Corporate affair: Make yourself count

Posted on September 16, 2007

Corporate affair: Make yourself count

Most people at the workplace inhabit the far extremes of the spectrum: They either behave like sheep or treat others like them. While the former appear inordinately conditioned by their childhood morals to never come across as pushy, demanding, fussy or impatient, the latter seem to reckon that high decibels and absolutism are the only levers of advancement in a dog-eat-dog world.

The ever-elusive golden median, the trait of assertiveness that has for long been the staple of personal development experts, psychotherapists and self-help books alike, is being increasingly hailed as the make-or-break leadership quality. And yet, in a society split across plastic politeness and presumptive boldness, assertiveness continues to take a bad rap.

In a series of studies carried recently by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Daniel Ames of Columbia Business School and Francis Flynn of Stanford Graduate School of Business have reported a trend that assertiveness seldom qualified as leadership strength when colleagues evaluated one another. On the contrary, it often got bracketed as a weakness, either because the person came across as too aggressive or a pushover. And while the right balance may just be the stuff boardroom role models are made of, striking it is indeed difficult.

Sulajja Firodia Motwani, managing director, Kinetic Motor Company, draws attention to the fluid interpretations of assertiveness at the workplace. “If you are in a leadership role, it is your ability to manage your team effectively so that you can discharge your responsibility effectively. If you are a part of the team, it is your ability to express your thoughts and contribute to team discussions in a meaningful and equal manner. If you are representing your employer in outside meetings or negotiations, assertiveness means communicating your preferences and effectively guarding your interests,” she says.

“One is not being assertive if, in response to someone else’s aggressiveness, one finds oneself doing things that one does not want to do because they are unethical, outside authorised codes of conduct, or outside the job description,” opines Dr Hemant C. Sashittal, a professor of management at the Rochester, New York-based St. John Fisher College.

“Overt assertiveness is when one tries to make a point and change the behaviour of others by trying to argue and win one’s point of view without any public invitation to scrutinise their argument for logic and data, and without offering hard, confirmable evidence to support one’s argument.”

“Assertiveness inevitably conjures up negative images of aggression and combativeness,” avers Rajiv Narang, CMD, Erehwon Innovation Consulting. “This form of assertiveness creates defensiveness and negatively impacts relationships and results, and becomes the greatest block to innovation. Positive assertiveness is the courage needed to express a disconnect with a ‘different point of view’ or with another person’s style of engagement. It is the capacity to not say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’ or ‘maybe’; it is the willingness to put forth a radical, unconventional idea without the fear of ridicule; it is the ability to openly express disagreement with a superior without antagonising him or her.”

“Assertiveness is when we weigh others’ rights as well as ours equally,” explains Dr. Sanjay Chugh, senior consultant psychiatrist. “This means being truthful to ourselves and respectful towards others. Assertiveness at the workplace does not mean that we say no to some work because we don’t feel like doing it. It just means that we stand up for ourselves, do not let others trample upon us, and ask for whatever we think is our right. At the workplace, like elsewhere, compromising on things that are important to us will only suffocate us.”

Ames states that an individual’s personality has a strong bearing on his assertiveness. Extroverts, for instance, are likely to be assertive. Often, he observes, people tend to affiliate themselves with like personalities, who then reinforce their behaviour. Experts cannot emphasise enough the need for periodic reality checks on one’s assertiveness. Business psychologists suggest that seeking feedback from colleagues and bosses on how one is perceived or taking stock of whether one is getting the desired results are among the best ways to figure out if one is not being assertive enough or being too assertive in a self-serving manner.

According to Narang, most Indian organisations suffer from a ‘public agreement or public silence’ and ‘private disagreement’ culture. “This breeds mistrust and suspicion and completely dilutes innovative possibilities. Most Indian organisations, both the new players and the legacy organisations, have a hierarchical culture that kills the openness needed to nurture positive assertiveness,” he points out.

As Marie Reid and Richard Hammersley write in Communicating Successfully in Groups: A Practical Guide for the Workplace: “More assertive people tend to have good self-esteem, compared to passive or aggressive people, because self-esteem and assertion are inter-related.”

Ames points out that while overly assertive people tend to be too optimistic and assume too much on other people’s behalf, pushovers may be pessimistic and fear angry reactions to their questions. Changing these attributes, he believes, is more about changing one’s expectations. Ames explains that possessing the right amount of assertiveness is also a matter of reading a situation and fine-tuning one’s style accordingly.

