Org Dynamics-Lessons Learned

It was again a time of change in this organization. Again, a new leadership was taking charge and making assessment about the business, technology, people and the products. It was clear that the new management will make some quick decisions between the two teams, two approaches and the two thinkings in this org.

This group had amazing amount of talent, the technology they were working on, was really promising, and there was great opportunity ahead for this business with the market transitions. The only challenge was people dynamics not making it easy to drive fast and focused implementation. Now the choice was to be made between the two teams and how to drive innovation moving forward.

One team had some headstrong leadership that really believed in what they were doing and the message was clear down to the last person in the team. Every team member was speaking the same language, had the same level of confidence about the approach they had taken and believed in it.

On the other hand, the other team was further divided on what the right approach is? what the end goal is? and were very busy fighting for their ways, their thinking and often very vocal about how the other approaches are wrong.

I guess now the decision was really simple to make for any new leader coming from outside :-)

Three lessons learned from this situation that can help with team dynamics:

1. Have clear goals and ensure all the players believe in it. Make sure the whole team knows and believes in what you are working on. If you are still working through your plan and some team members have not fully bought in the story, make sure they believe in the team. If someone has any doubts about both, help them find something they believe in. Believing is what makes it happen!

2. Take responsibility of your decisions- Teams make decisions and they evolve and change and might not turn out to be right.  Sticking with the team and accepting wrong decisions gives more credibility to any team even when some of those decisions did not go well. It is ok to make wrong decisions, not ok to not learn from them!

3. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate- In the time of change, communication engine got to kick-in and try to keep the teams all aligned and updated on the latest thinking. Do not leave your teams hanging in the dark and add fuel to the rumour mill. Communication is the key to create and lead a high-performing, delivery focused, winning team!

Overcoming our fears...

It does sound empowering to know that you can overcome your fears and conquer every situation you come across. However, fears in our life are not always easy to work with and even more, we are not even aware of most of these fears.

Recently, I was working on one of my known fears of flying. This made me realize that I need to honestly find what my heart and brain are afraid of.  I had seen a small cargo plane crash a few years back in Denali National Park, Alaska. This incident not only was sad and disturbing, but also started a fear and anxiety of flying for me. I took medicine for a few times and for last few flights was working hard on my aerophobia by just convincing my brain. For me, this was an act of making my brain believe that my body is just a group of organic particles. These particles have to become part of the matter they came from someday, so do not worry about dying in a plane crash.

I was still thinking about more unknown fears and after a little bit of soul searching, the one that came to mind was - fear of losing face in front of my friends and family or anybody I had a good opinion about. I get nervous and anxious around the people who are taller, slimmer, beautiful, smarter, wealthier than me or in simply anybody who has something that I wish I had. This did mean most of the people around me, as I was very good in finding something really good in each and every person.

My brain was very active around these thoughts and I asked my 6 year old what are his top three fears. I was really not expecting a very specific answer. An instant response came back from him. “My three fears are- something I really want to happen, not happening; fear of being alone in dark places; and my anger, because that prevents me from being happy and I like to be happy”.

I really did not know what to say to that. In his first few words he had summed up every single fear that I can think about my life. He just knew what he was talking about in that moment. His fear of the day was mommy and daddy not buying that foosball table he really wants them to buy:-)

Lesson learned for me was that to overcome my fears, I need to leave all my strong desires of things happening certain way I want them to.

I have a long ways to go before I can truly be empowered and not feel nervous around people because of my real fear of them not liking me. I think, my strongest desire in life is to be liked by everyone even when I do not have some of those qualities that I greatly admire.

Assumptions we make in cross-cultural communications

George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” This illusion in the context of cross-cultural communications is even more detrimental. A lot of us are very familiar with the challenge as the groups we work in are becoming more and more diverse.

In my opinion we are part of the problem. Most of the times we start with some beliefs and presumptions about the person from a different culture and that influences how we interact and even interpret their communications. Here are some common beliefs I have seen:

- If we are talking and the other person is nodding their head, they really understood what we are saying. Nodding head might just mean that they are hearing you, but they might not understand a thing about what you want them to understand.

- If we have nailed down the most common words and phrases of the other language, we have perfected communication in that language. A limited vocabulary without the proper understanding of the culture makes it useless for any meaningful conversation.

- Making small talk about the other culture brings affinity and will help us with the conversation. This might actually create a barrier for communication as no one likes to be pointed out different.

- Imitating mannerism and behavior of other culture makes us a culturally sensitive person. Mannerism is just one piece of the cultural puzzle and with out knowing the full picture, following it might actually make us look like an insensitive person.

People are just people everywhere and an honest communication with no assumptions can never go wrong.

Communication- there is always room for improvement!

Communication some how seemed like an overrated topic to me for a while, partly because I was always a chatty personality and was even good in probing people enough to make them communicate back. I strongly believed that it does not matter what language you speak or how you speak or not speak, as long as you can get your message across you have done your work.  But, over years certainly learned more subtle elements of communication that can always help. Will share my observations around some of these elements in next few posts.

Relevance of the information is the first one that comes to my mind. Have you ever observed a conversation between a toddler and a parent, where ending is not so pleasant with a crying toddler and a frustrated parent? I have lived with that, until I understood what the problem was.  The problem was that the information I was giving was relevant from my perspective, but not from my toddler’s perspective. Does not still mean that I have conquered the world of toddlers, but for sure I have learned a lesson in communication and try to put information in perspective of the person I am communicating with.

