Leadership Flexibility

 

Recently I had an opportunity to learn Blanchard & Hersey's Situational Leadership Training. 

For the leaders, the main takeaway is to adapt and be flexible to every one of your team members on their phases of development. Leadership flexibility is critically important especially, during these uncertain times. 

Phases

It is interesting to reflect on how my journey relates from low confidence to high confidence through different stages, especially when I started learning bicycle.  

Initially it was huge interest without any skills (D1) which turned into loss of motivation with struggle to peddle (D2). Without any option to move around and seeking to gain freedom, slowly I was able to get on to D3. For me the last stage came out when I took up long drive of 5+ miles to my school in distant city. Today, I miss going on purposeful trips on bicycle but the learnings stayed with me for any other struggle I undertake. 

D1: Unable and Willing (Low Competence and High Commitment)
D2: Unable and Unwilling (Low Competence and Low Commitment)
D3: Able and Unwilling (High Competence and Low Commitment)
D4: Able and Willing (High Competence and High Commitment)

More details can be referred at 

https://www.business-to-you.com/hersey-blanchard-situational-leadership-model/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory

Compensation Structure in 2021

 Most companies baseline the employees' compensation during the year-end and convey the updated structure during January. 

Irrespective of many different kinds of recognitions, cash compensation remains the topmost in terms of how people value their work. 

For a variety of reasons, the current structure of compensating everyone at the year-end only falls short.

• It does not promote the team culture. Always Individuals are rated instead of teams. How can we reward the entire high-performance team?

• Performance reviewers always have an unconscious bias towards the performance during the 4th quarter. But, it should consider for the overall performance of the year. Individuals who exceed and go beyond in different times of the year may not be well appreciated. 

• In difficult conversations, the managers reiterate the company quarter results to convince the employees. This strategy does not correlate well many times. 

• Compensating everyone at the same time of the year may bring uniformity but unfortunately, it brings unnecessary comparisons. Individual's compensation should just be tied to the company contract and not to the other team members.

• Top talent may not have the patience to wait for the year-end.

• It also induces sudden instability and attrition during the first quarter. Some of the managers even started to expect this year over year. 

• Mobility and moving across the teams during the mid-year may impact the individuals.

• Due to predictability, People can start to game the system. 

People are the core asset of any company. How to reward the top talent, appreciate the hard work and retain the talent has always been the most debated and highest priority item for many C-suite executives. 

Its the time for the companies to start thinking about how to restructure the employees' compensation. 

I certainly do not have the best alternatives but, I believe the timely appreciation, transparent incentive rates, team rewards will demystify the clutter and pave ways for the continuous run of high-performance teams. 

Reflecting 2020

It's the time for reflection on 2020. Instead of going through the typical retro format, I like to attempt to answer the following powerful questions. 

What is the most important lesson you learned this year?

Ability to live with less. Life needs just sufficient food and a place to live. Everything else is optional for reasonable good living. 

What challenges did you overcome?

Adapt to remote working. Improved Communication. I am now open to sharing more details with colleagues and strangers. My perspective on WFH changed a lot, and I no longer feel guilty about working from home or taking a break during work hours. 

Too many calls (mostly video calls) drained me physically. I started questioning the need for my participation more diligently and delegated as many as possible to either peer or my team. 

Deadline wise delivery is a thing of the past. We encounter people's availability changing daily. So continuous planning and adapting to the changes has become a core part of leadership roles.

I am a bit more organized compared to the last year due to the scarcity of many resources. 

We entangle with a lot of chores. The priority and the need for these chores are highly magnified being at home. I yet to find a cleaner handle on this. 

What new skills did you acquire?

Learn to educate kids: Volunteer as an assistant teacher for a local nonprofit school on educating kids with foreign languages.

What did you do for your career growth?

Leading a team with multiple workstreams in this ever-changing crisis is a fabulous experience. Remote working broke many logistical barriers with senior management, and I could gain insights on my strength and opportunities for embarking on technical leadership. 

How did you have fun?

Spending time with the kids on their remote education and playing with them in the evening hours has been a fantastic experience. I also took post-lunch breaks every now and a while and went out for a walk. 

Lucky to gift me with excellent homemade food and sound sleep of more than 8 hours a day. 

On many weekends, we either hiked or walked and had brunch picnics in the parks. We also enjoyed the drive-in movie shows from the Township.

What were the most useful resources you had?

Zoom

What did you leave unfinished?

