Tag: Corporate Culture

Will you Choose the Forest or the Bouquet?

Some situations demand us we wait patiently for the forest to grow, while sometimes, we need the instant joy of the gift of a bouquet. Read on.

image showing a plant and a bouquet to talk about creating systems

Say, you have been given some seeds, and it is expected that you will grow a forest out of it.

How would you go about with it?

Perhaps you will first try to determine in which soil do the said seeds thrive the most. Their nutrient requirements, how much water and sun do they need- all of this will be followed consistently.

You will know that since a forest is expected, it will take a long while. You may see the signs of the forest over the months and years, through the growth and such, so it’s not that you will not get any rewards or signs of your care in regards to the seeds.

But since you are to grow a forest, which may take a generation or two to grow, you will create something that will enable the future generations to also care and nurture that forest. Perhaps a guide or a set of instructions that lets one know how to care for the shrubbery grown so far, so that it one days grows into a forest. And continues to grow, with or without you.

You, and the ones who care for it will get the rewards in the form of the flowers and the fruits and medicinal herbs and countless other use that a growing forest rewards us with. Insects, birds, small animals, the microorganisms in the roots and the soil underneath- everyone will benefit.

Growing a forest takes some planning, time and effort. But once the system is in place, it thrives on its own, and it benefits not just the person who planted the first seeds and cared for it, but even the ones who become a part of that system, directly (through its nurturing and care) or indirectly (the ecosystem around it).

Now compare this with buying a bouquet of flowers from the market.

It will require some money, a good aesthetic taste, knowledge about good florist shops in the city. Once the bouquet has been gifted to someone, they will be quite pleased by it. They will probably try to preserve it for a while by keeping it in a pot for some time. They may preserve it longer after following some tricks and tips. They may decide to preserve the flowers for ten more days, and may reach that goal. Eventually, those flowers will wither away. Unless, someone knows how to replant something. Unless, they follow a system.

The difference between the gift of a forest, and the gift of a bouquet is a system.

A quote by author James Clear comes to mind:

Goals are for people who care about winning once

Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.

We believe both mindsets are necessary, and it might be a wise thing to understand what the situation demands of us.

The choice is ours. Depending on the situation, we may decide if we want to invest in a bouquet or a forest. Short-term or long-term.

Winning over a client through some research about their preferences, their company- that is working towards a goal.

Brainstorming an idea with the team, and eventually concretizing the best idea- that is working towards a goal.

Starting a company of your own with its own operations and objectives, such that over time even people other than you, the founder may benefit through it, and be able to understand, follow and improve upon those operations and objectives- that is working up a system.

Starting a new department in a company, which takes into account the demands of the competition and that which also integrates the company’s objectives and culture- that is working up a system as well.

Goals are for the now, the immediate, the near future. They get completed. Objectives get accomplished.

Systems are built in the now and thrive through later; from the past, to the present, and for the future. They grow. They adapt. They live on.

Working on a goal, and working on a system, are both necessary. They both require different mindsets. Which of the two do we need to take up is a choice we can make. A choice that can make the kind of difference we want to make. Creating systems calls for choosing to create the forest; needing to do something now calls for the bouquet.

Do you Matter at your Workplace?

Feeling like one matters at work can help in stress-reduction, employee-retention and opportunities for growth.

Priyam has been working at his company for two years now. He is in-charge of the sanitation and cleanliness management staff at his office. Although he works in a corporate office, his is not your typical high-profile corporate job one would associate with power and prestige. The income is decent- not too high as compared to certain jobs. But he is happy at his job, and he likes going to work.

Prita has been working at a different company for two years now. She is in-charge of the marketing department at the company. A high-profile, high-power, high-earning job. Since she is in-charge, she often gets to delegate work, which also reduces her stress- and work- load by quite a lot. But she is not happy at her job, and she does not like going to work.

What is it that makes a difference to these two employees? Objectively, on paper, Prita should be the happier person. After all, she earns more, is on a more prestigious position conventionally speaking, and definitely is supposed to have more clout at the workplace. But why is it that the opposite is the case?

The answer is simple but profound- Priyam feels like he matters at work. Prita doesn’t feel like she matters at work.

Priyam’s company makes him feel that he matters at work. His job is not that high-stakes and high-profile- hid company won’t lose millions if she falters. But he nevertheless matters, and is made to feel that he matters. His boss Shweta routinely appreciates his work. She thanks him for the work he does at the company. He and his work are treated with respect. He gets opportunities- in fact, Priyam started out as a simple cleaning staff member, and eventually, rose to become the head of that department. His work might not be conventionally ‘high-profile’ but everyone in the company understands and respects the effort that goes behind keeping the office space clean, organised. Right from the handwashes in the bathroom, to the plates and cutlery in the kitchen, everything is in perfect order thanks to Pushpam and his team.

