Trends In People Development

Tags

interactive learning, personal development, personal goals

The goal of every person is to grow and to succeed in his/her endeavour. What makes some people more successful than others? What differentiates “winners” from “losers”?

Here are a few tips that can help you succeed:

1. Here are Three Personal Development Goals that successful people practice habitually. This article from Entrepreneur .com is re-published in The Globe & Mail. The key points of Getting to Know Yourself; Improving Yourself, and Sharing Yourself are universally applicable whether you work for yourself or in a large organisation. It underscores that you need to act yourself if you want to be successful.

2. The IT Industry News Daily has this article to explain what the new trends are to foster development in your workforce. If you want to capture the imagination of the Millennials who are so caught up in social media, you will need to adapt to match their needs for interactive learning.

3. As if to underscore that people development issues are as applicable in the UK as they are in India, here’s an article in CIPD  which claims 25 % of the workforce in the UK believe they receive insufficient support from their employers in their development.

 

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Book Project: Critical For Success Ideas

Tags

personal development, professional development

“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” “Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.” — Aldous Huxley.

Improving Performance

Tags

A Step A Day, personal development

There are many objectives of having a performance appraisal system. However, every performance appraisal system will have these two objectives:

1. Improving individual performance
2. Personal development of individuals

It is obvious that team, department and organization performance improve with improvements in individual performances. There are higher expectations each year, from our clients, from our vendors, from our business affiliates, from our business partners and standards of performance have to reflect these expectations.

Organizations that have got the best out of appraisal system have given strategic importance to personal development. You, me and every team member must see benefits in their quest to grow as professionals and as people. Personal development works best when it is tied in with organizational goals.

In my experience, there are 3 categories of employees:

1. The Self-Starters: Sadly not more than 10 % (if you are lucky) fall into this category. They have high initiative, know what they want to achieve and work relentlessly to improve- all on their own steam. They are treasures to be nurtured.
2. The Happy Many: Ranging from the contented to the mediocre drifter, about 70-80 % of employees fall under this category. they look to the organization- and more specifically their boss- to nudge them to action. They need support. They need direction.
3. The Stubborn Few: These are the die-hards. They respond only when compelled to do so. They need close supervision and lots of chasing even to get themselves to develop.

You may recognize some of your team members- or indeed yourself- as being in one of these categories. Cater to them differently. Recognize them based on their level of response. You have a responsibility to see that every team member experiences personal development.

However, since resources, including time and effort are limited, focus more on those who show greater interest in taking charge of their own development. Focus more on those whose performance and contributions have greater impact for your organization.

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Why is it hard for adults to say “No”?

Tags

assertiveness, personal development

My post today in the A Step A Day series was titled: Not saying “No” means “Yes”.

By co-incidence, a few hours later, I came across this article in the Washington Post which I found quite interesting. Laura Sessions Stepp asks “ Why is it hard for adults to say No?“.

A few things caught my attention: “In order to say yes to what’s truly important, you first need to say no to other things,” says William Ury, a social anthropologist by training and a professional negotiator based at Harvard Law School.

Ury who wrote ” The Power of a Positive No” this year says the significance of saying no is a recent epiphany for him. “It’s the defining challenge of our age.” he says.

Secondly, the actual word “no” — as well as “yes” — starts appearing when a child is about 18 months old, as signaling between parents and children becomes more complex.

Third, by age 15 or 16, young people possess virtually all the cognitive abilities to make good decisions that adults have, according to Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

Like adults, they must know 3 things to use those skills well:

• what they really want as opposed to, say, what their friends want
• what their options are
• what will happen if they choose one option over another.

Looks like these skills are best learnt during childhood. Can they be learnt later in life? I am sure they can but it would take that much more effort and time to master.

Action Planning – Key to Success

Tags

A Step A Day, action plans, personal development

What separates achievement from desire?
What separates excellence from mediocrity?

Action planning is the key to success. If you don’t formulate and implement carefully thought out action plans for personal development, I am afraid, the desire to improve will remain- a desire.

Many of us have dreams of what we want to achieve, what we want to be. However, not everyone achieves these dreams. The failure to achieve our fullest potential can be traced back to a lack of action to fulfill those dreams.

Saying “I want to be a more effective manager” or “I want to improve my leadership capability” is not enough. These are broad statements of intent. To improve your chances of success, your action plans should satisfy the mnemonic SMART.

S-Specific
M-Measurable
A-Achievable
R-Realistic
T-Time bound

Here’s a process I suggest:

1.    Refresh yourself on what you want to achieve.
2.    Draw up a short –list of possible actions.
3.    Run each of the possible actions against the criteria of “Criticality” and “Immediacy”. Those actions which score high on both these dimensions should feature in your final list.
4.    Formulate your action plan keeping SMART in mind.
5.    Begin with an action verb.

Examples:

•    Prepare Mr. Bala to take up the higher responsibilities of Program Lead for Project xyz by March 2008
•    Reduce costs on item 4 by 10 % with reference to same period for last year
•    Complete certification program of abc conducted by xyz with grade pqr by March 2008.

And yes, don’t try to implement too many actions at one time. Choose no more than 3-5 actions. Choose these well.

Choose those which will have the biggest impact on your overall performance.

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To Help People Grow

Tags

A Step A Day, personal development

Our meeting was over with a client team. Some of us were waiting for our car to take us back to Bangalore from the resort on the outskirts of the city.

“There are so many things for us to know. Why don’t you tell us how we can be successful in our careers?” asked a young manager.

This was today’s premium on speed, I thought to myself. I have always maintained that people development is not like the Nestlé’s Maggi 2 minutes noodles, which the young manager and his wife probably made 3 days a week at home, like many young couples do.

We had 5 minutes before the car drove up. He wanted everything there is to know in 5 minutes. There could be many like him, I reasoned on the drive back, eager to learn and learn, fast. Here was someone who wanted everything in a jiffy. He was a product of today’s instant world.

Personal and professional growth, I am afraid, does not work that way. However, enthusiastic you might be, you cannot master skills overnight. Skills have to be mastered one step at a time. The best way to start is to incorporate improvements in yourself a step a day, every day.

It is with this backdrop that I plan to initiate a series of posts categorized “A Step A Day”. The objective: provide perspective and provoke thought to facilitate self-development across a wide spectrum of issues – big and small- crucial for executive success.

I hope this will be useful to many at my client companies . At this stage of my life and career, my personal goal is: To Help People Grow.

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