• Reward centered
  1. They see the moving to leadership as a reward of what they’ve achieved so far and is a prize.
  2. Focus on the “glory”, “prestige”, “rewards” for achieving pinnacle of success
  3. They usually pick and choose what they want to do as leader and do what is usually something they feel they are good at or have fun.
• Responsibility centered
  1. Look at this as a responsibility rather than reward.
  2. Don’t shy away from doing what is required for someone at this job
  3. The experience of being ‘responsibility centered‘ leader should be tough and challenging
  4. Look at this from the perspective of the people they lead, rather than themselves.

• There’s no pure “Reward” / “Responsibility” focused Leader. People are usually in a spectrum. You need to ensure you are more aligned toward Responsibility centered.

• Responsibility centered Leaders need to be aware of the Trap – when they are being responsibility centered leader, people tend to praise them and agree with them quite a lot and this can lead people to move down the path of Reward centered leadership.
  • Have a strong inner circle who can challenge and keep them honest

5 Core responsibilities

These are responsibilities that “Reward centered” Leaders usually ignore or don’t do well

• Having difficult & uncomfortable conversations
  • Addressing Bad behavior immediately and not tolerating regardless of how good the direct report is at their job
  • Don’t avoid these hard conversations

• Managing subordinates
  • Individual coaching and guidance is necessary at all levels. This has got nothing to do with the person’s experience.
  • If you feel you should be able to trust people to manage themselves, or justify not knowing what your direct reports are doing by justifying not being a micromanager, then your motive for leading is wrong.
  • Micromanagement — the only people who call management, micromanagement are the ones trying to avoid accountability.
  • As a leader, you need to
    • Know what they are working on
    • Know their progress
    • Give them the right feedback and coaching
  • Lots of experience doesn’t mean people don’t have to be managed. It’s not sign of punishment or lack of trust. It’s giving them the benefit of direction and coaching.
  • Best of sportsmen pay people to coach them.
  • Stopping managing is a sign of neglect.

• Running great team meetings
  • Running boring meetings / avoiding them
  • Outcome based meetings
  • If you allow in-effective meetings to happens, this will percolate to entire org
  • Bad Meetings == Bad decisions

• Developing Leadership team
  • If you feel this is something touchy-feely and waste of time, then your motive for being a leader isn’t right.
  • Hiring != delegating to HR
  • It’s not just a annual meeting or gala for team building

• Communicating constantly & repeatedly
  • Research says it takes 7 times for people to hear the same message before believe execs are serious about it.
  • CEOs need to be Chief Reminding Officers
  • You always need to over communicate.

Quotes & References

• It’s about doing the job, not having the job.
• CEO is not Chief Executive Officer , it is Chief Executing officer.
• When deciding on picking up a certain role ask yourself
  • Why do you want to do the thing that __ does? (CEO/VP/Director etc)
  • Why do you still want to be _____ ? (CEO/VP/Director etc)

Life is not a quest for Pleasure – It’s a quest for meaning

• 3 possible sources of meaning
  • Work – Finding purposeful work or doing something significant
  • Love – By Caring for another human
  • Courage – Showing courage at the face of difficulty
• What matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
  • Like in Chess, there’s no best move in the world, there’s only what is right for the specific game at the specific time depending on the personality of the opponent etc.
• Find meaning for the suffering in your Life
  • Faith, hope, and purpose helps with survival, story of a warden who thought the war would end by a month and how he died when that didn’t happen. While many said the reason was typhus, his body stopped fighting back once he had lost hope.
  • How suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.
    • “Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
  • “Suffering is not necessary to find meaning in life, meaning is possible inspite of suffering”
  • Question : “Do monkeys / guinea pigs who get pricked multiple times know they are serving a great cause for the humans?” – they most certainly don’t but they still server a purpose. The same way there may be situations when we humans don’t understand the reason for the suffering, but deep down there’ll always be a meaning to it.
• You always have a choice
  • What is to give light must endure burning

