Take the ZZZZ out of work

• Are you so bored by your job that you fall asleep as soon as you reach your seat?
• Do you feel it is so routine that you can work with your brain shut down?
• Do you complain that there is no excitement unless Ash and Abhi choose to visit your office?
• Are you so predictable that you wear white shirts on Mondays, blue on Tuesdays…?

Well then, what are you waiting for? GET up and take charge of your own work place! You are the only one who can do it. So, others wouldn’t appreciate it if you went to office dressed only in ostrich feathers tomorrow. No, they wouldn’t like it if you hung up red and green polka dotted curtains near your desk either. Nope, not even if they are small dots. Not even if they are squares.

Then, what is this creativity all about? It’s about doing things differently. Yep, start wearing those flowered grey shirts on Mondays. Wear purple ties with them. Now you are already feeling different, because you are dressed different. Okay and when we are about it, let's change the font too. Who said I should use only Arial or Times New Roman fonts?

No, I will not use the Windings font because you won’t understand what is written.
So we have seen 2 principles for being creative already:
1. Do things differently. Start with dressing differently
2. Don’t be so different that it is pointless

How can I be creative, you ask? I am not a painter or an artist, never will be, and never want to be. This creativity is not about art. It is not about understanding art. No, not even modern art, though that takes a lot of imagination and an ability to tell stories without blinking.

Let’s take an example. Do you think making tea is an extremely boring activity; just boil water, add tea sugar and milk and your tea is ready? What if we add a dash of creativity to it? One way to be creative is to not make tea at all, but Chocolate milkshake topped with ice cream. But let’s stick to basis here. You can’t really have Chocolate milkshake twice a day everyday. Ok, may be you can, but let’s not argue on that.

Let’s stick to tea. Take each ingredient: water, tea powder, sugar and Milk. Can we replace any of them so that we can enhance the taste?
- What about water?
o Canned water? Doesn’t sound interesting.
- Tea powder
o What about a flavored tea? Earl gray or mint flavor?
o What about adding that flavor yourself? Lemon grass? Cardamom? Ginger? Mint? Sounds good….
- Sugar
o What about honey?
o What about brown sugar? ( It is less “processed” sugar so it is better for health)
- Milk
o What about no milk at all? Your tea would look like beer!
o What about adding a dash of lemon instead.

With this simple exercise, we have already identified 10 different ways of making tea. Imagine how many other ways there are to do the complex tasks at your work place.

So now, we have seen how to start being different.
3. Take a task and break down its components. Change those components one by one and see what works.

Yes, take those headphones to office and listen to music tomorrow or take that great photo of holiday memories to brighten up your little corner. Great! You are already thinking creatively. Apply this simple principle to a little more to your work. Preparing boring reports? Can I jazz up those reports with a chart this time? Can I print those reports on yellow coloured paper? Can I summarize it and make it easier for the other person to understand? Can I get someone to program a macro in excel that makes the report for me?

Once you have started the process of being different, don’t stop. If you made mint tea once and then always make mint tea, you have once again fallen into the rut. So keep things changing. You will be drinking Chinese herbal green tea one day or finally realize the value of the good plain old “chai”. Great! You now know what works best for you.

To summarize:

-Know that things need to change and that you are going to change it
-Dress differently. It reinforces what you are about to do
-Identify the task that needs to change
-Break up that task into its components
-Start experimenting being different
-Don’t be so different that it is pointless
-Keep working on it, till it becomes a habit

Making your Presentation forceful

Making a presentation is all about putting things in logical order and presenting to an audience. Right? Not necessarily.

Let’s look at the problem of a manager in Atlas Manufacturing Co.

Vishwas Kohli is a manager in a company. He has a presentation to make this week to some seniors on an idea his team has proposed. He is nervous. His alumni classmate, Ankit Patel is a public speaker and trainer. He decided to call Ankit up to ask him for some tips. After the formalities, the conversation is as follows:

“Ankit, I need some advice. Do you have some time?”

“Go ahead. What’s the issue?” Ankit encouraged him.