A couple of years back, I was watching a mom tell her 2 year old child to return a toy back to their friend and the child was not ready to part. Mom kept saying, ‘please give it back’ and the child kept increasing her grip. The conversation did not change until the child’s older sibling came and told her, “this toy is not yours, give it back.” It occurred to me that the child was not even ready to listen in the absence of a reason why she needs to return the toy back. That was the more relevant piece of information for the child. For the mother the only relevant information was that the child returns the toy.

What is relevant to each of us changes our absorption of information and how we respond in a communication. We all have that child in us who wants to hear the relevant information we care about and in the absence of that, we do dig in our heels deeper and it is difficult for us to come out of an argument. So if relevant information is missing I try to convince the child in me to understand the other side. Try that and it might work for your communications.

Stop interpreting every action

There is a saying in Hindi (Mein tumhari nas nas jaanti hoin -I can read your veins) that means that I know exactly how to interpret each and every action of yours.

I think most of us know how to interpret people around us in day to day situations, but still feel frustrated and uncomfortable when an in-law does that thing again to tick your nerve, or a colleague again continues to push their agenda, or that executive again provides those strong opinions that you hate. The question that worries us is why they keep doing this? Oh my god! Can’t believe they did it again.

I also have wasted a lot of my time and energy thinking about this question. What I realized while working with Jill Bromund (www.becoachable.com/) was that I was asking the wrong question. The right question all along should have been why it troubles me so much when someone reacts certain way I do not like.  I truly believe that most of the people are good and do have good intentions. Conflict only occurs when their interest clash with someone else’s. In our daily lives that is not the case. However, we spend a lot of our life thinking about such small things that slowly try to change our opinions about people and most of the times make us react not so nicely.

Here are some key principles that I learned during my coaching sessions that I thought are very applicable to preserve sanity of our lives.

1. People will not always have reactions you expect them to have, so do not try to find logic in every conversation.

2. Reactions from different people are on different response scales and learn to best work with it.

3. You can’t make them change to fit your needs; change your response level to adjust to people around you.

4. If you do not think you can adjust well with the group, try to find a group that matches your response level.  

In the end our work/organization/group is all about the people it is made off. So find the bunch you enjoy being with and there is no room for interpretation.

Controlling your emotional reactions

Human brain is a tricky thing, but in most of the situations it does believe what it can see, hear and feel.  That is why the terms like ‘blink response’ and ‘first impression’ are so important as they create opinion and perception. Opinions may start with one person, but do travel quickly in the group and do stick longer than what we might think.

So here are a couple of tricks to control your reaction, when in a situation you do not like a comment or statement from someone.

Trick your brain. When someone says something that our brain does not like, it drops into this state of negative feeling. This is what makes us react in a manner that might not present a good opinion about us. Tricking your brain in believing that everything is up to its likeability seems to work. It is not an easy thing and does take practice, but once mastered comes very handy.  I even try to be preemptive and fill my brain with some positive thoughts before walking into a discussion with a person or a group that I was anticipating to generate some negativity.  Good thing about being positive is that it never hurts you or anyone.

Create a perception about you as a positive and a neutral person.  Even when you try to be positive all the time, there are times you might feel differently. This is when having a perception that is positive helps. Being passionate is good and it should be shown in the right forum; but it is even more important to not give an image of having too many strong opinions.  Having too many strong opinions can not only alienate you from certain set of people who might think otherwise, but these can be used against you to bring out strong emotions from you in a group setting. I will admit that people with passion and enthusiasm do make better first impression on me then a poker face. However, that impression remains good as long as we believe in the same things.

So I thought I was becoming good at not getting bothered by people’s comments, but that changed when I recently got pleasure of working with an executive coach Jill Bromund (www.becoachable.com). The best thing about working with Jill was this awareness about the situation that can impact our career growth and how to work on it. It so turns out that I still have some buttons left that can easily be used. Will share some of the insight from Jill in my next blog.

Do you get bothered by some comments your colleagues make?

As a little girl growing up with two elder brothers, teasing was part of my life. They were really good in teasing and I was really good at getting teased. It did get better over years as I learned to be not bothered by it.

There was this one thing they used to say that did bug me a lot. They will tell me that Mahatma Gandhi is a good friend of James Bond. One would ask why will that bother me, here is why. I happen to share my birthday with Gandhi and feel some affinity with the guy. I could never in my dreams have imagined a non-violent person like him to be friends with James Bond.  I was around 5 year old at that time.  As I grew older I did learn; the more I get bothered, the more they will tease.

Years passed by, I was a happy-go-lucky person and did not get bothered about much of what people would say.  That did change when I came to US for my MBA. It was 4^th day of school and we had a group presentation. It went well and I had no doubts in my mind that it will not. However, what ticked me was this one comment from one of my team members. “ You did really good” as if he was expecting me to not do that well.  

We all have been in situations where people will say things that will some how press our wrong buttons. Sometimes we are able to deal with such situations easily and sometimes not. It is really a skill that does not come easily to most of us, but an important one to have in any kind of group environment and especially in a corporate.

In next couple of blogs will share some tricks to not get bothered or may be do get bothered a little but not show it. Trust me it is no fun pressing your buttons once you stop getting bothered.