My spouse sacrificed a lot to enable kids remote learning as she could not get on with their next level in career roadmap. 

My kids missed New York City rides.

What was the best compliment you received?

Unattributed feedback from my direct reports called me - an empathetic, inclusive, strong technology leader. I am proud of standing by my core values, especially during this pandemic year. 

If you were to talk about this year like a story, how would you write it?

2020 is a showcase of war-like uncertainty in a milder way. 

How do you describe this year in 3 to 5 keywords?

2020 reminded us of our mortal nature. Expecting the change anytime on anything and positively adapting to it is the real insurance one can have for a promising future. 

What advice would you give your last-year self?

Too many short term ambitious goals go meaningless in a spectrum of broad timeframe. Try to focus on skills and long term goals. 

We do so many things unconsciously that are nothing more than entertainment. With little awareness, I can try and even efficiently overcome the urge to fall back on old bad habits. 

Right outputs happen only with the right inputs. Intentions may influence a starting point, but only perseverance will take you to the end. 

Volunteer Teaching - Part I

This pandemic year has seen many twists and turns in most of our lives. On the positive side, I am volunteering as an assistant teacher at the local language school. I just completed my first trimester, and reflecting on the last three months is satisfying as well as enriching. 

I am always passionate about education. Teaching goes back a few generations in my family history. Several of my friends & relatives are in the teaching profession. My very first job was also as a teacher at a prominent Technology Training School. Another forced reason being, my kids are enrolled in the same school, and the principal requested additional help due to all-out remote learning. I got an opportunity to teach the Tamil language to 3-graders. 

First of all, I have to admit, remote learning for kids is an uphill task. The school teachers are, especially in lower grades, are doing an excellent job. Managing and coaching with so many limitations in an ever-changing environment is not only commendable but also needs innovation, resilience, and courage.  

Kids are way advanced in adapting the technology, the culture, and the nuances of remote learning. Teaching has become truly two-way, and teachers also learn every day. I am surprised to see that kids have a great understanding of current affairs, politics, climate, and sports. 

We have a Saturday class of 90 minutes. Setting up the mood of the classroom with cheering after a week-long engagement has been an extreme ordeal. Nevertheless, closing the classroom is bliss for everyone. 

Remote learning requires teachers to prepare more in advance, have razor-sharp focus during the class, and above all, maintain balanced, composed patience all along. For a naive teacher like me, teaching 20 students is like teaching a student 20 times. Even though the curriculum is simple, I have to run through it a couple of times to make sure I can explain all ancillary questions that may arise.  

 

We used Google Meet for better integration with Google Classroom. However, it felt way inferior to Zoom in terms of stability, performance, and clarity. 

Distractions are contagious. Bringing back the class attention from the side conversations, subject deviations, and the demotivated students has to be achieved as micro-goals with utmost care and patience. For example, allowing students to take a bathroom break on their own is far better than making students ask for permission. The moment one student breaks the attention, the entire class follows this suit. 

No matter, whatever you teach, some students test out the teacher's patience by displaying indifference. That's where one has to step up and try a creative diversion so that the entire class is not discouraged. 

There are sometimes wifi issues, external noise, household interruptions, bathroom breaks, and snaking during the class. But they are in no way cause any critical damages. 

Evaluating the students on their participation has been another challenge. Some extrovert students continue to seek out attention, but many others wait for the time may miss out on the chance. A teacher has to keep track of individual personalities for an unbiased evaluation. 

Over-communication on digital channels (WhatsApp Group, Google classroom, email list, etc.) is another must to ensure everyone gets reminders on homework, projects, test schedules, and any other expectations.

I tried, explored, and tested a few techniques and continue to learn every week. 

Expressing the thoughts does not just go with only voice, but it will take so many clues from the body language (nonverbal communication). Albeit, Zoom and Google Meet are improving the experience day by day; the following limitations still need to be distilled out.

• Making sure participants are involved totally. Can you color code and categorize the image based on movement or retina focus? 
• The number of people displayed on the screen is limited. Most phones can display only 4 participants at a time, and tablets may show a maximum of ten people. Tough?.  
• It is not easy to guess who will talk next - Can easily invent something like instant messages now "typing" clue. 
• How to respect fruitful side-conversations? Develop something better than a breakout room. 
• Convey the body language. Nonverbal learning. A long way to go. 

We are certainly going to innovate and move towards better solutions. Instead of migrating towards better schools, the affluent will certainly prefer full-time online schools with part-time tutors. We might see the big corporates think out globalizing K-12 education. 