“My team has come up with a innovative design change in the product. I need to present that and I am nervous. “

“I see…and…”

“Some of my guys have put together a PowerPoint presentation. But I am not convinced.”

“Then it’s a good thing you decided to speak to me. If you are not convinced, how will you convince your audience?”

“That’s a valid point. I never thought of that. What should I do then?”

“First and foremost, who is your audience?”

“It will be mainly senior management and my guys of course!”

“Hmmm…so Senior management is your target audience. Do you know what they are looking for when they spend an hour listening to your presentation?”

“Bottomline I guess!” Vishwas said laughing.

“All of them would be looking at the bottomline?”

“No…of course not! That is only what Rupesh Garware will look at. But Pereira will be there. He is the Sales and Marketing man. He would be interested in how it will sell. Devan is the manufacturing head. He will reject the idea if it is not easy to manufacture or will take lot more time and material….Ganesh…” Vishwas listed down everyone expected.

“…and is your presentation having material to convince each one of these decision makers?”

“I don’t think so. The presentation only talks about the change proposed. My guys are all kicked about how creative it is and so have put in a dozen slides on that.”

“So your gut feeling was right. What interests your guys will not “sell” to your audience. That is the key. When you make a presentation, think about two things
a) who is your audience and
b) what is your objective i.e. what do you want them to take away or decide based on your presentation.

Once you have these 2 in mind you will always be on the right track. " Ankit clarified confidently.

“I need to start rethinking what to put in this presentation...” Vishwas scratched his head.

“What’s the plan?”

“Simple. First, I will list down my audience. Second I will put down what each one will need to be convinced of.”

“Good plan. You will definitely feel more confident presenting.”

“I feel more confident now. I just need to build around the presentation my guys have made.”

“Let me know how it goes!”

“Will do that! I know this presentation is going to be a hit…”
Vishwas was all fired up as he went to an empty meeting room with a large white board. It was just what he needed.

INDEX

The contents of this site are classified below :

Presentation Skills - thoughts....

*NEW Get Noticed with Powerful Presentations: Why should presentation skills matter to you?

Evaluate your slides: A presentation on making slides memorable and audience-friendly.

Is your communication sharp enough to boost your career? Take the quick test now!
Simplicity in slides: Example of how difficult concepts are represented pictorally

Kill the bullet and other boring things: The first step to start making more creative slides

Burger-izing your presentation: Presenting to foreign audiences needs to be customised like burgers are to different countries.

Stand up and Speak : Are presentation skills important?

Slide inspiration: Getting inspired by photos for creative and emotion-getting slides

Talk the talk: Be the Amitabh of Presentations

Tips for preparing presentation

How to start on a presentation: Making presentations more forceful

Powerpoint templates : Free PowerPoint templates to use as you like.


Management
Motivation through humor : How to be a medicine man

Time Management : Creating and sticking to a schedule

Sacred cow hunting: About doing productive timepass and some comments on the book

Appraisals: Treating the appraisal nightmare

Managing team: At customer site

Quality: The quality attitude

Creativity : Adding creativity to work

Whole-brain thinking: Why right-brain thinking is essential...

Reviewing : A 'not so often 'talked about part of a managers job

Hope you find this site useful. Do feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.

DR. MANAGER: How to be the medicine man for your team ( without a Ph.d)

This post is about team management. If you are a manager who has recently been assigned a group of people and wondering what to do with them… or a manager who wants to be made to think....

Too many of my posts lately have been of a serious nature. It’s time to unwind and relax a bit.

Started to feel as if you are wasting time reading this article already? A bit of laughter does lot more. Consider these two case studies:

CASE A: Madhavan, the humorous
Madhavan, is a manager in a textile manufacturing company. Various floor supervisors report to him. He shows them smiling face. His main fault is that he gets tense when there are stiff deadlines to be met. But he encourages his guys to joke around, even in such situations. He takes all the floor supervisors out for a “cutting” tea when they meet their monthly deadlines.

