How you go at home from office? Cool, it’s simple….

Travelling back to the home form office is always another struggle. Sometimes I feel that most of the problems are created by human. To make the life easy, they manufactured vehicles so that we can commute easily from one place to another place. However as usual, he never planned to face consequences. The fuel prices and congested roads are the consequences. To take care of these consequences, human made industries so that people earn more money spending on such things. This is a cycle and we lost our sleep. Pollution, noise and stress are the part of our life.

The question is how to make this journey meaningful. You can’t hire the driver so that you rest at rear seat and read some good books, or just take a nap. If you hire a driver, still he will make you feel that you have made the mistake and at last you have to drive on your own. I made this experiment and then came to the conclusion that by hiring driver you make your life more complicated. Finding good driver is impossible.  

There are certain ways to make this daily journey meaningful. You can listen music, audio books or Vedic chants. Meaningless radio jockeys from FMs are also there to make your driving enjoyable. But then you get bored listening same songs and foolish commentary of radio jockeys.

After doing this all, I came to conclusion that you yourself have to take the charge of your life. Off course, I never speak on mobile while driving and even don’t use the hands free. I have seen people who plug hands free to the ear and don’t miss a single call even while driving. I always surprise why people keep themselves so busy even while driving. Great two –wheeler riders sometimes put their and others life in danger by doing this.

For driving, only driving skills are not necessary, if you want to make your life simple and stress-free, you also need to be great saint on roads. I tried this lot and I have accepted that in any condition, I need one hour to go home for 20 KM distance and I am not in hurry. I enjoy my ride back to home. When I stop on a red signal, sometimes person behind me bangs his horn without any effect on me.

I give the way to the pedestrian on zebra crossing. Once when I stopped, the group of small children waived hands towards me. Their smiling face made my evening. Near Hotel Sarja (Aundh, Pune) crossing, there is always a mess. During pick hours traffic wardens enjoy their paan and ghutka at corner paan stall. And you know, people are always in hurry crossing the road, banging the horns. They are more aggressive on road. Few days back, on the same crossing, I put my hand outside the window asking another person to stop so that I could cross the road. Surprisingly he stopped and as another people saw him stopped, they also stopped.  It was my duty to thank him. I did by it by saluting him. Next day the same car was coming, I thought the person yesterday stopped, let me stop today. And he waived his hands thanking me. Now we both know each other at least by face and help each other to cross the road without pushing our accelerators. Someday I do, next day he does.

Off course, the traffic problem is still there, but whenever coincidence happens and he is on the road on same day, we both make our life simple, juts by respecting each other. This is working.

Why always be aggressive when not required. Apply the mind and let’s be human…

Manage your boss…

All employees in this country believe that they don’t need any boss. They also believe that companies are wasting money by hiring highly paid bosses. You will hardly find any employee who is satisfied with his boss. In employee engagement surveys, most of the times superior are rated based on the personal biases. If boss’s boss entertains employee by bypassing the boss, then it goes very difficult to manage employees.   

We have lot of expectations from bosses. We expect that boss should be the leader, motivator, coach, mentor etc etc. But we fail to understand the perspective of bosses. Employees tend to take convenient stand about the situation. We always forget that boss is successful because of work of subordinate. At the other hand boss makes you successful by assigning tasks and honing your skills and competencies. Bosses are not God and neither we.  They don’t know everything and neither we; however collaborative relationship helps both.   

If you want to climb the corporate ladder, your boss will take you there. For this you should learn to manage your boss. Try following strategies to manage him better.  

Understand him: Understand the boss as a person. How he is. What is his personality type? How he reacts and what he likes and dislikes. If you understand the boss better, you are creating more opportunities to be more effective. After all he is not your enemy. He is there to support you.  

Understand his expectations: Get clarity on goals and KRAs, but also the style of working. If your boss is perfect, then defiantly he will not expect mistakes in data.  If your boss is organized, then he will expect the same from you.  Make his expectations clear.

Give regular feedback: Give and take the feedback properly.  I have seen employees who do not bother to communicate the bosses about their task. After all your boss is accountable in the company. If you don’t give him the feedback, he will get it from somewhere else.

Don’t hide your mistakes: One my employee use to keep her mistakes under the carpet. Sometimes she uses to manipulate the situation by not communicating the issues. I never like that. Never hide mistakes. You are human being and human being makes mistakes, Exhibit your courage to admit mistakes. However don’t repeat the same mistakes.

Don’t lie: Honesty is the best policy. Being truthful is one of the ways to be successful in life. Never lie with your boss. He will come to know anyway if you are lying.   

Improve your communication: You must be expecting from your boss that he should communicate everything to you. This is applicable to you also. Communication is the area which always has the room for improvement.  Improve your communication with your boss. Don’t scare to go to him if you have any issues.

Don’t complain: I have seen employees who always complain. You will have lot of challenges in professional life. Challenges make person perfect. Never complain about person, situation, and resources.

Don’t give any excuse: Employees give many excuses if the work is not done. You are responsible for what you are doing. Result counts and not your excuses.

Don’t gossip about your boss: Gossiping about your boss and making fun of him is very unprofessional. Somehow gossips are never secret and bosses come to know what you say about him.

Be effective and result oriented: You are hired for your work. You are expected to show the results. If you are not result oriented, you will not survive in the organization.

Go extra mile: He assigns the task because he thinks you have the caliber to do that task. Hence ask more from boss. Go to him and ask if you can support him if he is busy. Ask delegation. Take more responsibilities.

Be creative and think out of the box: If you are traditional and just following the SoPs, you are not adding any value. You are just a clerk. Be creative in day to day work. Go with ideas and influence your boss.    