And everyone, especially Shweta understands this value that Priyam generates. More importantly, Shweta communicates this to Priyam. Priyam and his work matter. Priyam feels this way, and that makes him happy at his job.

Prita on the other hand feels like she doesn’t matter at her job. Her boss Anil, although appreciates Prita’s work and her team-management skills, he doesn’t communicate that. No matter how much of a success a project by Prita garners, she almost never gets a ‘good job’. It has been long since Prita has received any acknowledgement to her contributions to the company. A certificate perhaps, a token of appreciation, but that is it. Regular words and regular actions do not make Prita feel like she matters at work or what she does is appreciated. Since Anil is uncommunicative, Prita’s other colleagues reflect the same mindset- if the boss herself doesn’t say anything nice, they also don’t feel the need to appreciate Prita.

Prita wonders if she is doing something wrong, and if the certificates and tokens are just formalities. Her confidence levels have come down over the years at the company, despite being the head of a department herself. Prita feels this way, and that makes her unhappy at her job.

It is a simple matter of feeling like one matters at work.

As people working among a collective of professionals, whether we are employers, or colleagues, according to research by Psychology Today, making our employees or fellow co-workers feel mattered at work can contribute to their general well-being, job satisfaction, and lower chances of burnout, stress and anxiety. It can lead to one being happier in leadership positions. Moreover, it can also lead to higher employee retention.

So, what can we do to make our employees and/or co-workers feel like they matter at work? Simple things, such as:

  • Thanking people for their work. Acknowledge their efforts. Not just through tokens and certificates, but say it through your words and actions. Even simple recognition can go a long way.
  • Let people know you have belief in their capabilities. If you are at a mentorship position, you can also provide them opportunities to grow so that they realise that you genuinely care about them, and haven’t just hired them for convenience.
  • When you observe something remarkable about people, don’t simply keep it to yourself- make it known that you see what they are doing. If you are the boss, this acknowledgement will hold even more weight.
  • If you aren’t the boss, you can still tell someone how you appreciate their work, and if you have opportunity, you can bring it up in front of everyone, or at least communicate that to your boss.

At the core lies the fact that people who do the hard work should know that you see them.

Psychology and age-old wisdom say that, often the key to living a fulfilled life is not happiness. It is meaning. And the first step to finding meaning at work, is to feel that what we do matters. That what we do is a meaningful contribution to the fabric of our profession. When we find this meaning by feeling like the work we do matter, happiness soon enough, follows.

The Road to Hundred Medals

As the Indian contingent in the Asian Games hauls hundred medals for the first time in history, we look at some lessons this journey can teach us.

The Indian contingent at the Asian Games 2023 has hauled hundred medals for the first time! With the gold in women’s kabbadi, the medal count reached the grand hundred (and still counting!).

The victories come with lessons in attitude, discipline, sportsmanship and never giving up.

Getting up after the fall:

Sport is unpredictable, and it treats everyone equally: it doesn’t matter how experienced or inexperienced you are, the rules apply equally to everyone, everyone can make mistakes, everyone can reverse the mistakes and everyone is out there in the open to give their best. There was a point in the nail-biting final match between India and Chinese Taipei when an Indian player slipped and gave the opponents a two-point lead. But India bounced back and made history. The Indian player who slipped, and the team could have just thrown the towel and decided that it’s out of their hands now. They could have blamed each other and cried foul at the opponents.

 But their ‘antifragile’ attitude- learning from mistakes and using those to their advantage- made all the difference.

You will make mistakes, sometimes huge ones. You might fall, you might get knocked down in spite of all the preparation, experience and wisdom but the attitude lies in getting up after the fall.

Never Stop Playing:

Playing when the whole world is watching you can be daunting- every mistake you make is out there for everyone to see (and replay!). On the other end is the fact that you could give your best for years and still not get the credit due to you.

As the team gets its due recognition now, it is to be noted that this hasn’t always been the case. The women’s kabbadi team is a giant in the sport- in the previous editions of the games, it has consistently won medals, gold included, and yet most players remain unknown. A google search for them yields very few results as compared to many players of more ‘glamourous’ sports, or even male players of many other sports.