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

• There are always external forces you can’t control – you can only control the internal forces – your response and attitude to .
  • It’s your attitude towards your existence that makes all the difference.
  • Even in the most dire situations you have the power – E.g inmates from Auschwitz.
• You are more resilient that you think
  • We are way stronger than we think. E.g of how people survived the concentration camp , harsh weather etc.
• Take Responsibility
  • Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
  • If you find its your destiny is to suffer, you must accept the suffering as a task;his unique task and your opportunity lies in the way in you bear your burden
• Everybody’s why is different
• Love
  • Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
  • Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
• Happiness and Success cannot be pursued – It must ensue
  • The more you aim at it, the more you are likely to miss
  • It can only be the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a purpose /cause greater than oneself or one’s surrender to a person other than himself
  • You have to let it happen by not caring about it.
  • Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it (*Gita*)
• Cherish your memories
  • “The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

Logo Therapy

• Logo Therapy – School of thought in psychotherapy that focusses on finding the meaning and purpose in your life.
  • Dereflection
    • Focus away from oneself, towards other people so they can become whole and spend less time being self absorbed about a problem or how to reach a goal
  • Paradoxical Intention
    • is a technique that has the person wish for the thing that is feared most. This was suggested for use in the case of anxiety or phobias, in which humor and ridicule can be used when fear is paralyzing. For example, a person with a fear of looking foolish might be encouraged to try to look foolish on purpose. Paradoxically, the fear would be removed when the intention involved the thing that was feared most.
    • Reversal of attitude by replacing fear with a paradoxical wish
      • “Paradoxical intention can also be applied in cases of sleep disturbance. The fear of sleeplessness12 results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient not to try to sleep but rather to try to do just the opposite, that is, to stay awake as long as possible. In other words, the hyper-intention to fall asleep, arising from the anticipatory anxiety of not being able to do so, must be replaced by the paradoxical intention not to fall asleep, which soon will be followed by sleep.”
  • Socratic Dialogue
    • Help someone realize the answer to their question / self discovery through the use of their own words
• No-o Dynamics
  • Man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However this tension is a pre-requisite of mental health

Quotes & References

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way”

“He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW” – Fredrick Nietzsche

“In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are forced to change ourselves”

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Gaur Gopal Das draws an analogy to wheels of a car and states that the secret of Life is finding the balance and just like a car balances on 4 wheels, we must balance 4 critical aspects/areas of Life.

1. Personal Life
2. Relationships
3. Work Life
4. Social contribution

Furthermore, Balance is split into 2 kinds :

External Balancing (alignment)

• Adjust priorities based on the situation at the moment and focusing on that particular wheel that needs attention.
• Tenets are Balance and Adjustment

Internal Balancing

• This is about our attitude and values, more like air in the tyres – If the air pressure is not right, there’ll be puncture.
• Tenets are Attitude and values.

Sprituality is another important aspect mentioned in this book and going back to Car analogy, this is compared as being the steering wheel. Even if you have all wheels of the car balanced and aligned with the right air pressure, not having the steering wheel means you’ll never reach the destination.

• In whatever genuine form, spirituality brings purpose to our life and gives a destination worth going
• Comprised of 4 pieces (4 S’s) – Spiritual Practice (Sadhana), Company we keep (Sangha), Our Character (Sadachar), Our service to god & others (Seva)
• When all these 4 are aligned properly we’ll be able to drive the car of our life to its destination