Probably a full VR approach might work out well too.  

Note: I will follow up with another extensive reflection on this journey at the end of the school year. 

Developing for Cloud Platform - Introduction

As financial industry finally move towards cloud adoption rapidly, we are now in a time to develop anything and everything cloud friendly. 

In last few months, we have developed and productionalized (serving 10MM+ users) couple of microservices in private cloud based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). 

Cloud enablement comes with many challenges and at the same time offers few luxuries compared to traditional stand alone distributed hosting. 

This blog assumes, you have already chosen the cloud platform based on your other constraints (cost, availability etc).

In broader perspective, I can categorize my experience in following areas. 

• Design 
• Choosing tech stack, managing dependencies, extensibility 
• Development  
• Breaking the assumptions, Local development environment, Tools, Best practices 
• Deployment
•  Managing environments, moving the code, Automation
• Testing 
• Methodology changes, Execution, What "else" to test, Automation
• Performance 
• Scaling, Performance Measurements, Reporting 
• Support 
• Logs, Troubleshooting, Metrics, Monitors 

We will cover each areas elaborately in following weeks.

Note 9 Tips

1. Double tap the recents button on your nav bar to jump directly to the previously used app. 
2. Customize nav bar, notification bar, recent apps, etc. with Good Lock from the Galaxy app store.
3. Secure Folder - you can set up separate apps logged into different accounts with different fingerprints, etc.

http://www.androidbeat.com/2018/09/best-samsung-galaxy-note-9-tips-tricks/ 

Chaos is also a Rhythm!

Before starting, I would like point it out explicitly,  this is not an attempt to relate obvious antonyms to create a buzz.

In developed countries, pretty much most of the activities are organized and executed with a plan.  This has become a de facto standard and being without plan is considered as disaster. Even reacting to disasters are well planned and in some cases pre-planned and dress rehearsed.

With the plan, they are able create a discipline thus scale any solutions to new heights. This is how modern world evolved.

What else one can ask for if everything is planned, executed tracked and measured? Are there really any short comings on this model?

Yes. This model too can be improved.

The most un-obvious cost of making everything as predictable and measurable is -

LOSS OF ALERTNESS! 

For most part, this model works fantastic in industrial evolution starting from school education to space exploration where machines are not fully grown humans (kids) are involved. But in some cases, it fails miserably in human centric activities, especially when managing highly intelligent individuals.

Why so?

Planning proposes Certainty.
Certainty expects Predictability.
Predicability requires Repetitiveness.
Repetitiveness brings Monotonous.
Monotonous creates Boredom.
Boredom results in loss of Alertness.
Loss of Alertness is the cause of Imperfection.
Imperfection leads to Planning (step1)

So, this becomes a vicious cycle and goes for ever in the name of excellence.

I would like to point out few examples, where lot of strangers need to co-ordinate silently without any major plan/instructions on day to day life.

Ever wondered, Subway crowds in large cities walk without colliding each other?  Especially, people in New York walking on the streets during peak morning/evening hours.

If you have experienced driving in developing/ under developed countries, where traffic rules are not enforced and/or obeyed, its chaotic order. So many people would not even dare to drive. But casualty rate is lower or comparable to highly organized traffic systems.

There is a famous South Indian Temple (Tirupati), where millions of people visit every day. Mile long queue ends just before the main entrance and people walk to the main temple on their own without any queues or rules or enforcement. Imagine hundreds of people walk into 10-feet entrance at once without any major disturbance.

All these are possible, because they expect "disaster as default behavior" if they are not alert in these scenarios. This brings keen Alertness when they are involved in those activities which enables them to easily accomplish such complex co-ordination without much hassle. 

In a developed world and matured organizations, lack of alertness is the biggest of worry of slowdown!  

As an inefficient workaround, many a times system generates some of below man-made troubles to keep the alertness and motivate the people to get going.

Enforced Economic Recession
Enforced Management Change
Enforced Government Change
Enforced Process Change
Enforced Military Exercises

These cavities make temporary relief until they become the normal. Again we enforce them.

Are there any really effective alternatives to keep people alert and focussed all the time?
What kind of goals/rewards can keep people motivated throughout the life?
How can we make every activity of an individual as perfect as possible?

I do in search of these answers. The harder we raise the questions, solutions go deep and leads to self-inquiry and search of ultimate goals. But if you have experienced any practical solutions, please do share.