Execution and Results

You have started an initiative. You have laid down initial plans for executing it. You now go ahead and execute the plan.

Will you necessarily have success now?

You may or may not! Execution of plans does not necessarily ensure success.

So what kind of execution or what other elements are necessary to ensure success?

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Let us first look at our perception of execution.

Will you call execution a series of steps or an iterative process? Usual image might be it is a series of steps. If you require follow ups and iteration- well that might seem as process inefficiency!

Surprisingly, I have hardly come across initiatives that have not required follow up, iterations, or some kind of course correction.

Execution of plans is important. But plan needs to factor in 3 things mentioned above.

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Secondly you need to have contracted beforehand with relevant stakeholders on definition of success and timing and process of success measurement.

This is important because success maybe interpreted differently by different stakeholders.

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So execution of plans seems to be a pre-requisite but not a guarantor of success! – a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success J

 

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Sourav

Long Term Perspective

Can you create a long term plan for your work?  

Most of us will be able to at least propose an initial draft of a 2-3 year plan.

 

Are you working today with a long term perspective? 

I was a bit taken back the first time I thought about this question. I frankly didn't have a well formed answer.

 

You could say that if you are working towards a chartered out long term plan, you probably are working today with a long term perspective. But is that the case?

 

Yes. That does seem to be the case. A long term plan will also have tactical and operational elements to it – which link what you do today to expected outcomes in 2-3 years.

 

But then why do we often feel like a clog in wheel - not sure of why we are doing the work we are doing today?

 

Many a times we may not have been involved in long term strategy creation process and/or we don't understand how long term strategy connects back into our daily/weekly/monthly actions.

 

Managers can play a role here – in helping employees understand/appreciate this connection/linkage.

 

Once we understand this linkage, chances are we will do our work today with a long term perspective.

 

Consequently, our work might also feel more meaningful.

 

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Sourav

Manager and Mentor

How does one manage an intern? Is managing an intern similar to managing a full time employee?

How does one manage a campus hire? Is managing a campus hire similar to managing an industry hire?

I think there are differences. These show up both in terms of amount and nature of supervision (if that is the correct term) required.

Frequency of supervision (meet once in how many days) differs. For an intern, it might make sense to meet him/her at least once a day. Would you do that with an industry hire? Possibly not!

Nature of supervision (kind of support provided) differs too. An intern might require more mentoring - being told the answers, more structure in work assigned, and a larger element of ‘psychologically settling down’ conversations. An industry hire/full time employee might want more freedom in both terms of shaping out the goals and working towards them.

First and second elements in mentoring need to be led the manager.

On the other hand, the last element (psychologically setting down) may be better led by a peer/combination of peers. But manager surely has a role to play in setting up these peer relationships.

 

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Sourav

Modifiers

Sometime we qualify our statements -using terms like maybe, possibly, may, try, you may want to, etc. I hear and have experienced that’s one way of ensuring you are collaborative and inclusive.

While it surely does help us put challenging and risky propositions on the table less threateningly, does it have universal applicability? Should we be using modifiers irrespective of the situation.

Solutions are context specific- and so I believe is usage of modifiers.

A difficult conversation where the other party may not be on same page as you and you yourself may be wrong - is a situation where usage of modifiers help. Same will be true for a situation where you want to support the other person/party to move from one position to the other – and nature of task/relationship between both of you is not adversarial.

A context where usage of modifiers may not be relevant is in high stakes negotiations – you need to be clear in your communication – though I accept that timing matters a lot in negotiation- and so does power of silence J Any situation which requires direct communication might/will require a 'non-modifier' laden communication style.

So context is name of game – you need to know where to use modifiers and to what extent.

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Sourav

Participation

‘You can take a horse to the water- you can tell horse drinking water  is good for its health -but choice to drink or not to drink water lies with the horse'. This is a statement that I had formed early in my career when I was working on learning and development space.

Over last few months I have realized that this statement is applicable to situations/processes where the efforts and results are not linearly related in space and time and area spread out across time. Career Planning & Execution, and Development are 2 such processes – you make efforts today but results may not come in the same year.

My new tagline on careers is – ‘Performance is ensured over a year while a career direction is built at least over 2-3 years’.

We harp on relevance- we learn or we work towards a career goal if it is relevant for us. We say that the challenge for the resource provider or the manager is to create a space/opportunity for employee to find relevance for him/her.

Let’s say that as a resource provide you have done work on both fronts mentioned above-you and employee have figure out relevant aspects and you have provided required resources.

And then - employee resists turning up to utilize the resource! You are left perplexed! What happened?

Maybe it is relevant but other priorities are at play.

I had been working on creating for last few months a program – working along with intended audience to ensure relevance of resources. On day of session, we clocked around 50% attendance. I wondered whether we could have had at least 60% attendance – that’s what I had expected. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at this situation. Those who attended seemed vested and involved in day and shared that they found session very valuable.

I saw them taking notes and thinking of how they will make use of learning's back at work.

Leaves me thinking – should we work on participation?

Sometimes we need to drive participation - to ensure people prioritize A over B where both are relevant and where they may not have realized importance/power of A. This is especially the case when A is career/development and B is performance.

Low participation undermines power of an initiative. High participation does not guarantee effectiveness. Relevance is critical.

Hence both relevance and participation are necessary but not sufficient resources by themselves. They go hand in hand to ensure success.

If required participation can be driven. If people choose to stay on as day progresses, that's a possible indication that efforts were worth it.

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Sourav

Response time, readiness, and experiments

All of us will prefer adequate time to learn ropes of a role.  But is that always possible?

Sometimes turnaround time expected in a role is very small- response to situation has to be immediate and effective almost from day/week 1.

How do you prepare for such roles? - when you are unsure of what's going to come your  way and when, and additionally responses are expected almost immediately.

Forming tentative hypothesis, and experimenting may be way to go in such cases.  

You create tentative hypothesis (even around territorial scope of your work), define a problem statement, and then go about trying to find a solution.   

You do this in your free time and even possibly before you have taken on the role.

Through this way you give yourself a better chance of performing from day/week 1 in such roles.

I am reminded of something I had found once relevant – we may not be able to control the situation we are in but we surely can control our response – as long as we know what is it that we are trying to achieve!

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Sourav 

Creativity

How can you be intentional about creativity? What tools/processes can you use to beckon creativity at a moment's notice?

 I can think of a few ways:

• you take reality and stretch/shorten/ some other way distort it.e.g- a double storeyed car,  a foldable plane
• you disrupt natural flow of things. e.g -water flowing uphill, paying people to shop.
• think of what can't happen and remove no from it. E.g.- a car can't run without fuel- a creative challenge can be a car that runs without fuel\
• add incremental stuff to existing, e.g-a phone that can act as a car heater too.
• take 2 incompatible things and merge them together- chocolate and paint seem to be 2 incompatible things- what about a chocolaty and edible paint!
• take inspiration from nature- e.g.-sky like ceilings whose colors can be changed-like sky changes colour depending on weather conditions.
• We could also think about how something should sound, look, smell, or feel like. e.g- sweets that look like birds, smell like eggs, and that emit a peech-peech sound when you chew them.

These are 7 ways I could think of intentionally being creative. What other ways can you think of?

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Sourav