When one of the supervisors tried to get workers to go on strike demanding better food in the canteen, Madhavan blasted the guy. Couple of days later, Madhavan was back to joking with the same guy and the incident was forgotten.

On Valentines Day, a supervisor had tied a dozen red balloons in the work area. Seeing this, Madhavan had burst out laughing. On the next occasion, that same supervisor was given the task of arranging the decorations.

CASE B: Prasad, the serious

Prasad is a manager in the same company. He keeps strict distance between himself and his subordinates. They are not allowed to smile or crack jokes in front of him. He thinks that it is insulting for subordinates to laugh in the boss's presence. He prides himself on his calm reaction to all news good and bad. When his supervisors meet deadlines, he calls them to his room and shakes hands with them.

When Prasad heard of the way Madhavan reacted to the red balloons, he said “my people have far more dignity than to do such things.”

NOW…
There is a new project coming up that has stringent deadlines. Remember I haven’t mentioned anything else about these two people – their educational background, the length of time they have been managers, their previous history of meeting deadlines, the kind of equipment they have…..

Which of the two managers, do you think, will be able to get their team motivated to achieve the target?

CONCLUSIONS

I am hoping and guessing you have said “Madhavan” because he has the right attitude to motivate his people. Given a boss who has a good sense of humor, subordinates automatically associate various other good managerial qualities to him. Remember, encouraging humor and bonhomie also makes any negative attributes seem less significant (Madhavan does get tense around deadlines!)

It takes time for a newly promoted manager who expected to lead a team, to adjust. No one takes to managing like a fish to water- because fish have always lived in water.
Management is a learning process and if a manger proceeds in the right away up the learning curve, he reaches a favorable point. That is, the point where his team considers him approachable, understanding and fair.

How can a manager be laughing and cracking jokes, you ask, when that manager is not naturally humorous? It is not necessary for the manager to be humorous. But can the manager encourage his people to be humorous- i.e. less stiff and formal and more open and natural around him?

If you have a team of 10 people, chances are that at least one of them is very humorous. Encouraged, this person will,
- act as a stress buster
- relieve boredom
- defuse tense situations and
- make the office a more attractive place to be.

Having found the joker in the pack, so to speak, your task as a manger, is to make sure those jokes are not offensive or interfering with work.

There are possible additional benefits to this. When people have less stress and feel that the atmosphere is open, they may be more productive, able to give more ideas and even undertake unpleasant tasks with good humor. Isn’t the idea of working on a holiday less frustrating, if other people at work were laughing and joking and working?

So go ahead, and be the medicine man for your team. Allow a dose of humor to take away the ills and chills of a workplace.

Thinking Quality

Ask anyone about a public service, and they will give you their free and incisive opinion about it. For example, ask them about the status of the roads. You will have to run away because they just will not stop complaining. They will condemn everything from the potholes, patchy repairs, the pollution and traffic jam caused by dug up roads, the condition during monsoon, and a hundred other things.

Let’s analyze this sample list of complaints:
- The potholes: caused by low quality material
- Patchy repaid work: leaving behind unwanted scraps, just addressing the specific part of the road with the pothole
- Pollution and traffic jam, dug up roads: carelessness about the people using the road, bad planning, closing off alternate roads at the same time
- Condition during monsoon: again to do with usage of low quality material that is unable to take the load.

Every one of these complaints is rooted in lack of two basic things:

- Quality focus
- Customer focus

The people who lay the roads are not bothered about quality or proper planning, because they are not bothered about how much the customers suffer because of their careless or money pinching attitude. They are laying the road, because they get paid money to do so.

It is easy to find fault with the public works department. That is because it is a problem visible to all and so easy to pinpoint. What about your customers? Are they complaining the same about the work that you deliver?

Now, think back to the work you do: whatever it is, running an organization or managing a team or driving a car. Think over the work your people do. Does this same attitudinal problem affect you or your team?

