Today is an important day; a job interview or your first day at work or better still your first meeting with that special someone! You get up in the morning pre- occupied with the day. You spend some extra time in front of the wardrobe giving careful thought to what you’re going to wear. You CHOOSE your clothes, you CHOOSE your hair do, and you also CHOOSE to put on that special imported cologne for the occasion. Yes, we all choose our attire for the day. But do we ever CHOOSE the attitude we’re going to wear for the day?
Simply put, attitude is ‘Mood’ for the day. Do you see yourself complaining about the breakfast or thanking for getting a hearty meal in the morning? Do you catch yourself irritable about having to get up early to get to work or do you find yourself looking forward to the endless possibilities that the day holds for you? Do you start your conversations with, “What a gloomy weather” or “What a great day for some reflection!” What do you CHOOSE to wear; a pleasant, positive and cheerful attitude; or complaining, nagging and belligerent attitude?
Do I hear you saying… “But how can I choose my attitude? Life is not all under my control! In-fact, most of my life is not under my control. My teachers don’t know what they’re teaching, my job exhausts me, my boss does not support me, and my salary is peanuts for the amount of effort I put in.” The list is unending and no argument would be able to surpass the multiple layers of events and experiences protecting and strengthening these beliefs.
Last week, while conducting a training program for a group of professionals from a large pharmaceutical company, I met a young man Suvinder Kumar. During the tea break we got talking. I noticed his smiling face and cheerful demeanor. Soon I found myself engrossed in listening to his inspiring story. Suvinder started his professional journey as an office boy at a small law firm operating out of a garage in Chandigarh. His job was dusting, attending to visitors, carrying files etc. They told him not to touch the computers, for he didn’t know anything about them. Today, after eight years of work, Suvinder is a successful professional managing warehouse and purchase function of a large company. Informally known as the IT guru. In his last company (again a large pharma compamy) he managed the IT function of the company. Some journey for an office boy with a duster in his hand!
The key question is, “how did he manage to achieve this breakthrough?” With a slight twinkle in his eye he says, “I always wanted to learn more, I took initiatives and did jobs that no body asked me to do. I started typing letters, designing documents, fixing small problems related with computers. I wanted to grow, I knew that I had started as an office boy, but that’s not where I’d stay.”
Suvinder is an example of choosing the right attitude.
It is our attitude that decides the difference between our success and failure. In management corridors the popular wisdom circulates ‘Hire for attitude, train for skill’. This wisdom is the result of learning over a period of time that if the attitude is positive, one can train the person, however if the attitude is not positive the best of training will not help. From Mahabharat, Eklavya personified ‘Positive Attitude’. Despite being spurned by Dronacharya he managed to learn and become the best archer with potential to pose a challenge to Arjuna’s supremacy in archery.
In reality, we always have a choice! One distinction that makes us human is our ability to CHOOSE. And yet when it comes to choosing our attitude, instead of exercising our choice we let the environment determine our attitude. We let our attitude be determined by the traffic, weather, boss, colleagues etc. but not ourselves.
Today when you stand infront of your wardrobe, don’t just choose the clothes for the day, choose also the ‘Attitude for the day’. So what attitude are you wearing today?
rajesh@peoplefactorindia.com
The writer is a management consultant and a leadership coach.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Continuous Improvement
One competency most prized and valued in business today is that of ‘continuous improvement’… the relentless and never ending quest to raise the bar in any sphere in your life. Let us look at an athlete who, throughout his practice sessions, times himself and focuses on beating his own record each time. The key here is not to limit yourself to work place. On the contrary, start by using this principle in your personal life. In-fact the attitude that we adopt and practice in our personal life surely affects our professional life in a significant way. I am a firm believer that if one does not have the mind set of continuous improvement in one’s personal life one may find it very difficult to adopt the same in one’s professional life. In keeping with this belief think about any area of your personal life where you can say that you are focused on achieving continuous improvement? Is there some thing that you are trying to do better than yesterday or last month or last year?
The first golden rule is that ‘improvement comes from the processes’. Simply by setting new and higher goals you start thinking of how to get there. For example, if you’re trying to manage your time more efficiently, then just set a goal that this month you would reduce your late sittings to half & still manage to complete all the tasks for the day. You’re bound to fall flat on this goal if you just keep doing the same things the same way. Look closely, you would surely identify the ‘time waster’ and ‘fatiguing’ activities; eliminate these. This continuous learning, tweaking & changing is the foundation for achieving the desired milestones. We improve our situation only if we learn that the current situation is lesser than desirable or simply that there is still scope for improvement. We improve by making small changes in the way we do things.