Wheel #1 – Personal Life

Expressing Gratitude

• See the Positive
  • We all boil at different degrees!
  • I am not saying these problems don’t exist, but the real problem is that when negativity consumes the mind, not only do we lose the vision to see the beautiful things around us, but also the ability to solve the problems that confront us.
  • We have to train our mind to focus on the positive and feel empowered to deal with the negative.
  • When we think negatively of people, we should immediately counteract that energy by contemplating three positive qualities they have
  • Episode of the cumin seed stuck in teeth – Mind is the like the tongue, it drifts towards negative areas of Life, making us restless and uneasy. It schemes to uproot the problems that’s causing pain, not realising that persistent scheming causes more emotional damage.
• Gratitude is not a feeling; it is a state of mind that can be developed, and it allows us to tap into a reservoir of unlimited positive energy.
• Being grateful happens in two steps.
  1. The first is to realize that there is good in the world and that good has fallen upon us.
  2. The second is to know that goodness is coming from something other than us, an external reality is giving the gifts of grace to our very own reality. This could be our family, our friends, nature and even God. We have so much to be grateful for!
• Even in times of difficulty and sorrow, we can feel the inner strength, when we are grateful for the support of caring friends and family.
• How to express gratitude
  • Recognize the good that has been done to us and say Thank you
  • Remember what good was done and mean the Thank You!
    • Contemplation is the best methods to develop gratitude.
  • Reciprocate Live the Thank You- through your actions and give back.
  • Gratitude Log
    • Reflect on the last 24 hours and identify 3-5 people or situation that you are grateful for
    • Be very descriptive so it becomes easy to excavate the emotion from you.
    • Once every week, it should also contain 3-5 action points to thank people you are grateful for.
    • When doing this feel the happiness you felt when the good was done to you.

Press Pause

• Joshua Bell – Social experiment with Washington Post  & Article
• If we don’t pause, we miss a lot of beautiful moments in life.

Why Worry

• Learning to detach ourselves from situations outside of our control is an imperative skill to learn for personal growth.
• This doesn’t mean you should be lazy – we should do everything in our power to rectify the situation, but after that we should take our attention away from the unpleasant circumstance.
• What we see as bad at one point in time may turn out to be good for us and, what we see as good at another point may turn out to be bad for us. We should not judge the situation by its face value.
• Sometimes when we get engrossed in a problem, we feel trapped in our own minds. In that state, we constantly regurgitate our issues, causing us a lot of emotional pain. A spiritual process gives us the ability to come out of this mental loop and helps transform the greatest difficulties into opportunities.’

Importance of Meditation

• Takes time and needs discipline. All the more important for people who feel they don’t have the time.
• Like a plane, takes us high, far away and further away imperceptibly. If you look out of a window, you don’t seem like moving fast, but later you realize how far you’ve come.
• Allows experience of self realization.

Wheel #2 : Relationships

Be sensitive with our words and actions

• Fight the strong urge to judge someone based on an initial interaction with them. Everyone has a fascinating story that we know nothing about.
• Being attentive in our relationships is crucial to our success. How we behave towards others determines the quality of our life. ‘It’s just my personality’ is not an acceptable excuse to be insensitive towards others.
• Golden Rule : Treat someone better than how you’d want to be treated. Ask the question – “Does my tone of voice, body language, behavior reflect sensitivity”
• “Familiarity breeds contempt – When we are overly familiar with people, we forget how important they are to us and the correct way to behave with them”
• Attitude doesn’t discriminate – Treating inanimate objects with insensitivity will gradually leads us to treating everyone the same way.

Look at the Positives

• Always see the best in people – Like a bee that always looks for flowers with nectar and avoid lingering where there’s dirt.
• 5 different ways to perceive people in our relationships.
  1. Person who cannot see the Good at all  (e.g neighbours dirty clothes & window)
     • This kind only sees the bad and magnifies it out of proportion
     • Possible reasons maybe – spite, dislike, insecurity
  2. Person who sees both Good and Bad, but chooses to neglect the Good (e.g dog that shopped and forgot the keys)
     • Happens so often – Our friends and family, do so much but we neglect and focus only on the bad things.
  3. Person who sees both Good and Bad and is neutral to both
     • Difficult to find this type – they are indifferent to everything and don’t care much for anything.
  4. Person who sees both Good and Bad and consciously chooses to neglect the Bad
     • Really tough to live this as it requires you to consciously avoid the natural human tendency to focus on the bad.
     • E.g Aditya Birla – Speaking tree employee who caused a huge loss, started by making a list –  “Points in favour of this employee” to create the conscious attention to shift focus to positive. This set the tone for the leadership behavior.
     • Before you decide to reprimand someone, sit down and write a list of all good qualities they have – though it may not change your ultimate decision, it may change your perspective about the situation and help control anger
     • Focus on the good and deal with the bad – is a principle that help save relationships and help make the right decision.
  5. Person who cannot see the Bad at all; they see the slightest good and magnify it
     • Only possible for God or an enlightened one.
     • Can be impractical for us most of time.
     • Neglecting the bad doesn’t mean that we do not deal with it practically – It just means that we do not allow our mind to focus on and hover over the bad.

