“My expectation is my team member work, and I will enjoy the designation. I will make only boss around. I’m the Manager. I’ve worked enough to reach here. I no more intend to slog further.”
The failure of a leader is because he fails to lead by illustration. You can’t be a leader only by giving advice. You should be able to stand up to demonstrate when required and handle the psychologies of the team member well.
Self-discipline is hard to sustain when people look at you as a leader.
Punctuality, Body language, choice of words, Attitude, Integrity thoroughly, knowledge, interaction, motivation – a sustained approach in all these is a challenge for the leader unless it is his way of life or he is willing to adopt it without the downtime.
Further, leadership transition should possess the maturity to choose between speaking and silence at the right time—the topics for silence and the issues to speak about. The thought process should rise to talk about integrity and efforts essential in the job and company to peers and subordinates.
An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.
It applies in all contexts. Engaging an employee in productivity is very important. Else he will engage in office politics and life outside the office and prioritize them over time. The control is lost. The employee is reluctant to involve entirely in the job. But the root cause is not known by the Manager.
Again micromanagement is not the solution. But micro-level analysis and emotion management are. A manager’s role is more time-consuming than an individual contributor’s.
If we were self driven, we never required a school, teachers, peers, exam, a company, a job, a boss, a society etc…, All of these intentionally or unintentionally have droven us to be successful in different phases of lives.
If we want to claim we don’t care for any of these, then why are we worried about our image and impression, results, reputation with all the above.
A Manager’s job is not to make people stressed out at mind with work. It is to make people tired at body and rejuvenated at mind. Rejuvenation at mind is due to the happiness of having crossed boundaries, set new milestones, achieved new targets and explored the potentials of self.
Stress is built only when you feel you have a limitation to achieve something. When you feel helpless, less confident, less skilled and develop a fear of not reaching the goals is when you feel stressed.
And you can tire at body only when you are young. So make your team members work hard when they are young so that they can reach those heights from where they do more of mental work, strategic activity than physical activity like execution or long hours work when they grow older.
Erase the boundaries team members have drawn around themselves. Push them hard to step out of their comfort zones. Every team member has a skill in them which can be their strength. Step by step make them explore themselves. Make them believe that sky is the limit.
Don’t give them leniency to cut corners. It won’t take them farther. What you add to their habits and personality stays with them for long. As a Manager this is our role. And in this pandemic, this approach is more essential to save our team members’ jobs too.
‘Why are you keen on this job?’ “It’s pretty challenging, and I like challenges.”
90% of people fail because they want to face challenges designed by themselves.
Defining a self-designed challenge – The intensity should be just how much they can forego, the magnitude should be as much as they can bear, and the duration should be no more than microseconds. This is the recipe for a challenge.
In that case, have we mistaken challenge to be a sneeze. Because they say your heart skips a beat when you sneeze, it lasts a microsecond, it isn’t caused by you, and no one ever died because of a sneeze. But when you hear that your heart skips a beat, you panic. You feel you’ve reborn after every sneeze.
Well….. the commonly expected answer in an interview for ‘Why are you keen on this job?’ is “It is pretty challenging, and I like challenges.” And when they join an organization, they reason out saying these challenges weren’t expected. Or on the other hand, you want to do all the homework and figure out how fewer challenges are there in the job? How to pass them on to others? How to find reasons and justifications to convert the challenge into an impossible task before the Bosses?
We are surrounded by people with enormous skills and intelligence but trying to convert all of it into a National waste. We are all born smart and physically, mentally equipped to handle situations and challenges. We have done it time and again also in our personal lives. Then why are we finding escapes when our professional life offers challenges.
Today is the time to invite unknown, unexpected, unfabricated Challenges and accept them irrespective of your age, level, and authority. COVID is a colossal example- personally and professionally. Do not glorify challenges. Do not expect challenges to be customized by yourself. Avoiding challenges is avoiding success, opportunities, and avoiding LIFE. EMBRACE CHALLENGES, EMBRACE LIFE
Emphasis to shift from Company and Salary to Sector and Sustainability Criteria for job security now will not be gauged by How stable the company is? How comfortable the job is? How highly am I paid? But Which sector is sustainable at most of the times even in crisis? What is the growth graph of this sector? At what intervals the graph shows a decline? Which deptt or skill I should be in to not be replaced by automation, digitalization or robotization? How can I not become redundant in the organization? How much can I save in this job? Will I get paid throughout my career in this sector?
Whose jobs may be at risk with this evolution of the industry? How is the industry trying to plan its efficiency with respect to resources? Every company is facing unknown risks. And every company is uncertain about economic progress.