The second golden rule to remember is that ‘God is in incremental growth’. Try losing 6kgs in two weeks… you might actually succeed, but within no time those kilos would be back. Or take a language crash course and learn a new language in just a month, you might be able to correct sentences in that language but you’ll see your limitation in using the language to express yourself. Very soon you’ll actually forget most of it. Any endeavor following the rule of spurts, is sure to fail. As commonly known, any incremental growth would have its peak and might not stay as motivating with time. Well at this juncture, change your goals! The constant dialogue has to be improvement and there are innumerable areas for ‘continuous improvement’. Success then is inevitable.
On the larger canvas, it is this relentless focus on continuous improvement that guides the success of most organizations. Ask any CEO about the mantra for growth, more often than not it is not the big bang; it is actually the small incremental and ongoing improvements at each step and in each process!
In one of my earlier assignments about ten years ago, the CEO had taken ‘Quality Drive’ for the whole organization. Struggling with ‘how to drive home quality’, he thought of not using work environment as the driver. The risk being that the real spirit of quality would get reduced to dead process documents. Continuously improving himself, he came up with an interesting initiative that made a humungous change in the organization’s culture and in the true sense, Quality got internalized. In each of my training programs he took the first slot of half an hour to address the participants. He asked every one to list about four or five areas of personal life where they would like to improve and track the frequency of default, using quality management tools and did the same himself. Simple things like polishing shoes everyday, grooming every week, reading two books every week etc. got shared in his session. Month after month, he shared and asked the participants to share their goals, successes & defaults. This practice germinated from the belief that unless people see continuous improvement in their personal life, they would not be able to focus on the same in their professional life. Wow, what a way to integrate continuous self improvement to continuous organizational improvement!
rajesh@peoplefactorindia.com
The writer is a management consultant and a leadership coach.
The first golden rule is that ‘improvement comes from the processes’. Simply by setting new and higher goals you start thinking of how to get there. For example, if you’re trying to manage your time more efficiently, then just set a goal that this month you would reduce your late sittings to half & still manage to complete all the tasks for the day. You’re bound to fall flat on this goal if you just keep doing the same things the same way. Look closely, you would surely identify the ‘time waster’ and ‘fatiguing’ activities; eliminate these. This continuous learning, tweaking & changing is the foundation for achieving the desired milestones. We improve our situation only if we learn that the current situation is lesser than desirable or simply that there is still scope for improvement. We improve by making small changes in the way we do things.
The second golden rule to remember is that ‘God is in incremental growth’. Try losing 6kgs in two weeks… you might actually succeed, but within no time those kilos would be back. Or take a language crash course and learn a new language in just a month, you might be able to correct sentences in that language but you’ll see your limitation in using the language to express yourself. Very soon you’ll actually forget most of it. Any endeavor following the rule of spurts, is sure to fail. As commonly known, any incremental growth would have its peak and might not stay as motivating with time. Well at this juncture, change your goals! The constant dialogue has to be improvement and there are innumerable areas for ‘continuous improvement’. Success then is inevitable.
On the larger canvas, it is this relentless focus on continuous improvement that guides the success of most organizations. Ask any CEO about the mantra for growth, more often than not it is not the big bang; it is actually the small incremental and ongoing improvements at each step and in each process!
In one of my earlier assignments about ten years ago, the CEO had taken ‘Quality Drive’ for the whole organization. Struggling with ‘how to drive home quality’, he thought of not using work environment as the driver. The risk being that the real spirit of quality would get reduced to dead process documents. Continuously improving himself, he came up with an interesting initiative that made a humungous change in the organization’s culture and in the true sense, Quality got internalized. In each of my training programs he took the first slot of half an hour to address the participants. He asked every one to list about four or five areas of personal life where they would like to improve and track the frequency of default, using quality management tools and did the same himself. Simple things like polishing shoes everyday, grooming every week, reading two books every week etc. got shared in his session. Month after month, he shared and asked the participants to share their goals, successes & defaults. This practice germinated from the belief that unless people see continuous improvement in their personal life, they would not be able to focus on the same in their professional life. Wow, what a way to integrate continuous self improvement to continuous organizational improvement!
rajesh@peoplefactorindia.com
The writer is a management consultant and a leadership coach.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