Correcting Cautiously

• Learning the art of appreciation is vital for building healthy relationship.
• Mutual Funds & Relationships have one thing in common – You must invest in them before you can withdraw
• We should learn to invest appreciation and love into a person before we correct them. If not done this way, the person receiving the feedback will feel demotivated and not cherished.
• Art of giving feedback – just having the right intention is not enough. Giving advice inappropriately may do more harm than good. It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it. Tone of the voice, body language and facial expression account for more than words too.
• 4 questions before giving feedback
  1. Am I the right person to give corrective feedback? – Is someone else better suited, am I a friend? Am I an authority in the subject?
  2. Do I have the right motive to give corrective feedback
     • Desires govern what we want and motives tell us why we want it
     • We should be conscientious that our motive to give feedback is appropriate  – or is it the case of settling old accounts, grudge or to exact vengeance.
     • Feedback from the place of love may be unpalatable, but it tastes the sweetest if done appropriately and has the right effect.
  3. Do I know the right way to give corrective feedback
     • People are usually resilient. They can stand being wrong, but only when it is pointed out to them with love. Being blunt and abusive can be emotionally draining for both, and the person receiving the feedback switches off after some time.
  4. Is it the right time?
     • Hot heads don’t give good feedback – Choose a better time.
     • We should not simply let our anger loose – we should explain it. When we express what we feel, we do so at the risk of seeming unpleasant, but when we take the time to explain our emotions to people, they might be able to empathize with us.

Forgiveness

• In this fast paced world, we no longer bother with the subtle intricacies and niceties in our relationships – we think about people in terms of their purpose and utility and our interactions are driven by it.
• Everything in this world is instant – Sadly it doesn’t work like that for our relationships.
• How to practice forgiveness
  • Look beyond the situation –
    • We’ve all be in situations where our intellect is clouded by emotions. At those times we say anything and everything for our own peace of mind. Although a moment of patience in a moment of anger can save us a thousand moments of regret in the future, usually when we are suffering intensely, we cannot help but let our minds run amok.
    • Think –  How are they suffering? What are they feeling? Is there a deeper chaos?
  • Separate the episode from the Person
    • Start with language we use to describe the incident
      • Saying “It is my problem” causes us to feel guilty and over time it may cause inferiority complex.
      • Saying “It is your problem”  causes us to feel angry – you can never say those words peacefully.
      • Saying “It is the problem” – separates the problem from the person and helps deal with it effectively.
  • Focus on the higher purpose
• Forgiveness vs Justice
  • On a personal level, you can forgive a person who has wronged us, but on a societal level, there should be strict justice to create an orderly society. No one should be able to break away with the law in the name of forgiveness.

Associations

• Association (called Sangha in sanskrit) is crucial to your success in this world and beyond.
• We are known by the company we keep (funny story about handsome man and excretion)
• Association is beyond neutral dealings – Level of intimacy
  • dadāti—gives charity; pratigṛhṇāti—accepts in return; guhyam—confidential topics; ākhyāti—explains; pṛcchati—enquires; bhuṅkte—eats; bhojayate—feeds; ca—also; eva—certainly; ṣaṭ–vidham—six kinds; prīti—of love; lakṣaṇam—symptoms.
• Association creates sub-conscious sharing of value systems (e.g smoker vs non-smoking friend and consequence)
• “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

