Ingredients to drive the team effectively

 

Keeping everything “In Control” and “Being Boss” is now old school management concept. Now team of intellectuals requires The Leader and not the boss! Furnishing yourself as a Leader is more than managing things well, it requires inter personal skills to manage human resources, to understand personal emotions attached to professional emissions. Here are my observations to drive the project effectively without facing the crunch time with the team:

Getting Support from the Executives :

• Drafting a Straw Man Proposal :

A “straw man” can be very useful, as long as people know that it has been designed to be pulled apart. When you begin a project or start looking into a problem, you often have incomplete information to work with. Rather than wait while you gather all the facts and data, a “straw man” lets you get going straight away with an incomplete solution, with the intention of finding a much better one, as you gain experience. Indeed, the criticism and testing that it receives provides vital feedback that can be used to develop a final outcome that is rock solid.

Suppose your revenue is falling and you have to come up with a better sales strategy. Using the straw man idea you might do the following:

• Create a draft proposal to expand to new markets.
• In your proposal, outline the markets that might offer good prospects, based on your initial judgment and experience.
• Present your draft proposal to the team and tell them that it is a straw man – This is critical because everyone must clearly understand that your idea is the starting point and was created for the purpose of being critiqued.)
• Analyze the proposal, find the weak points, clarify assumptions and decision-making criteria, and work on a refined proposal.
• Draft a new proposal and repeat the process until a final decision is made. These subsequent proposals can be given names too: such as wood man, tin man and iron man.

In a culture that values being right, the notion of constructing a straw man is difficult to embrace. Why spend time drafting something that, ultimately, isn’t going to be used? If you can get past this perception you will be surprised at how useful the technique can be. One of its main advantages is that it forces you to do something. Taking too long to deliberate the merits of an idea or hypothesis can be costly, as you risk never making a decision at all. With a straw man, you force an early, if incomplete, decision. This ensures that a final decision will be reached because doing nothing means accepting a poor plan by default.

Thus, drafting a Straw Man proposal helps the Executive Team, a great tool to evolve the project/proposal with the passage of time and new findings/observations and pushes the project for the vital decisions to create the desired benchmarks.

 

• Set the right expectations & time to nurture the organization :

Any activity done without clear vision and mission is considered as “purposeless”. Considering the same, executive team must clear vision and mission of the organization and set the right expectations among the team. Envisioning the Managers and Employees with expected goals and milestones of the organization, helps to maintain streamlined productivity throughout the journey. In project management, this also leads the team for an effective communication among all stakeholders.

For any startup, rightly set expectations interests the investors and leads the organization to wrap up probation period real quick. After this, a very crucial stage is to provide time to nurture the organization and teams. As they say, “Fruits can’t be made overnight!!” – the startup needs a fair time to get matured as Enterprise along with lots of nurturing efforts.. To bifurcate, we can assume that first 2-3 years should be spent in building the organization and potential team focused to build meaningful services and products. For the year 3-4, executive team should be focused on building the market for the existing products and robust revenue model for funding fuels.

 

• Set up Key Performance Indicators (KPI):

Any activity shall be considered vague if we remove the purpose or goal out of it. Similary productivity can only be measured with completion of milestones. Such milestones can be considered as “Key Performance Indicators (KPI).  A key performance indicator (KPI) is a business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization.

Whether it is project management or sales management, KPIs adds the value in analysing the gap between estimated productivity and actual productivity. Such indicators are also helpful the measure the monetary aspects of the productivity, such as budgeting, estimation and profit/loss outcomes.

KPIs are applied in Business Intelligence (BI) to gauge business trends and advise tactical courses of action. Before KPIs can be identified, the following requirements must be met:

• A predefined organizational process.
• Clear business objectives for the process.
• Quantitative and qualitative measurements.
• An active approach to finding and remedying enterprise variances.

Thus, putting up KPIs in the organization, helps to drive the environment more focused and productivity oriented.

 

• Turn your Prototypes into Products :

 

Once the “Innovation Lab” is created and functional with roles and responsibility, the litmus test of the team begins while designing the prototype. Designing a prototype is highly important and recommended before finalizing on any product development for commercial market. Such approach manages the failure risks well and negates the rework on the implementation of the concept.

To take the company on next levels, it’s mandatory for Innovation Lab to come up with 2-3 unique product/service prototypes every year and get at least one prototype matured enough to push into productions. This road map leads the organization towards the ultimate success. Such practices also ensures regular delivery and “Out of the Box” product management.

 

• Put your ideas into experiments :

 

Volatility is the essential element for growth. It is highly recommended for executive team to put various ideas into experiments is necessary. Considering the changing demand of consumer market, put your efforts on Technological Experiments and try to offer your clients/customers with easy process to deal with your team. For an instance, if you’re having a store, try to begin with online selling platform, once you’re live with online store, try to provide your online customers with advance and easy search functionality, offer them a better preview of the products and so on.

