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

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“True leadership must be experienced, which influence people.”

A leader in an organization has to possess a number of qualities for effective results on continual basis. But one of the most important attributes of a leader is his ability to empower his employees unselfishly, unpossessively to exercise their skills on the job, make mistakes and learn from them for future improvements in their work.

A good leader, by definition, is not one who has not made any leader in life. He is a person who has invariably made leader and shape them to meet new challenges in the organization.

If one applies this concept in an organizational context, any leader, howsoever great leader he may be, simply cannot bring effectiveness at all levels across the organization without adopting the principle of delegation of responsibilities with authority to his employees. To achieve that, he has to identify right kind of persons within the organization and consciously decide to groom them as leaders.

To serve this purpose, he has to entrust such employees with   responsibilities which, in normal course the leader himself would have shouldered. Along with the responsibilities, he also has to give expressed authority to experiment his ideas in his functional area, let him make mistakes, counsel him to avoid such mistakes in future and leave the matter at that.This process may look very irksome and time consuming to implement. Nevertheless, any organization which believes in long term ‘succession planning’ simply cannot do without undergoing this process.

Another facet of this situation, which is equally essential, is the ‘job satisfaction’ of every employee at the end of the day. For an organization to prosper, every employee needs to feel happy at the end of the day having accomplished something substantial   during the given time. Irrespective of the quantum of remuneration he receives, he will go home feeling incomplete at the core of his heart without the feeling of his work well done. This surely is not a healthy sign for future of any organization.

The top rung of leaders in any organization must have the attitude of imparting their skills and knowledge to the persons working under their wings. They should also be given enough opportunities for their professional growth and also encourage them to make mistakes in the process. This exercise if done with right kind of persons over a period of time, shall definitely give the organization exceptional leaders who could enable the organization to achieve greater heights with the young crop of employees with great leadership qualities.

Needless to add, this should also give the senior leader the satisfaction of having created a no. of leaders in the organization who would continue his legacy of effective and result-oriented management of the organization.

And no amount of financial compensation can beat this great feeling at the end of one’s career in an organization!!!

Here below, I am listing the top ten mistakes, which are very common amongst bosses.

1) Micro-Management
Sometimes, when bosses assign work to an employee they don’t completely trust that employee will be capable of completing the work. They underestimate the ability of the people they hire and end up offending the employee. “According to me, the number one mistake is, not effectively identifying the strengths of the employee, thereby micro managing or not delegating or not trusting the employee’s judgment. A good boss is one who brings out the best in the employee,” says Sharda Balaji, Founder of NovoJuris Services.

2) Using Improper Mode of Communication

Some bosses have a weird sense that since they are boss they should order people around and create a military kind of environment. They feel the stricter the things, the better things are organized. If an employee is late for some deadline, then the boss starts labeling the work or the employee himself.

3) Leading through Intimidation

This is one of the worst kind of mistake that bosses make. They feel that if an employee is threatened to work they will perform better. What the boss does not realize is that an employee under such pressure end up losing interest in work and will meet the deadline just for the heck of it. Such employees then would only do what is asked from them and will never happily give hundred percent to do something good for the company.

4) Lacking Empathy for Employee’s Situation

They are sometimes when employees do make excuses to take leave or when they come late. But, not every reason is an excuse. Bosses end up thinking that their employees are always making excuses and do not show any consideration for employee’s situation.

5) Becoming Inaccessible to your Employees

An employee wants to contact his boss for something important but he is busy with other things and does not give any weightage to employee’s problem and hence he is scared to approach his boss.

“I have had some experiences at one of the company I worked with, where the manager was just not approachable and accessible. I could not expect any kind of guidance from him. It would not be wrong if I say that he was too busy caught with meetings (not accessible). He was also not approachable at the same time because of bad temperament and everything depended on his mood,” said Prashant Honnavar, who is a HR Manager at NextBiT Computing.