Wheel #3 : Work Life

Competition Crossroads

• Causes of Unhealthy Competition – Being envious or uncontrolled ambition
• We compete with people who have same skills or outlook in life, otherwise we don’t feel threatened.
• Competition is everywhere.
• Jealousy or Envy
  • When one harbours ill feelings towards others wanting to be like them or better than them but does not act on those feelings, it is called jealousy.
  • When one acts on those ill feelings jealousy turns into envy
• If we do have to compare ourselves with others, we should compare positive attitudes. That person’s attitude to tirelessly keep working or grinding at their skills is inspiring. I want that same attitude. Let me learn from them and in turn help them in any way I can. Let us mutually grow. That is how a an open-minded person thinks.
• Healthy Competition is about competing with ourselves rather than others
• There’ll always be workplace politics and we should learn to manage it in a clean way.

Self Discovery

• We should understand ourselves to know what’s meaningful for us and what we want to spend our time on
• If there is one thing that I think is the foundation of growth, it is understanding who you are. You can only compete with yourself if you have a clear idea of your potential, your capacities and certainly your limitation
• Everyone has been gifted with special talents and skills. Every individual has something unique in them. If God were to reveal that talent to us straight away, from the very day we were born, there would be no excitement in our journey. God covers our talent, skills and potential only so that we have the chance to discover it. And in the process of doing so, in trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives, there is a tremendous sense of satisfaction
• Self Discovery is not a one-time event, but an ongoing evolution.

Sprituality @ work

• To be ambitious and entrepreneurial for yourself is not wrong.
• It’s a misconception to think spirituality kills ambition and zest to achieve.
• Spirituality changes your motive to achieve and makes us want more so we can have the resources to help others.
• Another misconception is that spiritual people get walked over in business because of their values (e.g sage and snake story). Spirituality teaches us to stick to values but at the same time be meticulous and straightforward in business.
• You can make as much money as you want/desire, but be wary of it’s potential to distract us from our purpose.

Integrity & Character

• Good character has the ability to change lives.
• Philosophy without character is of no value.
• 3 aspects of spirituality in practice.
  • Vichaar: The philosophy that we seek answers from. This helps us understand how life should be lived, and how spirituality should be practised. These concepts, in turn, are the universal lighthouse principles that guide us towards living a life of value.
  • Aachaar: Based on the philosophy is the physical action which leads to a transformation in our value system and helps us develop good conduct and character. When one’s character is transformed by following even a sentence of the rich philosophy, then those actions are called aachaar.
  • Prachaar: The good conduct of a spiritual practitioner inspires others to have faith in the philosophy and values of spirituality. Without having to give a single sermon, we can reach out to many just by being exemplary and having good character. What great men do, common men follow.

Wheel #4 : Social Contributions

Selfless Sacrifice

• Ice-cream and Candle both melt – but there reasons are different. Ice-cream represents the desire to savour every moment of your life through personal enjoyment, whereas candle’s very essence is to give light to others.
• Oxygen mask  in flight – use it yourself before you help others.
  • We can only share wealth with others if we possess wealth. Similarly, we can love others only if we know what it feels like to be loved. We can only bring hope to others if we feel hope for ourselves. In conclusion, we can only give to others what we possess
  • If you don’t follow this you’ll land into compassion fatigue.

Family First

• Relationships at home can work well only if all parties have low expectations of each other, but high expectations of themselves to help the other.
• Example of Lata Bhagawan Khare – who ran Marathon barefoot to save her husband.

Nation Narrative

• Expand the circle of selflessness slowly so we can effectively serve our community and nation.
• Love for God is composed of 3 things
  • Right Action – behave and act in accordance with spiritual principles
  • Right Intention – Have selfless intention. Continuously checking our intentions makes them pure.
  • Right Mood  – Serve in a way that’s favourable for our growth. Don’t do it because “You have to” but because “it’s the right thing to do”

Quotes & References

“Feeling peaceful, happy and content is not about avoiding challenges in our life, but about how we navigate through these challenges to reach the type of life we want to live”

Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.’ It’s how we respond that makes all the difference. – Aldous Huxley

The Paradox of our times is that those who have the most can often be the least Satisfied. We have Mastered how to look successful, but not how to organize our lives so we feel successful

We all have 3 things in common – we are all stuck, we all have a journey to complete & we all have a destination.

