Dr. Shailesh Thaker - Best Management Training Blog - Top Management Consultants

Posts Tagged ‘ceo training’

The lesson that working as a builder taught me above all others, one that’s not in the textbooks but should be, is this: There’s pure joy when you take a risk to pursue your dream and find work that you deeply connect with.

Now, as a college professor, I see my students struggling with a desire to have more than a career. They want to have a “calling,” but many are dissatisfied and frustrated, following a path set by others while afraid to set their own. I have counseled many of my students to follow their passion as I did. But it’s not an easy thing to do.

I learned in building that in the end, for my career to be my calling, it will not be what I designed, but instead the collective of what I experienced. It will not be aimed toward a fixed end of stability and certainty, but a continuous pursuit of growth and awareness. That growth will not be for others to critique and review but for me to judge and deem satisfactory. Now I know that my very first decision to become a carpenter in Nantucket was only the first step in a journey, I didn’t know I was taking. And that’s what makes it so wonderful. For all its seeming irrationality, it was my announcement to myself and to others that my life was my own.

When I started this journey, I just wanted to be a carpenter. But I surpassed my wildest dreams and became a builder, a distinction I didn’t even know existed when I started. And this realization leads me to one overriding and inescapable truth, that a life well lived must be a creative endeavor. Whatever form that creativity takes — whether it’s carpentry, building, teaching, raising a family, or writing a book — the challenge of looking within ourselves to find that creative element makes us who we are. But chances are, if we are genuinely open to the possibilities of a calling, we will find that satisfaction will come from someplace far different from where we expected to find it.

I cherish my experiences as a builder — and the astonished looks on people’s faces when I tell them that I chose this path over graduate school. I still maintain my set of tools and make constant repairs on my house (many not needed). And I recall the certainty of satisfaction I felt with a job well done. I felt a clarity in construction that doesn’t come as easily in academia.

This is not to say that academia is not a noble profession or that I should not be devoting my life to it now. It is to say that satisfaction in life comes from knowing who you are, what you want to do and sticking to your idea of what quality is; how a job well done is measured. Matthew Crawford has been writing lately about the need for society to reexamine the taken-for-granted assumption that everyone should go to college and get a white collar desk job; that the trades “suffer from low prestige” and that a choice to go into them “is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive.”

While I agree that the trades are an honorable profession (and presently quite a lucrative one, as anyone who has done a renovation on their home can attest). But the deeper point to me is the challenge to take the time to think about what you really want in life before laying out the time and money on higher education. And once you have a sense of yourself, stick to your own measure of who you are.

The pressures of conformity in graduate school can be quite strong; most vividly at graduation time when students compare starting salaries. And those pressures start much earlier for many. I see young students today building their resumes from the 7th or 8th grade. The danger in teaching this practice so early is the concurrent lesson that the measure of your worth comes from outside, from the evaluation of others as they survey your resume.

When students ask me where they should go with their careers to make the most money or to have the most impact, I am quick to tell them: “Wrong questions, try again.” The key questions are ones that only they can answer (with some prodding from me): “What were you meant to do with your life? What do you want to do? Where do you most fit?” The final lesson for my students from my years building houses is to pick their path and be open to the possibilities that emerge as they embark upon it. I truly believe that opportunities will be revealed to you.

As Henry David Thoreau said most eloquently, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Andrew J. Hoffman is at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and is the author of Builder’s Apprentice Huron River Press, 2010. This is the fifth installment in a series of posts on five years spent running a construction company. The first post was Firing Someone: What They Don’t Teach You in B-School. The second post was, Talking Across Cultures (With or Without Profanity). The third post was, Trusting Your Gut: What They Don’t Teach You in B-School. The fourth post was, How Comraderie Works: What I Didn’t Learn in B-School.

On June 6, 1944, 156,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landed in Normandy to establish a foothold in France and begin the drive to Berlin and victory in Europe in World War II. It’s easy to remember the victory and to praise the leaders and stand in awe of their competence and confidence.

But there were plenty of uncertainties at the time. Nothing this large or complex had ever been attempted. The great mass of US troops were still untested in battle.

The excellent German army was just across the Channel in well-prepared fortifications. They were led by one of Germany’s legendary military leaders, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

Even the weather was a factor. Eisenhower had already postponed the invasion because of some of the worst storms in memory. When he gave the order to launch the operation on June 6, he had only the most rudimentary weather information to go on.

Since we know how things came out, it’s easy to underestimate the uncertainty. But, for Ike there were huge gaps in information, complex operations that could break down, and a determined foe whose actions would influence the outcome of the day.

He faced the very real possibility that the invasion would fail and that thousands of Allied men would die without achieving victory. As he thought about that, he wrote out the message he would release if things went badly. Here it is.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.

My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

That kind of willingness to take responsibility is rare today. Today our leaders often deny any part in decisions that turned out wrong. They practice the art of spin.

How about if, just for the Fourth of July, we talk less about leadership and think more about responsibility?

Boss’s Bottom Line

No one wants to work with a coward or a liar. Be assured that your people will know if you act like either one. Great leaders give praise and take responsibility.

High performing leaders know that learning to lead at the edge is a lifetime process of discovery. By playing to win, rather than playing not to lose. Winning every time is a habit of leader. It is not that leaders do not want to lose but it is always they need to win.
Leaders are alive at every moment and have inside power to go to work place with new energy, everyday. They know that they have power inside to express outside at the best level. Leaders do elevate their potential at their best. Leader change the situation by efforts, performance and influence.
Leaders are on a journey to shake the world. To shake the world, first they shake themselves.
Leaders make work a more exciting, enjoyable and engaging place for themselves and all those around them. Leaders do ask question to themselves that what is exciting? What is new in the life? They always jumped from one priority to another priority.
Life is not 100 meter sprint, it is a marathon race. One has to run everyday, every morning. YES!!!No option and no alternative. Everyday struggling, fighting, jumping and meeting priorities .AHHH! YES! Leader cannot effort to waste a time or moment.
“They days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party but they say nothing. And if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away.” Asserted by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
With this ideology, leaders seat in the first row with success.