6) Not Providing Guidance or Motivating Employees

An employee should always have something to look forward. A good manager knows how to motivate employees to make them perform better but for this, they have to spend some time with their team. In today’s IT work environment, many of the managers have no time to spend with the team due to daylong meetings. As a result, they miss out an understanding a team member’s problem at work and providing the right support and solutions for the same. Failing to support and understanding a team member will lead to recipe of resignation. A manager should always have the practice of having one on one to know more about the team member, and then provide right feedback at the same time to motivate with the right attitude.

7) Not Providing a Clear Picture – Transparency

Many times boss assigns work to employees without clearly telling them the complete picture. Boss should always maintain transparency with their employee to make them understand what exactly they are doing. “If bosses start informing their team about the correct scenarios and maintain transparency about a project, then the employees will work more willingly and meeting the deadline will no longer be a concern of the boss alone,” said Juilee Joshi, who worked as a Technical Support analyst at BMC software.

Insecurity about Their Post

Some bosses prefer to do things alone rather than taking team’s help, as they are unsecure that someone will provide better solution, and thus they get a sense of insecurity about their post. “There is something unique about Indian bosses. They get this superiority complex about their position and I fail to understand why. There are many extremely capable folks who like to remain in the ‘individual contributors’ role because they do not enjoy people management,” said Balaji. “You can deal with an egoistic boss, a demanding boss, an impatient boss… but the worst kind is the one who is insecure.”

9) Trying to be a Friend as well as a Boss or Showing Partiality

This is the trickiest part of the boss-employee relationship. Some of the bosses try to maintain a perfect balance between professionalism and friendship but it does not always work well for the company. Employees might become lenient in submitting at deadline or boss might start expecting too much from employees since they are good friend as well. Another part of this equation can be showing partiality or favoring certain employees over others, which create negative vibes in the team.

10) Making Fake Promises

In order to motivate employees many time managers make fake promises of promotion or goodies but when the time comes, they just stall it. This de-motivates an employee a great deal and might backfire badly on the company. There are many other mistakes that bosses commit, but we feel that these are the top ten reasons. You may think differently and have your own reasons. We would like to hear the top mistakes that your boss makes. Do let us know.

Ribble, who has chronic lymphocytic leukemia in addition to severe diabetes and impaired hearing, needed new eyeglasses last spring but couldn’t afford them after losing a job he’d held for more than 40 years.

Then he found out about the Modest Needs Foundation. The grass-roots charity pools thousands of small donations to help people get through short-term financial crises. Donors direct their dollars to the requests they want to fund.

“I need these glasses very badly or I will have to stop doing a lot of what I do: reading, writing, and working with my computer; I just can’t see that well at all,” Ribble wrote in his request.

Eleven visitors to modestneeds.org pitched in, and within a week Ribble, who lives in a trailer in Nappanee, Indiana, received a $364 check that changed his life.

“When I found my message from Modest Needs today that help was on the way, I cried a few tears of happiness knowing that I would be able to see again,” he wrote in a thank you note.

Stories like that make Modest Needs Foundation founder and CEO Keith Taylor giddy.

“It is so much fun to read these testimonials,” Taylor said. “It’s like Christmas every day.”

People often don’t realize how powerful just 10 or 20 dollars can be, Taylor said. In many cases, a small amount can stop a crisis in its tracks.
… No one who had ever helped me had ever been wealthy, they had just been nice.
-Keith Taylor, Modest Needs Foundation founder and CEO

“It’s wonderful to see what this does for people,” Taylor said. “You don’t find out until after the fact what kind of an impact these little contributions that people are making; … you have no idea what kind of a change you really are making in the person’s life.”

Cady Stanton, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, gave $20 to help fund Ribble’s request.

“Glasses are such a small thing, right?” she said. “I mean, the man’s worked 40-some years and he has cancer. The least he should be able to do is have some glasses. Our social contract with our country - we should have glasses. I mean, come on. It’s not that big of a deal.”