The mind is what we use to perceive the world. We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorry, it only saps today of its joy – Leo Buscaglia

It’s strange that “Sword” and “Words” have the same letters. Even more strange is they can have the same effect if not handled properly – Anon

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only Love can do that – MLK

Rule #1 – Don’t follow your passion

• Passion Hypothesis
  • The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion) is wrong.

• Passion is rare
  • 2002 study Robert Vallerand in Canadian Universities found that though 84% had a passion, less than 4% of it had any relation to work of education while the remaining 96% was more of describing a hobby.

• Passion takes time
  • Amy Wrzeniewski – Study published in Journal of Research in personality
    • Types of work
      • Job – a way to pay bills – focus on financial rewards, necessity rather than pleasure of fulfilment
      • Career – a path toward increasingly better work – Focus on advancement
      • Calling – work that’s a important part of your life and vital part of your identity. – Focus on enjoyment, fulfilment, social usefulness.
    • People doing the same work saw it differently between the above 3 types.
    • Strongest predictor of someone describing their work as calling is the number of years spent on the job
    • If you’ve been doing something longer – means you got good at it, built the required relationship for success

• Passion is a side effect of Mastery
  • Daniel Pink – Puzzle of Motivation TED Talk
    • Autonomy
    • Master
    • Purpose
  • SDT (Self determination Theory) – why some pursuits get our engines going while others leave us cold?
    • Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators
    • Nutrients for Intrinsic motivation
      • Autonomy – Feeling that you have control over your day and your actions are important
      • Competence – Feeling that you are good at what you do
      • Relatedness – Feeling of connection with other people
  • Competence and Autonomy can be achieved by most people in most fields assuming you are ready to put in the hard work required.
     
• Passion is dangerous
  • Origin & importance of Passion Hypothesis – 1970 publication – What color is your parachute – Richard Bolles
    • Figure out what you like to do & then find a place that needs people like you
  • Jeffrey Arnett –
    • Young Adulthood – “Work isn’t just a job, but an adventure, a venue for self development and self expression and something that provides a satisfying fit with their assessment of their talents.
  • Work Dis-satisfaction numbers have risen rapidly – The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it

Rule #2 – Importance of Skill

• Craftsman Mindset (Focuses on what you can offer the world. – offers clarity) VS Passion Mindset ( Focuses on what the world can offer you — Offers swamp of ambiguous & unanswerable questions.)
  • If you focus on what this work offers you, you are increasingly aware of what you don’t like about it and it causes unhappiness.
  • Also finding answers to questions like “Who am I”,  “What do I truly like doing” etc don’t have straight answers

• Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting a craftsman mindset will be the foundation on which you’ll build a compelling career.

• Career Capital
  • Traits that define great work
    • Creativity – How can this be done in a way that’s completely out of box
    • Impact (Mission) – How does this work impact you and the society
    • Control – How much flexibility do you have in how you accomplish your work
  • Career Capital Theory
    • Traits that define great work are rare and valuable.
    • Supply & Demand says that if you want a job that has those traits, you need to have something rare and valuable to offer in return. – This is your career capital
    • Craftsman Mindset is well suited to acquire this career capital.
  • 3 disqualifiers where you can’t apply Craftsman Mindset
    • Job presents fewer opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing skills.
    • Job focusses on something you think is useless or perhaps even bad for the world.
    • Job forces you to work with people you really dislike.