Here are some questions you can use to test yourself/ your team

1. When you deliver your product/service do you
a) wait till the customer tells you about a problem to fix it
b) do you take steps to fix any potential problems in advance

2. When the customer reports a problem, do you
a) Do whatever is required to make the customer happy
b) Address the customer’s problem, and put process in place so that it never occurs again. See if there are other related problems likely to occur.

3. When you offer more than 1 product or service, you
a) Leave it to your customer to figure out how to make these work together
b) You have done everything possible to be sure that they are complementary

4. When someone takes more time than the others to finish a project, or task,
a) He gets laughed at, because he is obsessive about being correct
b) Others are required to be as careful and obsessive about output

If you are answering with more A’s then you have the same problem as the Indian roads. If you have answered with more B’s, then you are on the right track. You are thinking Quality.
You are putting in proper process to reduce customer problems. You are encouraging people who are focused on doing quality work - less errors and less patchy fixes that come apart.

Do we really want to uphold the example set by bad road conditions? Are you or your organization still in that mode- the poor customer has to take whatever the organization chooses to give? He may not take it for very long, because, as we have seen before, without quality, there are complaints. Quality is in your attitude – see question 4 above. It reflects in everything you do.

There can be far more said on quality. But I will stop here for now.

Managing a team at the customer location

This is a case study:

Shyam Sundar (this name does not belong to anyone living or dead that I know of), was working in XOTIC Hardware systems. He was sent off to the customer's location abroad. He was pretty happy. He would earn in dollars, see new countries and it was like a promotion for him, he was going as a team leader.

The customer and the team members received him warmly enough. They briefed Shyam on what was happening. Shyam was determined that nothing should go wrong, because the responsibility ultimately rested on himself.

It turned out that things were not always so easy. If the customer was upset by the product features or delays he would blame Shyam. For the customer, Shyam was the person representing the company. He did not care if Shyam was not sitting and personally wiring together pieces of equipment. When his team members did anything wrong Shyam got blamed for it. Shyam had to accept all the blame quietly, because the project was running behind schedule.

It seemed to Shyam, working an 8 to 8 shift, that the number of complaints increased every month. He instructed his team to stop taking weekends off and start leaving late on weekdays to catch up. The customer would see how hardworking his team was. His team grumbled and did his bidding for a few days. One fine Sunday morning, however, he was the only one in office. He felt like his team had let him down. He started going to lunch alone and avoided time out with his team.

Shyam was sick of his team's behaviour and set up an internal meeting to coincide with the monthly get together with other Indians. He started to side the customer against his team. He was demotivated. He just wanted to go home. The customer’s voice and accent started to irritate him. His team started slacking off even more. Two of them actually quit and cited the reason for leaving as “Just too much pressure”.

The replacement arrived. It was a guy who was new to the job. Now, Shyam spent most of his time teaching the new guy. His other team members showed no initiative to help in anything. They seemed to take pride in making sure Shyam was perpetually embarrassed to meet the customer.

When Shyam returned home, his team was happy to see him get on the plane. They went to drop him off to be sure that he was going.

What happened here? Few simple words sum it up: Lack of Team management skills. When at customer location, under pressure, team leaders need to be able to stand back and take stock of how things are going for themselves. Customers have their own grievances and goals to achieve.
It is for the leader to view things in a more balanced way.

Shyam made many mistakes. Some of them are quite obvious. But, let's take a step further behind the scenes, and ask:

1. "Did Shyam know what was expected of him at site?"
2. "Was he trained in project and team management skills"
3. "Did he get adequate support and advice when he was there?"
   

This illustrative and purely fictional story is meant more for the bosses who send inexperienced people like Shyam to customer locations. Do people like Shyam, know what to expect, how to cope with stressful and demanding situations? They are left fending for themselves and have additional responsibilities thrust on them.

In a situation like this, the team leader needs to
- Manage the customer
- have excellent communication skills
- have good team management skills
- know when to escalate the situation to his bosses
- have project management skills
- even know how to be a buddy and mentor to new recruits.

