshua Bell. If you hear the same music and think it’s from some scruffy, anonymous street performer, it doesn’t sound so good.

And I think that’s a more general fact about pleasure. I think wine doesn’t taste as good if you don’t know it’s expensive or special wine. A painting is going to look different to you, and you’re going to value it differently, depending on who you think created it.

Bloom has explained how our minds shape the way a thing will be—because we behave in proportion to our expectations:

We don’t just respond to things as we see, feel, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned by our beliefs of where things come from, what they’re made of, or what their hidden nature is. This is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things.

Idea for Impact: Perception is Reality

Expectations color people’s perceptions, and satisfaction with any experience depends on their perceptions going into it.

What you make others think you’re offering them—your skills, your services, your products—profoundly affects their experience. The right expectations can alter anything from valueless to priceless.

However, as Dr. Johnson has warned, “we ought not to raise expectations which it is not in our power to satisfy.—It is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.”

Make ‘Em Thirsty

May 6, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Sony’s Akio Morita, like Apple’s Steve Jobs, was a marketing genius. Morita’s hit parade included such iconic products as the first hand-held transistor radio and the Walkman portable audio cassette player.

Key to Morita’s success was his mastery of the art of the pitch. Morita pushed Sony to create consumer electronics for which no obvious need existed and then generated demand for them.

The best marketing minds know how to create a customer—previously unaware of a problem or an opportunity, she becomes interested in considering the opportunity, and finally acts upon it.

Coca-Cola marketers are but creating a thirst by showing the fizzle a freshly poured glass in Coke ads. “Thirst asks nothing more,” indeed.

The marketing guru Seth Godin has said, “So many people are unhappy … what they have doesn’t make them unhappy. What they want does. And want is created by the marketers.” Recall the old parable,

A sales trainee was trying to explain his failure to close a single deal in his first week. “You know,” he said to his manager, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

“Make him drink?” The manager sputtered. “Your job is to make him thirsty.”

Idea for Impact: Whether you realize this or not, you’re in marketing, as is everybody else. You’re constantly pitching your ideas, skills, time, appeal, charm, and so forth. Study the art of the pitch. Master the art of generating demand for whatever it is you have to offer. Learn to “make ’em thirsty.” Marketing is everything.

The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego!

February 24, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even Petty Power Corrupts: Authority Can Warp Behavior

The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego! Ever wonder why some folks with a little authority, but not much real status, tend to throw their weight around? They often become overconfident, controlling, and bossy. This phenomenon, known as “hubris syndrome,” can lead to micromanaging, unnecessary rules, and a real disconnect from the people around them.

Even in lower-level jobs, you can see these power trips in action. For instance, rub a TSA agent the wrong way, and you might get flagged for extra screening. Summer pool guards can be overly strict with kids and parents who don’t show them the proper respect. In bureaucratic offices, clerks and supervisors frequently impose petty rules just to flex their authority.

These power trippers rely on control to boost their fragile egos. Power tends to amplify self-importance, making people more likely to act in a domineering way—something we often sum up with, “power corrupts” or the “authority bias.

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

This anecdotal observation is backed by a study titled “The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status.” The researchers argue that neither power nor low status alone leads people to mistreat others; it’s the combination of the two that increases the likelihood of abuse.

We predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status—and the respect that comes with that status—then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. Put simply, it feels bad to be in a low-status position and the power that goes with that role gives them a way to take action on those negative feelings.

One way to prevent these toxic power dynamics is to ensure that everyone feels respected and valued, regardless of their role. According to the study, “respect assuages negative feelings about low-status roles and encourages positive interactions with others.” In other words, courtesy pays off!

Notes

Some people despise anyone they suspect is trying to pull the strings or exert power over them.
Consider the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of students was assigned roles as either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison. Despite knowing they were part of an experiment, the “guards” subjected the “prisoners” to humiliating treatment. According to the researchers, this behavior stemmed from the guards’ desire for respect and admiration, which they felt was lacking in their interactions with others. This controversial experiment was later depicted in a 2015 docudrama.
This concept can be compared to the Napoleon Complex, where shorter men may overcompensate for their height through social aggressiveness, despite the fact that Napoleon himself was not actually short.
Cf. The “Waiter Rule” states that how you treat seemingly insignificant people says a lot about your personality and priorities.

Great Leaders Focus on the WHY and the WHAT—Not the How

January 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

The most effective leaders provide their employees with a heartfelt portrayal of the WHY, a precise description of the WHAT, and freedom on the HOW.

The WHY encompasses a vision in a way that matters to people. As Howard Schultz, the Starbucks tycoon once said, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.”

The British-American organizational consultant Simon Sinek‘s passable Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009; a good summary) identifies the difference between “giving direction and giving directions.” Great leaders, he explains, motivate with the WHY, a deep-rooted purpose, before defining the WHAT, the product or service, or the HOW, the process.

The latter, the HOW, is to be deprioritized—effective leaders leave it to their employees to figure out.