• How to build Career Capital
  • Deliberate Practice coined by Anders Ericsson – Activity designed, typically by a teacher for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individuals performance.
  • The 10,000 Hour Rule – Malcolm Gladwell
  • It’s a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that ends up explaining excellence.
  • Just the spending the time isn’t enough – if you show up and work hard – you’ll hit a performance plateau beyond which you can’t get any better – You need a combination of discipline, dedication & deliberate practice.
  • Craving for Critical Feedback – more direct, harsh feedback and faster feedback loops is important.
  • Taking up stuff that is beyond your comfort zone – Intentional allocation of time.

• Five Habits of a Craftsman
  1. Decide What Capital Market You’re In
     • Winner takes all – There’s only one type of capital available and lots of people are competing for it. For e.g television writing.
     • Auction  – unstructured, where each individual can bring in their unique collection – for e.g Technology
  2. Identify your Capital Type
     • In Winner takes all Market, there’s only one capital type, so you got to have it.
     • In Auction market –  it’s useful to seek Open Gates – as in exploring opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. This will get your further faster than starting from scratch.
  3. Define Good – Geoff Colvin – What it takes to be great
     1. Come up with goals that would determine if you have acquired career capital
  4. Stretch & Destroy
     • Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.… Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in…
  5. Be Patient
     1. Diligence – It’s less about paying attention to main pursuit and more about your willingness to ignore other shiny things that will come along the way to distract.

Rule #3 – Importance of Control

• Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfilment.
  • Autonomy & Control – Daniel Pink
  • ROWE (Results only work environment) was highly successful at many places (BBY, Gap etc)
• Control Traps
  • It’s dangerous to pursue more control before you’ve acquired enough career capital to offer in exchange
  • The point at which you’ve acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point you become very important your employer and they’ll prevent you from making the change.
  • The Key is to know when the time is right to become courageous in your career decisions
• Avoiding Control Traps
  • Law of Financial Viability
    • When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on
    • Definition of “willing to pay” varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. Once you adopt this flexible definition of “pay for it,” this law starts popping up all over

Rule #4 – Importance of Mission (Think big act Small)

• Multiples in science discoveries (for e.g Batteries, Oxygen Isolation, randomized linear encoding)
• Adjacent Possible (reference – Steven Johnson – where good ideas come from)
  • The next big ideas in any field are found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combination of existing ideas
• Understanding the adjacent possible and its role in innovation is the first link in a chain of argument that explains how to identify a good career mission

• Little Bets
  • in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics:
  •  It’s a project small enough to be completed in less than a month.
  • It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn’t exist before).
  • It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback.

• Law of Remarkability
  • For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking

Quotes & References

“Working right trumps finding the right work”

“Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.”

Steve Martin – Be so good they can’t ignore you

Money is a neutral indicator of value, so by aiming to make money you are aiming to be valuable – Derek Sivers

You  are either remarkable or Invisible – The World is full of boring stuff – the brown cows – which is why few people pay attention, A Purple cow on the other had would stand out – Seth Godin, The Purple Cow.

• Is Humble, Hungry and Smart (people)
• Is someone who can easily build Trust
• Has healthy conflict
  • “Argues about the right way to get things done without worrying that they’re going to offend someone”
• is Capable of being honest & vulnerable
  • “Getting people to admit when they make a mistake on a project”
• Holds each other in the team accountable
• is Results oriented (team’s results) , history of getting difficult things done.
  • “Sticking to commitments”

Identifying the traits

In all practical situations, you’ll find people exhibiting just one or two of these traits, but can be coached to being an ideal team player. Here’s a classification that Lencioni describes of people who don’t exhibit all 3 traits.

• Managers need to be smart about how to use these with their employees
• Accurately identifying people in these categories is not easy and shouldn’t be done flippantly
• Wrongly labelling them, even in private can be damaging
• Don’t assign these labels to people just because they are relatively stronger in one / two of these areas
• These should be used only when they are significantly lacking the qualities

Practical Applications

#1 – Hiring a team Player

#2 – Assessing the current Team members

Survey – Insert link to survey

#3 – Developing employees lacking some virtues / improvement to an existing team player

• The most important part of the development process and the part so often missing is the leader’s commitment to constantly “reminding” an employee if they are not doing what is needed (demonstrating humility / hunger /smarts ). Without this improvement will not occur.