I know, I know. You’d think I’d have learned.

Last week I wrote about the dangers of multitasking e.g. use of a cell phone while driving. And so I proposed a way to stop.

But when I sent that email, I wasn’t in a car. I was safe at my desk. What could go wrong?

Well, I sent the client the message. Then I had to send him another one, this time with the attachment I had forgotten to append. Finally, my third email to him explained why that attachment wasn’t what he was expecting. When I eventually refocused on the call, I realized I hadn’t heard a question the Chair of the Board had asked me.

I swear I wasn’t smoking anything. But I might as well have been. A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQs. What’s the impact of a 10-point drop? The same as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

You might think you’re different, that you’ve done it so much you’ve become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you’d be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.

I decided to do an experiment. For one week I would do no multitasking and see what happened. What techniques would help? Could I sustain a focus on one thing at a time for that long?

For the most part, I succeeded. If I was on the phone, all I did was talk or listen on the phone. In a meeting I did nothing but focus on the meeting. Any interruptions — email, a knock on the door — I held off until I finished what I was working on.

During the week I discovered six things:

First, it was delightful. I noticed this most dramatically when I was with my children. I shut my cell phone off and found myself much more deeply engaged and present with them. I never realized how significantly a short moment of checking my email disengaged me from the people and things right there in front of me. Don’t laugh, but I actually — for the first time in a while — noticed the beauty of leaves blowing in the wind.

Second, I made significant progress on challenging projects, the kind that — like writing or strategizing — require thought and persistence. The kind I usually try to distract myself from. I stayed with each project when it got hard, and experienced a number of breakthroughs.

Third, my stress dropped dramatically. Research shows that multitasking isn’t just inefficient, it’s stressful. And I found that to be true. It was a relief to do only one thing at a time. I felt liberated from the strain of keeping so many balls in the air at each moment. It felt reassuring to finish one thing before going to the next.

Fourth, I lost all patience for things I felt were not a good use of my time. An hour-long meeting seemed interminably long. A meandering pointless conversation was excruciating. II became laser-focused on getting things done. Since I wasn’t doing anything else, I got bored much more quickly. I had no tolerance for wasted time.

Fifth, I had tremendous patience for things I felt were useful and enjoyable. When I listened to my wife Eleanor, I was in no rush. When I was brainstorming about a difficult problem, I stuck with it. Nothing else was competing for my attention so I was able to settle into the one thing I was doing.

Sixth, there was no downside. I lost nothing by not multitasking. No projects were left unfinished. No one became frustrated with me for not answering a call or failing to return an email the second I received it.

That’s why it’s so surprising that multitasking is so hard to resist. If there’s no downside to stopping, why don’t we all just stop?

I think it’s because our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? So, while you’re on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brain power to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we’re already using that brain power to pick up nuance, think about what we’re hearing, access our creativity, and stay connected to what’s happening around us. It’s not really extra brain power. And diverting it has negative consequences.

So how do we resist the temptation?

First, the obvious: the best way to avoid interruptions is to turn them off. Often I write at 6 am when there’s nothing to distract me, I disconnect my computer from its wireless connection and turn my phone off. In my car, I leave my phone in the trunk. Drastic? Maybe. But most of us shouldn’t trust ourselves.

Second, the less obvious: Use your loss of patience to your advantage. Create unrealistically short deadlines. Cut all meetings in half. Give yourself a third of the time you think you need to accomplish something.

There’s nothing like a deadline to keep things moving. And when things are moving fast, we can’t help but focus on them. How many people run a race while texting? If you really only have 30 minutes to finish a presentation you thought would take an hour, are you really going to answer an interrupting call?

Interestingly, because multitasking is so stressful, single-tasking to meet a tight deadline will actually reduce your stress. In other words, giving yourself less time to do things could make you more productive and relaxed.

Finally, it’s good to remember that we’re not perfect. Every once in a while it might be OK to allow for a little multitasking. As I was writing this, Daniel, my two-year-old son, walked into my office, climbed on my lap, and said “Monsters, Inc. movie please.”

So, here we are, I’m finishing this piece on the left side of my computer screen while Daniel is on my lap watching a movie on the right side of my computer screen.

Sometimes, it is simply impossible to resist a little multitasking.

One in four people put their health at risk if they work without a break through the day, a new study has revealed.

Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) has warned that working in the same position for too long and going to work when ill or stressed can damage health.

Long working hours without a break can also lead to back pain, obesity, depression, heart disease and stroke.

“Physiotherapists are concerned that overworking and not taking breaks is actually costing employers and their staff,” telegraph.co.uk quoted Phil Gray, chief executive of the CSP as saying.

“Employees pay the price with their health and there is a cost to employers in reduced productivity and performance. Work is good for us and can contribute to physical and mental wellbeing - but not when overworking means people don’t have the time or energy to look after their own health or when staff are at work but are not fit for work,” Gray added.

Ben Willmott, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, agreed, saying “These findings should ring alarm bells for employers. A certain level of pressure at work is of course desirable.

“However when the pressure people face regularly exceeds their ability to cope, in other words stress, it is likely to lead to time off work and is linked to conditions such as depression, anxiety and heart disease”.