But does this lack of due recognition lead the team to stop playing? The Indian kabbadi captain Ritu Negi continues to lead the team. Pushpa Rani continues to be the all-rounder that she is. Pooja Hathwala continues to be a great raider.

The system might work against you, but as long as you know your worth, and continue to put up a fight, sooner or later, recognition will come. There might be a mellow show, or the show might not even be planned, but you must go on.

Nothing is Impossible:

A time-traveller might go back in time by a decade or two, and if they were to ask any random Indian if they think it is possible that India will ever win a hundred medals, the stranger might just laugh it off as impossible. Or they might say that if the events are just going to be of cricket, then yes, there was a possibility. Thinking about this three-digit medal haul was considered unrealistic at one point in very recent history.

Something that was deemed impossible and unrealistic has now been achieved thanks to an effort at the level of the collective- right from all the athletes of all the sports, to the system, to the administration and to the people for continuing to cheer the little wins. And how to forget the individual effort of the athletes? The individual athletes continued their ‘karma’, giving their best in whatever way possible. As the little wins over the years cumulated, the people and the system looked up and started to envision the possibilities.

Things might seem impossible, unrealistic and just unachievable. But does that mean we give up hope? Does that mean we should stop working towards anything worthwhile? Be it sports, or life outside of sports in the office, working on things that are under our control is always an option rather than to give up.

As our athletes at Hangzhou continue to give their best, and make dreams of billion come true with their hard work, we congratulate them on how far they have come. We thank them for teaching us lessons about determination, dreams and having confidence in competence.

Do you have the ladder thinking or rock-climbing thinking?

Rock-climbing could be a more realistic and accurate metaphor for handling careers, than climbing ladders.

We have heard the age-old metaphor of climbing the ladder:

We take a step, and then we look for a step above. When we aim to climb the corporate ladder, we aim to take a career, rise up the ranks through L&D and promotions, one step at a time. A very easy looking ladder. Almost too easy, too simple. Actually, too simplistic.

What if we were to think of a more organic metaphor? Something a lot more realistic and less simplistic? How about the metaphor of rock-climbing?

We all must have seen visuals of climbers, with their harnesses and equipment, climbing over steep rocks and mountains. Or we might be familiar with those rock-climbing gymnasiums that offer a protected environment to develop our skills.

Rock-climbing, in any case, seems to be a more relatable and realistic metaphor that we should be applying to the concept of career growth. Let us delve into it.

Climbing requires us to be strong and competent enough. If we aren’t, we can slowly learn, through the support of ropes, harnesses and other equipment. Similarly, to be a competent employee requires that we have some skill-set that can support us. We learn. We start small- we don’t aim to reach the peak, when we know two feet above the ground is what will be a major achievement for us. Shadowing, internships, mentorship programmes, observing colleagues and seniors we admire, upskilling workshops could be the harnesses through which we learn in the corporate world. The more we practice, the more we learn, the stronger we get- in climbing and in our field.  And the beauty of it is there is a possibility to get stronger.

When we are strong enough, it becomes easier to climb the most complicated surfaces.

Climbing is complicated indeed. Beginners will tell you how each step can be a challenge. Each little movement requires one to calculate the move, and at the same time, rely on one’s instincts. Climbing doesn’t simply involve going in an upward direction. Experienced climbers will tell you how there are times when we must ‘read’ the surface, and adjust our positions- spot the tiny but sturdy rock that offers support and saves you from a fall, or stretch ourselves just about right, consider the physics, and with one little pivot, climb a few feet at once. Systematically. Similarly, in the corporate world, we sometimes need to think about lateral growth. Perhaps as we can explore other departments. Through those ‘tiny rocks’ we might end up acquiring more skill-sets, finding our own hidden talents, which will eventually help us find our own niche.

And big rocks that appear sturdy and strong, might come loose as you step on them. Just as big companies might not always be as they appear- mass lay-offs, toxic competitiveness are only some ‘loose rocks’ we have heard of recently. You see, climbing isn’t simply about going up– it is also about going side-ways, maybe take a few steps down, make a diagonal move and then perhaps make a move that will finally take us to the next level. Just as exploring inter-departmental growth.

Growing in one’s career can be all about encountering challenges, and finding the best possible move at that point. The move might take us a few notches sideways, perhaps even seemingly down a few steps, but eventually, it is all progress.

A career can be a straight line for some people, of course- go study accounting, and become an accountant. Have an MBBS, finish your MD, a bunch of internships, residencies and finally become a doctor. But for so many of us, career growth involves some trial and error. Perhaps you started off with a science degree, but realised eventually that you find much more fulfilment in having your own business. Or you started off with a keen interest in journalism, only to realise later that a management job is where you thrive.