• They don’t do it because its Uncomfortable, unpleasant and awkward.
• No one wants to remind fifth week in a row that there’s still no progress or they aren’t working hard enough.
• No matter how unpleasant, managers should continue to do it till either of 2 things happens
  • They change and acquire the virtue and will be indebted to the manager forever
  • They’ll decide to leave on their own, but by then everyone realizes its for their own good.
• Leader Modelling
  • This is very important for developing any trait in our employees
  • Managers need demonstrate that they value these virtues more than anything else
  • They need to be open if they struggle with any of this and admit they are working on it

• Developing Humility
  • Source of lack of humility is always related to some insecurity and in many cases they are rooted to childhood or way back in the job.
  • All of us are insecure in some way – we need to acknowledge that and a manager can start by demonstrating their own challenges to make it easy for the employees.
  • Identify the root cause
    • MBTI / Personal life journeys / DiSC profiles etc
  • Exposure Therapy (fake it till you make it)
    • Making progress by simply acting like they are humble  and intentionally forcing themselves to either compliment others, admit their weakness and take interest in colleagues to understand the benefits
• Developing Hunger
  • Hardest to change and is more nuanced than other 2 because it’s tempting for an employee to downplay lack of hunger to be able to stay on the team and it’ll only show up in the long run.
  • Passion for the Mission and the team
    • Find a way to connect the person to the importance of the work being done. There won’t be any change till this is done.
    • Peer pressure is good motivator – if they see a passionate employee their motivation can be infectious.
  • Clear Expectation setting
    • Set clear behavioural expectations for them and hold them accountable for those
    • Differentiate between performance targets / goals vs Behavioural expectations
    • Helping colleagues in meeting their goals, taking additional responsibilities, working more hours, participating in org goals / initiatives etc
  • Not-too Gentle reminders
    • Habits of lethargy are instilled over time, so it’s very important to call out instances where their behaviour needs change.
    • Don’t wait till the review
    • Give immediate, unambiguous feedback – Tough Love
  • Encouragement
    • Praise publicly when you notice them exhibiting hunger.
• Developing Smarts
  • Employees who lack people smarts actually have no desire to create interpersonal problems with others, they just don’t understand the nuances of interpersonal situations and they don’t understand the impact of their words or actions on others.
  • Basic Training
    • Quickly & lovingly provide feedback & nudge them towards right behaviour.

#4 – Embedding these behaviours into Culture

• Be Explicit & Bold – Make your intentions public on how you want the organization to demonstrate these behaviours
• Catch & Revere – When people demonstrate these behaviours, recognise and call out / celebrate
• Detect & Address – When you notice violations, don’t overlook them – take time to educate the violater on why this is important – Do this in private

Quotes & References

• Most training & development comes down to how much a person wants to change”

• “Great team players lack excessive ego or concerns about their status. They are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for their own. They share credit emphasize team over self and define success collectively rather than individually”

• “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less – C.S Lewis“

• The most important part of the development process and the part so often missing is the leader’s commitment to constantly “reminding” an employee if they are not doing what is needed. Without this improvement will not occur.

In this book, Lencioni talks about the 5 dysfunctions of a team – how to identify them, and what can be done to fix them. It also calls out the role of a leader in fixing these dysfunctions. 

1. Trust is the foundation of great teams
2. If there’s no trust, there’s not going to be any open constructive idealogical debate. There’ll just be a sense of artificial harmony
3. Because there weren’t any debate, there’s a lot of ambiguity and the team won’t buy into the decisions – resulting with no commitment.
4. Because there’s no clarity/commitment, we wouldn’t hold each other accountable and call out when things aren’t progressing towards our goal.
5. Since there’s no accountable, members only focus on their own results and not the team’s.

Indictors of the dysfunctions and it’s absence

How to fix the dysfunctions