So what degree of assertiveness is indeed right for the workplace? Sulajja Firodia Motwani says that there are three steps to this ladder: assertive, aggressive and abrasive. “The ‘assertive’ is important, I like the ‘aggressive’ too, but I draw a line at ‘abrasive’,” she says. “To me, ‘aggressive’ indicates a strong will and the wish to impose that will, and that isn’t necessarily bad. But it can be a fine line between aggressive and abrasive. Abrasive is when you begin to rub people the wrong way through your attitude and that’s not professional.”

Dr Sashittal thus describes the hallmark of proper assertiveness: “First, is trust being built after every exchange of information? Second, is value being created after every exchange of information? Third, have you maintained your integrity? Fourth, and most important, when people agree in a meeting, does that agreement reflect a deep-seated internal commitment? If people are browbeaten into submission, they sabotage the implementation,” he concludes.

Tackling your anger

Posted on September 4, 2007 Updated on June 6, 2015

Anger is a letter short of the word – ‘Danger’. Ask where your anger is coming from. What is it that makes you mad? Try to tackle it at it’s root cause. Recognising situations that spark your fuse can make it easier to avoid or work through them.
Relax

Simple relaxation techniques such as deep breathing and meditating can help calm you down.
Think out-of-the-box

Your thinking becomes confused and exaggerated, when you’re angry. Most situations do not portend the end of the world, so try to put happenings in perspective.

If you slow down, you might find a way to solve the problem. The world is not out to get you, even though it may seem like it.

Thinking logically might not alter the reality of the situation, but may keep your anger from exaggerating the problem.
Solve

Channelising your anger towards solving the problem or trying to cope with the situation is the way out.

You can’t stop it from raining, but you can open your umbrella and stay dry.

Listen

Listening (though that is the last thing you want to do!) what the other person is as important as getting your point across. In fact you may sound exaggerated, hurtful, or aggressive. Say what you want the other person to hear-they may already know you’re angry. Then, listen carefully to the response.

This will help you stay calm-not to mention you improve your chances of resolving the problem.

Change your environment
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Move out of the milieu you were in. Try indulging yourself in any activity that will give you some time to cool down. A calm, rational mind and body will make better decisions.

Learning to manage and control your anger will surely make you healthier and happier for the rest of your life.

Using Fear To Your Advantage

Posted on September 3, 2007

Using Fear To Your Advantage
Facing your fears can help you achieve successes you never knew were possible

A friend of mine worked for a large Indian telecommunications company. After about six years of working there, he found that the initial excitement had died down and that his learning and growth had plateaued. That was when he received an offer to start up operations of a new entrant. The initial meetings clearly indicated to him that the role would be exciting. In fact, this was just what he was looking out for. There would be many challenges, especially since the company was new. At the same time, there would be tremendous learning.

However, after about three long months of discussions, my friend decided not to accept the offer. The reason he gave me was ‘fear’. He loved the job description but was afraid. He was afraid of stepping out of his comfort zone, of losing himself in unfamiliar territory, and of starting something entirely new. Fear made him flee from a great opportunity.

Fear happens to all of us and most of us normally react in one of two ways. We either flee, wherein we try to run away, or we hide and freeze, where we do not know what to do and are paralysed. These make people let their fears play on their minds and allow them to reach uncontrollable levels — leading to anxiety and pessimism. Like my friend who decided to give up on his opportunity, they continuously tell themselves, “I do not want to take risks. I do not want to do anything that I fear. It does not matter whether I am growing or learning, as long as I am safe in this old place where I have no fear.” But the problem is that, with time, your fears only get worse. You even begin to start fearing things that have absolutely no risks attached to them. You end up losing out on all the great opportunities in life.
How Do We Tackle Fear?

As the lines of a recent television commercial go, ‘at the end of fear, there is success’. The commercial shows two youngsters who are excited by an opportunity to tackle their fear. They react by fighting it, and enjoy every moment of the experience. Can we do this? Yes, of course. Think about adventure parks and horror movies where we pay good money to be scared out of our wits. We find this fear exciting. We deliberately trigger automatic reactions of fear in order to experience the thrill.

Like any other emotion, fear has both positive and negative aspects. Negative fear is debilitating. Positive fear is exhilarating. Life is boring without fear. Successful leaders constantly search for new, risky ventures. They even consciously focus on doing things that other people are afraid to do; go places where others fear to tread. Counteract the discomfort of fear by focusing on the positive side — the learning and the growth that every event generates. See events in a positive light that would give you power to overcome your fears and help you accomplish what you want to do.

People think that fear is paralysing and reduces your potential. Actually, the opposite is true. Fear can generate super-human feats. Have you not heard stories where normal people fought valiantly to save their friends and family from grave danger? Facing fear is empowering for leaders. It gives you strength you never knew you had. Fear is only damaging when you run away and do not confront it.

