What is your cross-cultural quotient ?
This mail is doing its customary rounds on the net, and not for a wrong reason! Though there are obvious pitfalls of stereotyping people, it also serves as a handy learning guide, even a field manual, when the similarities are generic in nature, and far outweigh the minute differences that might make an individual unique and different from others, but not dramatically different from other fellow tribesmen. The fact is we are all different, and success at workplace is also impacted by our ability to recognize, appreciate, respect and work through such cross-cultural differences. In today’s increasingly globalized world, this serves as a good starting point to recognize that there are people different from us, and a team’s success is impacted by mutual understanding of such differences. These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in...
What kind of “Managers stick with poor performers rather than hire new faces” ?
I am sure you have heard it in all versions, subversions and perversions, but one simple universal workplace truth seems to be don’t tolerate poor performance, and if not outrightly eliminate poor performers, do ease them out over a reasonable but fast period of time. The yawning gap between a bottom performer and the top performer is perhaps nowhere more so prominent as in a human-skill based knowledge industry like software. Over the years, various productivity studies still continue to point a gap of anywhere between 1:10 to 1:20 or even more between the top programmer and the bottom one. The exact number doesn’t really matter. What is important is to understand that success of a software endeavor howsomuch is dependent on very smart people, it finally needs a great team to deliver goods - no task is trivial...
Do you know your Zenobia(s) ?
Zeonbia is a great book by Matthew Emmens and Beth Kephart that you can not only complete in under an hour, you probably want to read it once again right away - to get a better flavor of the simple yet powerful story of Moira who must find a way out of the chaos she encounters day one of her job and no one is quite willing to help her. Zenobia is story of our times which is such a hard-hitting truth. I would say Moira is lucky (or rather willing to challenge status quo ?) in the sense she is able to see that there is a problem - a majority of us do not evey realize there is a problem at the workplace. Of course, of those sharp minds who are able to figure out there is indeed...
Creativity at Workplace ???
Most of us have been told in our appraisal discussions to be more creative, and many of us have, in turn, told our team members to be more creative. Sadly, most of us have no clue what is really means to be creative at the workplace. We normally associate creativity with creative or performing arts - things that we did long back as kids but feel we can’t apply those principles at workplace. Is creativity limited to dressing informally, or calling people by nicknames, or is it installing the coolest screensaver, painting the walls blue, wearing pink socks or something else ? Definitely, some of them might be every creative efforts, but how do we channelize those creative energies and urges to solving little more meaningfull business problems ? As a manager, is ‘creativity’ available to me as a resource ?...