You can not avoid bosses in your life. If you can not avoid them, then it is better to collaborate with them. Try to learn from your bosses. Your boss is also human being. He may have egos, emotions and he will also behave as others behave. However he also recognizes the fact that he needs you. He will definitely coach and mentor you. It is upto you how you take his coaching and mentoring.

Oh boss, help me to stay here!

I always surprise why all HR related matters are placed on HR table. Off course, it is the responsibility of HR to look into all HR related matters. But most of the times, HR is not responsible for all HR related issues. Employees work with their team and line manager for more than 8 hours. The real issues are with this. Most of the times their line managers are responsible for HR issues in the organization.

You must have identified few reasons during exit interviews. The list goes like this:

a) Compensation

b) Learning opportunities

c) More responsibilities

d) Organizational Culture

e) Employer Brand.

There can be other factors apart from this. The exit interviews are conducted by some junior HR person, mostly getting filled the exit interview format.

When I had grilled such employees, most of the times, the reasons which I find which nobody wanted to put officially are as under:

Relationship with bosses:

The fact of the life is bitter and compensation is definitely important. But when any employee decides to change the job as per the market he gets 25-30% rise on his current CTC. And the cases I have seen most of the times are not the compensation. It is the boss, line managers who are responsible for the attrition.

New learning opportunities is the another reason employees tell. The programmer ends up doing the same job what he was doing in his earlier company. The maintenance engineer gets the title of Executive Maintenance, not adding any further value to his personality. Off course every experience is the learning.

Employees are like elephants. They remember and they act. You need to manage them properly. Sometimes, employees need emotional support. When you takes extra care of new employee and ignores old employee, he get hurts. Logically new employees struggle to create their position in the organization and hence may be more effective than old employees. But most of the managers favour this behaviour and give more weightage to the. The “left out feeling” creates dissatisfaction.

Generally speaking, when any employee leaves the organization, he assumes that he is going to get 4 more things in new company assuming that 10 things what he is getting here will also be available in new company. But when he joins there, he comes to know that yes he is getting 4 more things, but missing almost 4 another things which he was getting in his earlier company. 4 things, which can be more important in totality. That can be respect, culture, challenges, and even may be other benefits.

When line manger and off course HR will be able to gauge these factors, attrition can have little impact.

Good boss, bad boss

I worked with different bosses in my career, good, bad, professional and unprofessional. Some bosses were very good and exhibited themselves as role models. Some bosses were terrific and I always surprised, why they were bosses? Who made them bosses?

There is a saying, “You can’t choose your father, but you can choose your father- in -law.” Like this, you can’t choose your boss also. Even you can’t also choose your subordinate sometimes. (If they are not doing well as per your expectations, then you have the choice to make their life miserable and find the replacement.)

I learned a lot from professional bosses. They exhibited real qualities of leader and they proved it in their professional lives. I also learned from unprofessional bosses that how the boss should not be. Good or bad, but all contributed a lot in my professional life.

There were bosses who always were speaking about the professionalism, but their behaviour was totally unprofessional. One of my bosses was TISS alumni, expert HR professional, but was very poor in interpersonal skills. He was treating subordinates as slaves. His day started with shouting on the people in office like on street. Not only on juniors but on seniors including his peers. Due to which he had high blood pressure. His kidneys failed. He was seriously ill due to his habits.

Another boss, (I never accepted him as a boss though) was very insecure in the organization. He was working in the organization for 20 years. His attitude was purely head clerk attitude. Typical example of the manager, mentioned by Sharu Rangnekar in his book “In the wonderland of Indian Managers”. He made a mess by putting his people, cheerleaders, on critical positions.

Ultimately organization got the major setback. Management decided to keep him aside and he was to force to take early retirement. I heard that when he was out of the organization, people in the organization celebrated his exit.

Professionalism is always a subjective term. For one person the definition of professionalism is different, however another person can perceive the professionalism differently. Good bosses understand the basics of professionalism. Nobody is perfect in this world. Shouting on subordinate is not unprofessional according to the boss, but if subordinate asks valid reasons, it is not professional for him. Paying dirty politics is not unprofessional for the boss, but if subordinate express his frustration, it is unprofessional according to the boss.

There is learning from good bosses, how we should be and also from bad bosses how we should not be.

Lot of material is available on how the boss should be. Hence I am putting some qualities of bad boss.

Some qualities of bad boss:

1)Skipping the managers and calling managers’ subordinates very frequently creating suspicious environment.
2)Creating the perception among the employees that management has given them unlimited powers. If authority is giving abusing the same.
3)Encouraging the cheerleaders.
4)Keeping the distance from employees and behaving as the king in the organization.
5)Expecting from the employees to call him frequently and communicate everything.
6)Encouraging backbiting.
7)Creating the fear among the employees about top management and not allowing the employees to have the access to them.
8)Creating the image that “I am the only person in the organization who can make your life easy.”
9)Creating rigid policies, rules and regulations so that there is very less scope for the creativity.
10)Encouraging bureaucracy.
11)Making favours. Deviating policies for specific people. Discriminating. Using the word case to case, (actually means face to face).
12)Less focus on talent and recruiting average people so that they can not challenge him in future.
13)Creating the policies in such a way that he gets all the benefits from company. Stay in five star hotel, using company car and driver, flying by business class and asking employees to follow cost cutting measures.
14)Using the word “I” and never giving the due credit to other people.
15)If somebody goes with good idea, then saying, “you should first study the history of organization; your idea can not work here.”
16)Spoiling the career of employees, sometimes forcing the exit of good talent by playing dirty tricks.
17)Focusing more on papers and not on results.
18)And many more. Please add your list how the boss should not be…..

Sometimes later, we will discuss about good bosses because I have enough to tell about them.