People avoid fear in order to preserve independence. Fear is only enslaving when someone else is purposefully trying to be fearsome and controlling. But the fear of reality — the possibility of missed opportunities — can motivate you to get to where you want to be. Rather than being afraid about losing security, comfort and predictability, start fearing about losing out on opportunities; start fearing about getting nowhere in life. Be afraid of being mediocre. Be afraid of waking up one morning and saying to yourself: “Why did I waste my life?” Use fear to your advantage. Fears accompany you until the threshold. Beyond that there is no fear, just success.

ON LEADERSHIP: SANGEETH VARGHESE for Business World.

The author is a leadership scholar from the LSE and founder of LeadCap. His book, Decide to Lead: Eight Decisions That Can Make You A Leader, will soon be published by Businessworld. will soon be published by Businessworld. He can be contacted at sangeethv@leadcap.org

Use More To Have More

Posted on September 3, 2007

Use More To Have More

The more you use your abilities, the more you will be able to benefit from them.

We often wonder why people who are already capable are blessed with more, while most others live average lives. How can a Jack Welch also be a successful speaker, author and columnist? And how could Vikram Sarabhai, the father of India’s space programme, simultaneously be a successful physicist, businessman, educationist and statistician? How could he possibly create institutions as diverse as the Indian space research organisation (ISRO) and the Indian institutes of management (IIM)? Are people like Welch and Sarabhai blessed with extraordinary talents, or does something else tip things in their favour?

Human capabilities can be divided into two broad sorts: Obvious capabilities are those that we are conscious about. We exhibit and utilise these every day. Our obvious capabilities are pretty much on display all the time. Or they could be discovered with very little effort. They are embedded in our basic tendencies. For example, from an early age, Bill Gates had always showed a deep interest in computing. When he set up Microsoft with co-founder Paul Allen, Gates knew that his strengths were in computing and that was where he invested his time and money. How a college drop-out used his passion to become the richest man in the world is plainly visible to everyone.

Hidden capabilities are different from obvious capabilities. They can be developed only by wilful determination, requiring some amount of effort before their discovery. To discover your hidden capabilities, you would have to boldly embrace opportunities, even when you are not sure. This requires you to be aware of the new opportunities you are exposed to. By being at the helm of the world’s largest software corporation, Bill Gates was constantly thinking about the future of technology to give his company a competitive edge. That led him to the broader realm of how technology could change the world. His thoughts were no longer limited to emerging technology, but he was now imagining the future. He was constantly building and improving it. He was no longer just a computer geek, but a management guru —evangelising the latest management techniques. A futurist — defining the way things would be. An author — writing about how things are changing and even a world reformer — driving projects that were changing lives for the better.

How can you improve your obvious capabilities and discover hidden capabilities? The basic law regarding your hidden and obvious capabilities is the Law of Use and Possess. According to this law, if you use more, you have more; if you use less, you have less.

Use more to have more: Very simply, the more you exploit opportunities around you, the more you will come across them. If you utilise the immediate, short-term opportunities that you come across rather than wait for that perfect situation, you will receive more long-term opportunities. If you did not start out on the first conquest, you would never have had the opportunity for more. That one initiative told you about your warring capabilities and your leadership qualities; and legions fell before you. If you had instead chosen to stay put and deal with your kingdom, you would never have gone out and made the whole world your kingdom. The more you use your capabilities, the more you reveal about yourself, to yourself.
Use less to have less: You could also choose to destroy your capabilities by running away from situations; by never learning or by never making an effort. You squander away your capabilities — and they are never again able to regain their original shape. The less you use your capabilities, the less you will benefit. Slowly, you will lose all that you had once owned.

As a leader, choose more. When situations demand, face them by investing your capabilities wisely. As you develop them, more doors will open up for you. Only in this way would you improve your existing capabilities and discover more hidden ones.

ON LEADERSHIP: SANGEETH VARGHESE for BUSINESS WORLD

The author is a leadership scholar from the LSE and founder of LeadCap. His book, Decide to Lead: Eight Decisions That Can Make You A Leader, will soon be published by Businessworld. He can be contacted at sangeethv@leadcap.org

The Practical Side of Leadership

Posted on September 3, 2007

Leadership as you see it:
Leadership, at the end of the day, boils down to taking the right decision at the right time. A leader needs to set the direction, get buy-in from the team, and then align the company to achieve the goals. Helping set the balance between short-term and long-term goals, between achieving day-to-day numbers and teamwork is also important.

