Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

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Over last 25 years, I have experienced multiple R&D roles in small startups and large multinationals, across multiple geographies (China, US, India) and domains (payments, e-learning, edtech). I consider myself a mix of leader & strategist, entrepreneur & org builder, product creator & problem solver, and now, researcher & systems thinker.

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  • Effective one on ones

    In my experience in working with so many employees and helping grow some of the leads and managers, I have found that one-on-ones is a useful framework for all managers who wish to manage people well. I think this is the case because 1-1s impact some core tenets of being a good people manager: Inform, Involve and Inspire the…

  • Manage your career, please!

    This thought again came to my mind yesterday while talking to a relative of mine. She has great potential, good educational background, but she seems to be stuck in a company and gotten into a comfort zone she doesn’t want to come out of. I tried very hard to make a case for doing something…

  • Trust in Manager-employee relationship

    In a previous post Do you think your manager is fair to you?, I proposed that trust is the most important part of the manager-employee relationship and it determines whether manager is considered fair or not by his/her employees. So the question is: how do you create trust in such a relationship? This is pertinent…

  • Let your manager help you

    Interestingly, about the same time when I was writing about how managers should assign jobs to employees, Scot Herrick on Cube Rules was writing on same topic from an employee perspective (“Help your manager help you improve your job skills“)! I liked his example of how employees can cause their own downfall by not using manager…

  • Do you think your manager is fair to you?

    I had an interesting thought yesterday (while completing my own performance review document!): how will people reporting to me ever be sure that I am not taking undue credit for my contribution? It may be possible that while the actual work is done by someone reporting to me (say Joe), I may present this in…

  • How do you assign jobs to employees?

    For a manager, it is important to make sure they assign right jobs to right employees. However, at the same time, it is also important to make sure he/she doesn’t come across as unfair or biased while doing such allocations. These are seemingly contradictory requirements, but it is possible to take care of both of…

  • Managing your Boss

    Here are some of the questions/issues I  have seen employees directly/indirectly ask which relate to their managers as well as to how they fit in the organizational scheme of things: I can’t talk to my manager, he is too rigid/aloof/scary. I am stuck in my career, no growth. My manager isn’t sympethetic to my career development.  I…

  • Performance Measurement – Team or individual?

    Among many advantages of agile development is the one which produces efficiency by squeezing away the cost of interaction between various members (roles) of a development team (for example, QA doesn’t need to raise the bug and wait for it to be fixed and then verify it, he/she can walk up to the dev and…

  • Manager as a mentor/coach

    Performance review cycles are coming in, and I have had a chance to review goals and tasks for many individuals while they are entered into our performance management (PM) system. Having gone through this exercise of using a PM product for almost 5 years now and reviewing hundreds of goals, it is clear that most good employees…

  • Family and Friends as career counselors – Revisited

    Couple years back, a cousin of my wife, a student of class XII then, was torn between her interest and  her college choice: she had been a gifted artist and painter as a child and in school and she wanted to pursue that as her career too, while her father wanted her to join some reputed  law…