Ribble wrote a beautiful thank you note that was passed along to the donors. Stanton keeps a copy of it on her desk.
SUCCESS STORIES
Modest Needs Foundation CEO Keith Taylor’s two favorite stories about his organization:

A 5-year-old boy had never been able to draw a picture with shapes because of an eye condition. His mother requested $50 for a down payment on $500 special lenses. Modest Needs paid the full cost of the lenses. When he put them on for the first time, the little boy turned to his mother and said, “Mommy, is that you?” When they went home, he drew his first picture with shapes: a portrait of his family.

A woman who had been marginally employed her whole life requested about $250 for union dues to qualify for a better job. When Taylor caught up with her two years later, she had been promoted and moved into a better job and was on her way to close on a condominium. “She went from marginal employment to home ownership in two years. I’d say that’s a pretty good investment of $250,” Taylor said.

“Your generosity overwhelms me and I just can’t say in words how very happy I am and I thank God that someone cared enough for a disabled man, in a very hardship situation, to help me out to see better,” the note read in part.

Taylor founded the site seven years ago out of a similar sense of gratitude.

One evening in 2002 he was marveling at how happy his life was, and remembered a few singular acts of kindness that had helped him get there.

For example, while in graduate school in Tennessee, he incurred a car repair bill that used up his rent money. His boss at his part-time job at a movie theater paid the rent for him - not a loan, a gift.

As he reflected on his good fortune, Taylor pledged, “When I’m really rich I’m going to start an organization to help the working poor.”

That’s when his “aha!” moment came.

“It occurred to me all of a sudden that no one who had ever helped me had ever been wealthy, they had just been nice. They’d just had compassion,” he said.

Taylor decided to set aside $350 to help one individual per month get through a crisis. He created a crude Web site inviting requests, expecting his effort to remain small, personal and obscure - “on the millionth page of Google.”

But this was the Internet. A well-meaning friend posted a link on the widely read blog Metafilter.com, and the next day Taylor was swamped with 1,100 e-mails. Many were asking for help, some were skeptical of Taylor’s motives, and a surprising number of people wanted to contribute, he said.

At first he fended off would-be donors, because his vision for the project was limited, he said. But the e-mails and offers to donate kept coming, along with more requests for help. Taylor soon incorporated Modest Needs as a nonprofit organization.

Modest Needs’ first grant saved a woman’s life: It paid for a mammogram that found a tumor, Taylor said.

The organization has done nothing but grow ever since. By the end of December, Taylor expects to have made $2.4 million in grants in 2009.

“Every day is another miracle,” Taylor said. “It’s beyond my imagination.”

Here’s how it works: People e-mail their requests - help with rent or a car repair or a medical bill, for example - to Modest Needs, whose seven-person staff researches and verifies their legitimacy.

The vetted requests are then posted on ModestNeeds.org, where donors can choose which ones they want to help fund. Once the funding level is reached, a check is sent out.

Gift certificates are available. A donor can contribute any amount and then let the gift recipient decide where it should go.

“You’re talking about huge, huge numbers of individual people giving just a little bit of what they have to make the lives of people who have short-term emergencies a little bit better by just keeping them on track, keeping them out of the social services system altogether,” Taylor said.

Those individual contributions are multiplied by matching grants from larger donors, including musician and recording company executive Herb Alpert and his wife, Lani Hall Alpert.

“We really wanted to help him [Taylor] grow that community of small giving,” said Rona Sebastian, president of the Herb Alpert Foundation.

The Alperts were also struck by how many Modest Needs grant recipients - 68 percent, Taylor said - turned around and became donors to the organization, Sebastian said.

“That was extremely exciting to us because that was something we found to be very powerful,” she said.

Ribble is among those rebound donors: Despite his poverty, he donates $5 a month to help others through Modest Needs.

Quit smoking and get 10 percent hike in basic pay. That is the offer made by the head of a Bangalore based firm to coax his colleagues to quit smoking in 2010, reports Debi Prasad Sarangi of Bangalore Mirror.