In addition to leading the team, it is important to have skills in change management, have a more participative style of management and being able to build relationships at all levels. You have short-term and long-term relationships; you have strategic and operational relationships. A leader should be able to identify and manage each one of them. I learnt how to juggle between short-term and long-term relationships, between managing our growth goals, and also investing in long-term and high impact projects like Shiksha for school education and Bhasha for enabling technology in major local languages. One needs to have leadership at various levels — operational and strategic. Operational leadership is about here and now. It is about producing short-term results that are visible. Strategic leadership is broader and is more at a change level. An organisation requires both of these.

Leadership in the US and India:
In my experience, I have noticed US companies focusing a lot more on the excellence of their middle management. Middle management is the layer that ensures operational excellence — the visible results that we were talking about. The top management formulates the vision, sets the direction with clear goals, and helps drive change. Mid-management operationalises the vision and makes the changes a practical reality. People at this level tend to have been in the company for a long time compared to junior management, who are relatively new, and hence the mid-managers tend to get taken for granted. They can get jaded and demotivated easily. It is very important that any organisation focus on them and make them effective.

Another observation I have made is that, in India, we don’t tend to differentiate between types of leaders themselves. Most of the time we rely on people who have already done well in large organisations to drive incubations or start-ups. But this will not always work. Running and producing results in an already established company is a different ball game compared to starting up a new entity or division. One needs the right type of people for the right type of job. The right type of leader can determine the difference between success and failure.

Leadership style:
I demand excellence, I demand stretch results. I am very involved with my team, whether it is a three member team or a 300-member team.

How do you demand excellence? There are two ways. Giving the team highly challenging assignments and goals is one way. Another way is to take a small number of good people and give them really crazy assignments. Give them a very tough and nasty job. There is a risk in the second method that I will lose some of them in the process. But I will definitely get to stretch and derive excellence from the rest. This produces great leaders. Both approaches work well.

I have a high amount of humility, focus on team building and focus a lot on communicating and reaching out to all levels in the organisation.

The excitement of being a leader:
The fulfilment and satisfaction derived from the hard work, the frustrations and the challenges, the success and, eventually, seeing your team and institution grow and create a broad impact, is tremendous. Being a leader in tough, challenging situations brings out the best in me. You give me a choice of assignments and I will gravitate towards the one in which I will learn the most, usually the toughest. This definitely brings many challenges. But I, for one, would rather die trying than not try to make the impossible possible. I will do things that I have not done before. I will go to places where I have not gone before. You give me the charge of a $1 billion company and ask me to grow it to $1.5 billion in the next 5 years. No doubt it has its own challenges, but I will not find that as exciting, as the things are mostly in place. But give me a company with lots of problems — operational, cultural, strategic — I will take it; for the learning, for the challenges.

Development of a vision:
When the company (Microsoft) decided to back me up for Project Shiksha in 2002, we were struggling as to what to do in the educational field. Some team members from Redmond were conducting focus groups to understand the needs better. As I went through the results, I realised there was a big gap in what was required in India and what was being done. That helped me formulate our vision for Shiksha — seeing a better future for India and then betting on it. The idea for Project Bhasha came up while Bill Gates was visiting India for the first time in 1997. We were passionate about a software localisation programme. People were really apprehensive about making software in Hindi. But Bill Gates could see our vision and, according to him, Microsoft is not here in India to serve just the creamy 2-3 per cent. We need to be broadbased and reach out to more people. Once that was agreed, I wanted to do all languages — 14 of them. I tried selling it to the headquarters and they thought I was crazy. But at the same time they saw the passion and agreed. So, vision is really about seeing the shape of the future and betting on it. It is also about keeping your ear close to the ground and watching out for early trends.

Handling the change agents of technology and leadership:
I love technology. I use technology as a great tool to help me lead from anywhere, anytime and at all levels, help me respond rapidly to our customers, partners and my team.

I am very adaptable and a quick learner. Throw me into a new environment and I learn quickly and ramp up fast. I am also highly optimistic and can see the positive opportunities in most situations. These qualities help a long way when dealing with change.

Author: Rajiv Kaul (for Business World)
Rajiv Kaul became the managing director of Microsoft India when he was just 31, at an age when most of his peers were in middle management positions. At Microsoft he saw the dot com boom and the subsequent bust. He also conceptualised and implemented projects like Shiksha and Bhasha, which continue to have a high impact on Microsoft’s future. In his last assignment at Microsoft, Rajiv was at the software giant’s Redmond headquarters leading the emerging markets group. Currently Rajiv is excited about his new move, as a partner in Actis, a leading private equity investor in emerging markets. Rajiv looks forward to using his skills and knowledge in each of the regions that Actis operates.