The calculation of damage from COVID-19 will continue for at least 18 months. Working capital will be impacted, Inflowing business analysis will fluctuate hugely to sustain the market. In such a scenario, the order of cost-cutting will be – resource retrenchment, pay cuts, and infrastructure cost reduction.
Recent Hires – Last come to go first. The company has not experienced the performance of a new joinee. And the resource has still not proven his credibilities to count on his performance. So their jobs might be at stake.
Support departments – HR/ Accounts/ Procurement/ Quality etc., or any such areas not driven directly by P & L – such jobs which may be digitalized or outsourced – need basis or consulting basis. the other option is the volume of work can be increased and the number of resources can be reduced.
Coordinating jobs – Any coordinating jobs like project coordination, procurement coordination with cross-functional teams that can again be digitalized with single window interaction.
Supervisory levels – Multi-levels of supervision like Asst Mgr, Manager, Sr Manager which can be replaced with more number of reportees to one person keeping the hierarchy less complex.
Repetitive jobs – Quality check by different people, purchase activities, or back up resources where accountability can be increased with one person.
Costlier resources – Resources at Sr level or expensive resources at any level. Since now themarket will be flooded with resources willing to join on same salaries as earlier or lesser too to survive and sustain, hence costlier resources will be on target
Less adaptive, less proactive: Resources with will issue, or poor interpersonal skills. Not flexible enough to own additional responsibilities at this time of crisis. Sticking to the expectations given at the time of joining and not understanding the changed scenario and multi-task after COVID-19. Not willing to take up end to end accountability.
Continuous mentoring and monitoring Employers, Sr Management and Managers have two choices in this scenario – invest your time in strategic planning, business acquisition, financial planning
OR
Exhaust your bandwidth in building better understanding, repetitive training, hand-holding your team members in delivering, In such a scenario such employees are preferred who are fast learners, self-motivated, better skilled, have a better understanding, better committed, more positive and take the ownership.
Of course, certain sectors like tourism, auto, airlines, retail, are affected by the rule and even the best of the employees will have to be losing jobs here. Or a few more have lost jobs due to traveling back to their native places or not having internet connectivity to work from home. Its an extraordinarily challenging, demanding situation for the whole world. Learn to prioritize the organization, if the organization lives, you live. STAY PUT, BE FLEXIBLE. WORK MORE to align with this crisis.
Follow to read about the employment trends in India in the days to come.
Every aspect of a HR job revolves around knowing, managing, analysing and supporting people. Still as HR’s people are Aliens to us. We do not know definite and certain reasons for people’s behavior.
We know processes. We do not know the logic of any process. Most of the times, we try to figure out flaws in the process to make shortcuts of the process to make it convenient for us alone. We don’t try to figure out anything to manage our role and know people as HR. Since we HR’s behaved robotic, AI is all set to replace us. And its alarming now and will be worse tomorrow. A skillset and role which got automated without even reaching 10% of maturity. What an irony?
What if some day humans would be interviewed by Robots? And Robots would be our Managers too?
The Robot would consolidate all the data of our performances, our engagement in job,our integrity from all the previous jobs and reject us even based on our thought process during the interview.
The Robots would expect our efforts to be equivalent to theirs; increasing our efficiency to the maximum possible levels.They would expect us to be 100% error free and productive.All our breaks and tricks of fooling the Employee engagement tools would be monitored rigorously.
Our work on system would be calculated based on our retina engagement and brain impulses tracking system.
Retrenchments would have loads of explanations minute wise deviations in the process, thoughts too.
All tech jobs would not require us to do support jobs like testing or repetitive activities but think permutations and combinations ahead of robots for creation of newer and better effective tech solutions.Most of the programs would be merged or adapted from ‘n’ number of other functions across the company or industry, auto run and analysed to yield best results.
All the process based sectors have already started facing challenges with automation. Further they would be managed with only few techies to configure these robots and Sr management to bring business.
Most of the Human Resource jobs would be auto run with auto program from the beginning till the end of an employee’s career in a company. There wouldn’t be any space left for managing egos or tantrums of the employees.We would be competing with robots hence can’t be carrying the slightest emotional set back.
All the strategical management jobs would show results of 1000 probabilities with all the scenarios-visualization which would help management decide upon the least risk and optimum output.
Business development jobs would be so specific on expectations.Our interactions, our locations with time duration would be auto recorded and saved for review discussions and we would be prompted on the behavior of the customer.
All the lower level jobs like Driving, Domestic help, Security, Facility Management jobs will be replaced.
Physical, Emotional and Mental health will be projected of the people to an extent of retiring or retrenching them before even they become a liability for the company.
The pareto principle would be rephrased as 800% of revenue is generated by 80% of the team.
We would be missing the most ruthless Human Managers too.The Human Managers would then be called Saviors.
