My Learning Blog

Develop Vision>Share Goals>Gain Support>Deliver Success Simple!

To direct, coach, support or delegate based on the commitment and competence of the team member in that situation, seems to work for me. Over the last couple of years I have consciously practiced situational leadership model with the teams I have led. My ultimate objective is to be able to delegate a slice of work and get quality output. Once there, the team member moves to higher challenges and we go through few of the other phases again. So far, I have had a little over 1 percent attrition. I guess some of this success could be owed to the situational leadership model. Likewise, I feel more motivated when my manager is able to assess my level of commitment and competence for a given task and align his/her response accordingly. Situational leadership model really seeks to analyze a given situation as a function of the person's will and capacity to perform the task. Because of this reason, this model finds its application outside the professional environment as well.

I have primarily worked in custom project environment. I moved to organizational learning environment - a support function only last year. The transition from seemingly efficient custom project environment to a support function can be tough. One of my biggest issue is having to remind people all the time - remind the business managers to respond to mails or about a meeting, remind the trainees to attend the training sessions, remind team members to complete their tasks, remind vendors to include all hidden costs or send faculty profiles. Sending reminders is such a waste of time and mindspace! If this post sounds like I am complaining...well I am.

I passed my certification examination today...it feels great!

Yesterday, I was reminded of an hilarious but powerful lesson on learning solutions design that I learned many years ago at my workplace. At that time, I had a habit of changing my computer wallpaper on a daily basis. My wallpapers or probably my habit typically attracted a lot of attention. One day a team member told me that she too wanted to learn how to place personal pictures as wallpaper. To keep it simple, I told her verbally--select a picture, right click the mouse, select Set as Wallpaper option... that's all! A couple of minutes later, I sensed frustration from my colleague's desk and so I went by to check out. She had taken a physical picture of her family, placed the mouse physically on top of the picture, right clicked the mouse and wondered why it didn't work! After digesting what I saw, I demonstrated the steps for her. I returned back to my seat with an experience that besides making me smile every time also compels me to remove any scope of content misinte...

Most organizations seem to have minimal linkage between the employee development goals agreed at the end of the performance review and talent management handled by the training teams throughout the year. Any attempt to link the two is either met with resistance from the employees (for example, line managers might not consider this activity important enough to allocate time) or is too complex to handle operationally (for example, it might be tough to come to an agreement on various overlapping human resources and training policies). I find this situation surprising. Development goals seem to be one of the most viable inputs for drawing up training plans especially since employees are typically more motivated to pursue these goals. To the set of trainings thus identified, if we map the trainings specific to the account competency development plan, we have a unified training plan for an employee for that year (or any duration specific to the organization). The above training plan integrat...