Like climbing, handling a career is about staying strong in the present, and still finding a way to move forward. It is about finding out that as skills, strength and competence develop, as we learn new things about us and our environment, there might be unexplored avenues for us that might surprise us.  

Too Obvious…Obviously !

There are articles all over the internet telling us all about out-of-the-box thinking. We are encouraged to brainstorm innovative and ground-breaking solutions; we are encouraged to think differently. We are told to move beyond the obvious and find ways to come up with fresh insights.

But somewhere, we forget about the surprising power of stating the obvious.

Stating what is seemingly obvious. To us.

The Deceptively Simple:

Let us delve further into this. What is it about brainstorming that makes us hold back on our ideas? Often, we underestimate the value of seemingly simple solutions. Additionally, we just assume everyone thinks the same way as we do.

An article by Teresa Colon on Medium tells us about some seemingly obvious solutions which no one voiced. The writer goes on,

‘One good example is the time my company was assembling a customer summit. We had channel partners who wanted to attend (for those unfamiliar, those are essentially resellers) and we were nervous about getting enough customers to sign up. It was critical for the defined success of the summit that it was customer-heavy and -focused.

What’s the obvious answer here?

Obviously, it seemed to me, the partner who has the most customers in attendance gets to go. It incents the partners to encourage their customers to sign up and gives them a stake in the success of the event. It seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t bother even speaking it aloud. I assumed that someone else was already working on that angle.

It wasn’t until thirty minutes into the conversation, when we were still brainstorming ideas for signing up customers, that I verbalized what I thought was obvious.

I got blank stares all around before the “ahas” showed up on their faces. Apparently, what was obvious to me wasn’t obvious to them.’

Or maybe, it was obvious to everyone but no one thought it was an insight valuable enough, innovative enough, ground-breaking enough to be spoken out loud. Everyone might have been wondering about the sheer simplicity of the idea, the sheer obviousness of it. And who wants to hear the obvious, they all must have wondered.

Turns out, that obvious, deceptively simple insight was what pushed the discussion forward.

The Ridiculousness of the Obvious:

As mentioned earlier, in a culture that stresses the need to innovate and break rules all the time, the obvious sounding solutions actually become the need of the hour. Some ideas seem so obvious that no one thinks worth voicing them, and as a result, the one who does voice them becomes an innovator! It is almost a comical situation where one takes a detour because they think the main road would be jampacked, only to realise everyone thought the main road would be jampacked and thus everyone ended up taking the detour, creating a traffic-jam there. The one who took the main road found no traffic.  

Moreover, most of us are stressed out, and often overburdened and it might take a nudge for us to see the obvious.

Organisational Psychologist Adam Grant gives us more nuances to think about in an article:

‘A few years ago, the people analytics experts at Google stunned me with one of their recommendations to managers. They had been studying how to onboard new hires effectively. After running surveys and experiments, they came back with a list of tips. Here’s the one that jumped out at me:

Meet your new hires on their first day.

People analytics has transformed HR and talent management into a data-driven field. Since Google was a pioneer in the field, I was expecting an aha moment. Instead, I got a duh-ha moment — a sudden flash of the blindingly obvious.’

Grant goes on to wonder how as an Organisational Psychologist his work has been to present ‘the counterintuitive’, ‘the unexpected’, ‘the overlooked’. But then he goes on to say how,

‘…Google’s analytics team had done the exact opposite of all that: They had confirmed the most banal of my expectations. I felt like I was hearing from Pelé that the key to becoming a great soccer player is wearing shoes. Who needs to be told to meet their new hires on their first day? What kind of manager wouldn’t do that?

A busy one, it turns out.

A manager who is so preoccupied with their work and burdened with so much responsibility that a simple idea like this just doesn’t register or strike. We are a busy species and sometimes, we forget the value of simple actions. It takes a sudden realisation to see how simple and uncomplicated a situation can be.

The sudden realisation of the value in taking the main road when everyone is busy taking the detour.

The value of obvious ideas is thus often overlooked because of the widespread culture of pushing innovation a bit too much. We often underestimate our own ideas and thinking, assuming it might be obvious to everyone, only to realise much later that not everyone thinks the same way as we do. Effortless, obvious, simple solutions are what’s needed amidst a culture that can become monotonous, tiring and one that stretches us in all directions with countless commitments.