This frequent experiments provides your customers an active engagement with the organization. Once the experiment is implemented successfully, integrate it as a functionality of the system permanently.

Winning Support from the Executives :

 

• Creating a Snowball Effect:

 

A “Snowball Effect” consist of small iterations of the actions and execution transforming into huge course of actions and implementation just like a life cycle of a “Snowball”. When the snowball is created it is small and tiny, once it gets rolled over the mountain, it gains more snow and mass turning into giant rolling ball.

The same is applicable while managing projects, where innovation starts with a small idea or a firm belief based on fact findings and observations. Following the idea, small iterative course of actions is designed, which initiates the base and pillars of the project and thus multiple executions of iterations turns into huge project streamlined with multiple team coordination. This approach aligns team from small task sprints till big data analysis and huge implementations without creating crunch time or stress for the Managers/Employees.

 

• Creating Mentorship Programs :

 

Company Managers and Employees are the biggest assets to the company. Organization can perform well only when their resources are having enough potential and spirit to overcome the challenging task. To bridge the skill gap of employees, organization can arrange mentoring programs to make the resources explore and learn new concepts, theories, implementation methods and management approaches to make their vision broader with improved skill sets.

Another way to apply such mentoring programs is to create inter-team training sessions. This is very effective approach as company’s existing resources can explore knowledge and processes of all vertices/department; resulting in better role management and resource backup creations while managing the projects.

Though these are limited observations, all are experimented, executed and successfully implemented concepts in my practices while managing the team. I will try to keep on adding more in this context as and when I realize anything useful.

Hope this will help you in practicing better and streamlined management. Have a Happy Business!! 🙂

Meditation – The metal maintanance for your mood

It’s 4:30 in the morning, my favorite time of the day during the summer. Watching the light begin to penetrate the darkness, I am greeted by a pair of cardinals singing their wake-up song outside the open window.
While on vacation last month, I would get up every morning at about this time of day and walk down to the dock to sit in uninterrupted silence for about an hour or two. It became my daily ritual. Coffee in hand, I would watch how the rising of the sun gradually changed the landscape. A great blue heron landed silently on the pond, one of the surprise gifts of early morning. Occasionally, a loon would give its haunting cry. I thought, “It sounds like a call to prayer — nature’s call to prayer.”

What are the gifts of silence? What do we gain from slowing down to rest? Common sense tells us the obvious — we all need periods of rest and replenishment, and I find that the older I get, the more of it I need. Rest is a difficult commodity to come by these days. We’re so used to the frantic pace that slowing down sometimes feels a little foreign.
Even when we purposefully take time for vacation, rest isn’t something we seem to value so much anymore. Staying busy and productive is what we equate with importance. Some people even find that sitting quietly in contemplation is boring, even anxiety-provoking.

And yet, taking the time to commit to a regular, daily practice of restful activity (such as yoga, meditation, prayer, or spending time in nature) has been documented to be good for us. Research has shown that daily repetition of restful activities helps to quiet the brain and the body, for it is through repetition that we are able to break old habits and slow down enough to become aware of the world around us.

Dan Siegel, a neuro-psychiatrist and author of “The Mindful Brain,” states that meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, has the power to change brain chemistry. Changes include greater emotional balance, improved cardiac and immune functioning, and greater attunement to life in the present. In addition, daily meditation has been shown to increase the neuronal fibers in the corpus callosum, the area of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres. What this means is that there is greater integration and connection to the two halves of the brain, thus enabling the brain to further develop and improve overall functioning.

These findings have implications for our overall health as well as providing documentation about how the brain continues to develop throughout our life span. Introducing children and adolescents to yoga and/or meditation has produced improvements in self-esteem and has shown a moderate decrease in hyperactivity. Siegel’s research also suggests that if we develop restful practices we can change neuronal pathways and increase the brains neuro-plasticity.
Increased neuro-plasticity is what helps the brain retain vital functions such as memory, creativity, judgment, and the ability to handle complexity. In addition, the practice of yoga has been documented to be the single most effective exercise in lowering blood pressure.

What is fascinating about Siegel’s research is that it has shown that it is not necessarily the amount of time that you dedicate to a contemplative practice that affects brain changes, it is the frequency with which you commit to a practice that makes a difference. For example, people who meditated for five minutes every day had more noticeable effects in terms of brain changes than people who meditated for one hour three times a week. Regular practice has an accrual effect, much like depositing money in a bank. Eventually, it adds up. We may forget about the importance of saving, may even begrudge our commitment to putting money aside; but then one day, all of a sudden, we are startled by the amount that has built up.

The brain is a lot like a bank. It takes time to change the firing patterns of the neuronal pathways in our brain. However, making a simple commitment to five or 10 minutes each day can make a big difference. Try it for six months and see what happens. You might even start waking up at 4:30 in the morning.

The only thing I found in last six month is – Giving sometime to yourself (alone) will make you more confident, productive and dedicated towards your dreams and goals. Hope you will try the same. All the Best 🙂