In contrast, ineffective leaders provide specificity around HOW to complete a task but fail to share the big picture, the WHY.

Don’t live in the weeds. Have faith in the ingenuity of your employees. Give much latitude in how they do things.

Idea for Impact: Define the job. Explain the responsibility. Equip your people with the tools and skills they’ll need. Establish expectations. Identify the standards. That’s the essence of delegation.

Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life

November 19, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Anil Ambani Learned the Ropes of Doing Business in India

In the Fall of 1982, Anil Ambani, scion of one of India’s wealthiest family, returned home to Mumbai, then Bombay, after attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Anil had fast-tracked through his two-year MBA program in less than 15 months.

He met up with his father Dhirubhai Ambani and announced, “Look, Dad, I’ve become an MBA, and I’m going to take a break since I worked hard. I will see you in the New Year.”

Dhirubhai asked, “I am very happy and delighted that you accomplished this. Since I did not go to any formal school or college, I do not have any degree, why don’t you tell me, from your learning at Wharton, what does an MBA stand for?”

Smug and self-satisfied, Anil replied, “That’s simple. Master of Business Administration.”

Dhirubhai countered, “An MBA represents Manē Badhā Āvō che,” (Gujarati for “I am know all.”) He explained,

You are entering India, and you need to Indianize your MBA … at Wharton School, did they teach you about customs duties, excise duties, income tax, sales tax, Parliament?

Do you know about a zero-hour question, a call-attention motion, and the difference between a starred question and an unstarred question in the Indian Parliament?

If you don’t get to know all these things, let me assure you, all your formal education is not going to help you. You need your practical Indian MBA. And I am going to create that learning environment for you so that you can get the exposure.

A formal education doesn’t necessarily teach you everything about how to navigate the real world

Dhirubhai Ambani, the prototypical crony capitalist that he was, was highlighting the importance of learning the ways and means of doing business in pre-liberalization India.

One must note that Ambani’s extraordinary rags-to-riches story was a blend of cunning, street smartness, audacious risk-taking, and an unparalleled knack for bending the rules through powerful politicians and bureaucrats. As controversial as he was, Ambani must be understood in the socio-political context of India’s post-Independence industrial milieu. He artfully exploited the opportunities those times offered.

Idea for Impact: Formal education cannot complete the kind of real-world operative skills that you need

If you’re truly serious in your desire to get ahead in business, you will need a broader grasp of your chosen discipline than you can get from formal education.

Look, listen, learn. Every industry, company, organization, and team has its own culture. Spend time observing the winners: what does success look like? Who holds power, and how are they persuaded? What are the traits of people who get ahead? Emphasize developing skills in line with the winners.
Develop a network of people who can potentially lend a hand or bail you out of a jam. Invest in the people who will listen to your ideas and support your ambitions. Get to know peers at all levels to build a support base. Any person may have the knowledge and the allegiances that they can put to work for you if they’re so inclined.
Discover how to make the most of the circumstances you’re dealt with. Don’t manipulate others for your own devices in a Machiavellian sense—although, occasionally, you may need to use duplicity for respectable purposes, i.e. where certain ends can justify certain means.

Remember, the political payoff for fostering and nurturing relationships, and for developing a vast reservoir of skills and experiences, may take months, years, or even decades.

Do Your Team a Favor: Take a Vacation

August 7, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Everyone understands that a manager should make time to check out and recharge. Yet, there’s an expectation that he remains available, plugged in, informed, and accessible while on vacation. Therefore, even when he does go away, he doesn’t truly get away.

Even the hardworking manager, when overwhelmed and overcommitted, can become a bottleneck. Refusing to take a break not only burns him out but also wreaks havoc on his team’s productivity—it hinders necessary skills building and succession planning. By butting in whenever he can, he subtly undermines his team by insinuating that his team members cannot run things on their own.

In 2012, the contact management company FullContact was in the limelight when it announced a “Paid PAID Vacation” policy. It offered its employees $7,500 every year to go on vacation with the stipulation that the employee totally disconnects. FullContact CEO Bart Lorang explained why employees and their teams can be better when they disconnect:

Once per year, we give each employee $7500 to go on vacation. There are a few rules:

You have to go on vacation, or you don’t get the money.

You must disconnect.

You can’t work while on vacation.

If people know they will be disconnecting and going off the grid for an extended period of time, they might actually keep that in mind as they help build the company. For example:

They might empower direct reports to make more decisions.

They might be less likely to create a special script that isn’t checked into GitHub [software development repository] and only lives on their machine.

They might document their code a bit better.

They might contribute to the Company Wiki and share knowledge.

Get the picture? At the end of the day, the company will improve. As an added bonus, everyone will be happier and more relaxed knowing that they aren’t the last line of defense.

Idea for Impact: Take a vacation. Empower your team. When a smart manager goes on vacation, he leaves clear directions about the critical situations under which his team should contact him. While he mentally checks out, his team members get the opportunity to stretch and show their individual and collective mettle.

« Previous Page