“The idea is to ensure that employees adopt a healthy lifestyle,” says A C Ramesh, CEO, Focus Engineering Services, who plans to lead by example. Ramesh has been a smoker for the last 25 years and plans to quit the bad habit, which, he thinks, would have some positive impact on his colleagues.

Focus has close to 40 employees and its clients include the Confident Group, Embassy Group and ISRO. According to Ramesh, 50 percent of his colleagues are chain-smokers. Concerns about his and their health prompted Ramesh to come up with this idea. “I have had enough of smoking and drinking for the last 25 years. Now, I want to put an end to these vices for the sake of my health and that of my family. Suddenly, I thought of getting my colleagues also to do the same, but realized that concern for their health alone won’t motivate all of them. I expect the 10 percent bonus, in addition to the regular hike, to do the trick. And, if my men are in good health, my company will also be in good health.”

Ramesh’s colleagues have already stopped smoking when they are in client’s office or premises. But, there is a rider. “Anyone violating the pact faces a 20 percent pay cut,” says Ramesh. “I was planning to introduce the bonus for those who quit both smoking and drinking. But, after discussions with senior colleagues, I decided to start with smoking. A packet of cigarettes costs about Rs. 40 and is within the reach of most people, and, hence, has far-reaching consequences. Any person can smoke 10 cigarettes every day.”

Karthik Anand, a Project Engineer in Focus said, “I would definitely quit smoking. If my boss can do it, why can’t I? This will only help me in the future. I have been smoking for last 15 years. Earlier, I used to smoke three packets, but of late have cut down to one pack.”

Dr. Shailesh Thaker - Management Guru India

A world renowned human potentialist, HR guru and management educator Dr Shailesh Thaker believes that leadership is demonstration, not definition. His specialist talents include mind management, professional development, managerial effectiveness, creativity and creative problem solving. Here, he answers 10 questions about his career so far.

How did your career begin?
My career began in September 1989. I had a training workshop at Surat, Gujarat in India called ‘Train the trainer’; a tough three day programme since there were a lot of us and we had to work through the day and night. The programme transformed me, however, and gave me the direction to make a career as a HR guru.

What are your greatest inspirations?
My greatest inspirations are Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi. My personal mission statement is: “To inspire people and to help them to identify and enhance their potential so that they can achieve the goals of their life.”

What is your philosophy on life?
My philosophy on life is to live in the present. The past never equals the future and each day is a new challenge.

In your opinion how can we underpin success?
Success depends on passion. You have to be passionate about your work, love your work and work with love.

What is your vision for world success and prosperity?
It is a way of life. The world should focus on new horizons and not be limited by the constraints of every day life. The distance between rich and poor creates a lot of problems for humanity and we should aim to achieve greater balance to prevent this. The world needs to be balanced but this should not compromise the goals of success and prosperity.

What are the determining links between time and purpose?
Time is used in different contexts in different parts of the world so I think one should focus on the present and give 100% to every moment, and every year one should compare and contrast with previous years. I think that can make every moment more meaningful.

You are recognised the world over. Who recognised you first, yourself or others?
The key to success is knowing you can do it. I recognised myself first then gradually other people came to recognise my potential and supported my goals. Confidence is key to the whole success equation.

To what extent does success depend on others?
Success is more connected with yourself than others. There are things within your control that you need to control. There are obviously things beyond your control such as governments, organisations and time that can hinder your progress, so what you should focus on is your internal resources. Leadership is inside-outside, it is the ability to project that which is most important, but also that you project what is inside you. One should focus internally, and then externally everything will fall into place.

How should leadership be measured?
Leadership should be looked at as 360 degrees; and travelling in both directions. It is a circle of trust. Trust yourself and others and in turn others will trust you; this is the foundation of leadership and success.

Which matters most: inspiration or perspiration?
Knowledge is the basic inspiration for everybody. One learns and then one applies. The application of the knowledge requires work. Application of knowledge is where the success lies. If the knowledge is not applied, then it is useless. So it is both inspiration and perspiration that matter.

Online Link
http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=10894

Official Website http://www.drshaileshthaker.co.in