Skip to main content

The human connect

The last few weeks I interacted with a few senior leaders who I admire and there was a certain commonality to the discussion. 

One of them told me how their ex-boss of many years ago still calls them up on their birthday and anniversary. It might seem trivial, but he knew this ex-boss when he was a Management Trainee 20 years ago. 

Another leader mentioned to me how today if someone falls like, they are fairly unlikely to get a call/ping/inquiry from the manager on how they are. It is "as if some work is affected, but nothing more than that". There were other people who took a day off only to find her inbox promptly filled for next days deliverables. 

The third example was of a team that appreciated their leader. A leader who was simply present during 1:1s, fully. No phones, no distractions - turn on video and fully present. And the leader did the same during long review meetings - asking good questions. The net result? An incredibly motivated and charged team - who says, wow, the leader is interested in knowing our contributions that he spends hours in a review going over things we do. 

The commonality of all this is the "the human connect".  As life goes by in a flash over whatsapp pings, slack notifications, skype messages and not to mention emails and shared drives, the human connect remains an important part of any leaders skillset.

And its not about time at all...

[PS: I myself am guilty as charged for some of these, so, yes, a learning for me as well]
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more