With all this, he still needs to be able to take a balanced view of everything. If Shyam is sent to another customer site, is there any chance of his learning from his previous experience? In all likelihood, he will go with the idea in his mind , that customers will complain and team members will behave badly.

Without training before the event and support during the process, it is extremely difficult for the team leader to cope.

Appraisal Horror: Nightmare at work

Appraisal...does the word itself conjure up images of horror, disaster, headaches and story telling? A necessary evil..?? If you feel that way, then your team also feels the same. They know the injustice of it all and suffer silently or noisily. But suffer nevertheless. One of the important things that causes dissatisfaction and loss of morale is- the appraisal.

No, this is not about appraisal systems as such, how to set up a good system or how frequently it should be set up. This is aimed more towards a manager who has a team, and will need to conduct an appraisal, somewhere down the line.

If, as a manager, doing an appraisal is also unpleasant, then this is the right article for you. A guy in the middle, is in an unique position. He has unpleasant things happen to him from the top management and has to decide how to pass on this unpleasantness to people reporting to him. He has utilized his position best if he has learnt from mistakes his boss makes. If you are in such a position, have you ever tried listing down what it is, about your appraisal that makes it so bad?
Let me try and list some very common complains I have heard; do any of the following problems seem familiar?

- PARTIAL AMNESIA: The boss remembers only what you have done recently. He forgets that you had done that great job earlier in the appraisal cycle?

- PROMOTE YES MEN: The boss never bothers about what work you do. He just promotes those who pretend to do a great job and tell him what a great guy he is.

- MYSTERY OF THE RATING: He or she, just assigns a rating without really explaining why. You don't know from which hat the rating was pulled out of.

- BULL EXCUSES : Your boss owns that you did great work, but he just can't give you a better rating because of the normalization process. That process means that if he assigns VERY GOOD rating for a person, then he has to assign a VERY BAD rating to someone else. He is too soft-hearted to do that to anyone or is just telling you some of that stuff that comes out of the back of a bull.

- BACKDATED KRAs: Your boss says, YOU should have looked after so-and-so aspect of the job during the year - AT THE END OF THE CYCLE. Why couldn't he have said that before. How can he judge you on something that you didn’t even know you were supposed to do?
Did these strike a chord of deep sympathy within you? What if anyone from your team reads this, how would they feel?

Here are some simple tips on how not to let this happen to your guys....
1. Make a list:

List the thing that you dislike the most about the appraisal system. Make sure you don't repeat the mistake. Simple?? It is. E.g. I don't like my boss spending only 5 minutes at the end of the year explaining my mistakes or telling me what I did right. I would prefer if he told me right at the instant so I can remedy my mistakes immediately. Now, think, wouldn't your team also like to know as and when they do something wrong/great? Do correcting small behavior-related faults have one appraisal cycle gestation period…like a baby (9 months after)?

2. Note it down:

The good, the bad, the ugly. Note it all down. Open a notepad in the name of each one of your team. Periodically put down what they have been doing into it. E.g. Shiva managed to cross sell a product to a very difficult customer. He showed great communication and inter-personal skills. But he was very uneasy at the dinner table in the party hosted for them. Need to nominate him for the etiquette training. Next appraisal cycle, you have the whole appraisal ready with you.

There are so many additional benefits to doing this:

• You know the reasons you are going to give for the rating. No partial amnesia for you!!
• It takes less time per person, because you already have all the data. Projects or work don't stop during appraisal time. So get on with your other work.
• You can spend time explaining the reasons for the rating, citing specific incidents. E.g. I am giving you this rating, because for your role, the most important factor is being able to coordinate between Team A and Team B... so it will be clear that you are not promoting yes men.
• If asked offhand about suitability of your team members for a particular role change or promotion, you have the information - on the tip of your tongue.

Writing things down makes you conscious and aware of ideas existing vaguely at the back of your mind.

E.g. I recommend Ravi to be assigned to head this team. He showed a lot of
potential when we organized that large convention last month.

