Archive for July, 2008

Leadership Wisdom!!!!

There is a difference between Team success and Team building OR Leading a team.
Team building is a process while team success is the outcome of how nicely you followed the process.
So concentrating on process and not the outcome…

The Purpose: Find out the purpose for which the team members are working, of course every one has his/her own purpose of doing anything. Once you relate the task you want your team to do, with their purpose of living, surely team member will put their 100% in it. Commitment, Hard work etc will come automatically.

Build Relationship: The deeper your relationship with others, the more effective will be your leadership. People will not follow you if they do not trust you, and before someone will lend you a hand, you must first touch their heart. For relationship building careful listening, keeping promises, caring are the key features.

Lead by action: we can not lie to our team members, they will smell if we ourself not doing something and expecting them to do it. It goes like monkey see monkey do. Try to set higher benchmarks by your actions because no matter the benchmarks are good or bad every team member going to follow it.

Be a liberator: Great leaders are always a liberator not a dictator. Leading a team is not about completing a project successfully or doing the assigned task, its about taking a team to a higher level. Let your team perform at its fullest without fear, don’t dictate just lead. of course their will be mistakes, might be blunders.. so what, if its not allowed to fall no one can learn to run.

How to Manage Failure:
This excerpt is taken from the speech of Former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam given at Wharton India Economic forum in Philadelphia on March 22,2008.
A Leader Should Know How to Manage Failure

Question: Could you give an example, from your own experience, of how leaders should manage failure?

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The Story Of Team

Some days back a group of 7 developers was formed to handle a project. Most of them were freshers (i guess 5 were freshers). They were expected to form a winning team [The word ‘winning’ holds more importance here]. So the challenge before them was “How to build a WINNING Team?”

The team decided over a structure to be implemented inside. Every project has certain phases to be carried out like designing, coding, testing etc. The team decided that they will develop various specialists for these various phases. These specialists will lead the team over that crucial phase of the project. So the team will not be driven by just one person (i.e. the Project Lead), but will shift the gears, i mean leaders, according to requirements. For e.g. If someone is very good at documentation then he will lead the team for completing the documentation of the project.

Another thing they decided is not to set proper deadlines for smaller subtasks. The team was ofcourse having delivery dates and internal milestones. And following them was the responsibility of every team member. But they deliberately kept subtasks open ended to promote creativity and flexibility in the team. The schedule overruns, if any, were managed by smartley moving around the resources. They decided to ride on the thirst of a person to achieve excellence.

Interestingly the team won the ‘Best Project’ award of the organization for that year.

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Politics, Selfish and Dumb politicians, Dr. Manmohan Singh and Sarkar Raj

Some parties in India seem to have taken the movie Sarkar Raj seriously.


About a few months ago, Left parties called bandh in Kolkata. Whose GDP loss was it anyway at the end of the bandh etc ?.


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