3. Tell THEM upfront:
If your organization does not have a system of telling people what is expected from their job or function upfront, then take initiative. Do it for your team. Tell them, what you expect. Sit with your boss and get the same done for yourself too. When you know what target has to be achieved, it is easier to achieve it! There is no use to anyone, telling after everything has happened: YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS or I THOUGHT YOU KNEW!

4. and TELL them RIGHT...

Make sure you can evaluate your team on the Key Results you set. E.g. Mr. Khanna, you should communicate better this year, has no meaning. You can neither measure it nor can Khanna work towards this nebulous goal. Mr. Khanna, ensure that your team knows about all releases 2 weeks before their due date. This time they will be able to prepare themselves well in advance for the work load. You have given him a number...and made his goal tangible.

Does all this seem simple and intuitive? Management always is like that. So then I guess you must be already doing all this!

If you think, that in an organization with a zillion people, you are alone in doing all this, then don't despair! Your team will automatically look to you as their role model. When they lead teams, they will apply what they have learnt from you. They will tell others in other teams... Soon people will be asking their bosses, why something does not happen in their own team or department... and the trickle will become a drizzle...a whisper will become a roar...

Maybe you will create a revolution, maybe not. But you will truly do right by your team and to yourself. Just take that one thought away with you.

Working on a presentation.

Making a presentation? Starting off with preparing one? Here are some tips to get you on the right track...

JUST GET ON WITH IT
When you want to make a presentation, just open Powerpoint or Powerbullet or any other software and start typing. This will ensure that you start in the middle and end up in the river without knowing swimming. If you have no plan, the war is already lost. Who cares if, without a POA ( plan of action) you are DOA ( Dead on arrival)?

RECYCLE
When you have an old, borrowed or stolen presentation that worked or may work or could work , reuse it. Thats a great way to just get it over with. It doesn't matter if you look like a burbling fish being strangled by an octopus. Your audience is asking questions and you don't know why something has been put on the slide. Recycling will get you a promotion, as your organisation is fully environment-conscious.

MAKE IT SOPORIPHIC
Put your audience to sleep. With all the work they have been putting in, they suffer from insomnia. Read each slide, one by one, word for word, without explaining anything. Lull your audience to sleep. Best of all, no one can say - they didnt like it!!!


JAZZ IT
Your presentation software had such great features. Use all of them. Your audience will just love it. They will queue up afterwards to ask you, just how you achieved that particular effect. The one that blinded and dazzled them so much that they didn't notice what you were droning on about. Hide your noise by cranking up the jazz levels.

DATABASE-IT
Your presentation should have every possible information required by everyone from the watchman to the door knob to the CFO to the guy who joined yesterday. Cover every subject, under the sun, so that you never run out of material. Put in all the sales statistics from 1777 to date. Add in the projection for next 100 years just for effect. Dare anyone to ask a question which is not already covered. ...atleast on slide number 787. Yes, ofcourse the presentation was supposed to be only for half an hour....

Keeping to a schedule

On working from home...

Making a schedule
The worst aspect is sticking to a schedule.
There are so many things waiting to grab attention like a blood-sucking leech.
The stuff that came back with me, on the last day at my old workplace is still mocking at me from my cupboard. No time to open up that plastic bag full of memories and put them into their rightful place.

My life can get along fine without having that bag cleared out. Just like windows can do without dusting or that shoe rack can remain disorganised. My daily schedule is set and I am planning to stick to it.

Making the schedule sticky..

The schedule has to "Work", or there is no way I can stick to it. Morning is for "home" activities. Afternoon to evening is for work. This schedule goes for a toss only if absolutely necessary - like taking my kid to the doctor. Even then the time has to be adjusted on another day.

It has been working for a while now, with good progress. I feel more work-oriented since business related work starts at the same time. There is less tendency to slack off or take an off. There is a timetable up, which lists all that needs to be done. No dates put against the list yet. That may need to be done soon.

Deadline it
Have DEADLINES and SCHEDULES and stick to them. Your boss in office wouldnt stand for you to give excuses. You are your own boss. Don't stand it from yourself!