Career Bloom

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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.

Category: Management discussions

Posts that are useful for managers

  • Appreciation at workplace

    I was talking to someone from my last company and this came up: why is it that I don’t get appreciated when I do a good job, but no one forgets to blame me when something goes wrong? It definitely sounded familiar to me: in every company I have worked so far, I have heard…

  • Change Initiatives – Managing self-fulfilling prophecy

    In a previous post on taking initiatives to advance your career, I had discussed about handling peers when you take initiatives because they may cause your initiatives to fail. Here I want to talk about another phenomenon that one needs to be aware of. Here is the term I use to describe it: self-fulfilling prophecy.…

  • Comparing management experiences in US, China, and India

      I have been working in China for last 18 months or so, with one of the largest software MNC here. During this period, I have (very briefly, 3 months) been an individual contributor and rest of time I have been a people manager. Having been a people manager in India and US in the…

  • Career Path for engineers – Management Track vs. Individual Contributor Track

    I read the article “Indian IT firms redefine career path for engineers” on www.livemint.com with interest: “Indian information technology (IT) service providers such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, Infosys Technologies Ltd and Wipro Ltd are following multinational firms such as International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) in building a technical career path for senior engineers opting…

  • Change Agents – can they handle change?

    As a manager, I have had my fair share of changes imposed on me (and my team) because of an incoming exec, and I have done my bit in bringing in change to the organizations I have gone to. If you have been in any of these situations, you will realize that change of any…

  • Performance Review – Weaving personal goals into organizational ones

    Often times, setting goals for next year’s performance review takes into account only organizational goals set by the manager for the employee. This misses an opportunity to set the goals in a way that could benefit the employee’s career growth plan in the most direct way. As an employee, you should look at goals set…

  • What do leaders/managers give to organizations?

    This is performance review time, and naturally I am thinking about what I have done over the past year as a leader/manager to warrant any reward. It is always hard to figure this out, because all the work is done by an Individual Contributor, and so it is hard to be objective when evaluating the…

  • Managing Careers

    Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Expectations). This is the final post in the series, and this tackles perhaps the most important question of all: Ravi needs to help people in his team build and grow their career as they work under his guidance.…

  • Managing Expectations

    Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing Work). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: How does a manager as important as him (and holding as many resources) manage expectations from other senior managers and executives without over-committing his team or…

  • Managing Work

    Here is the background on this series, and here is the previous post on this series (Managing 1-1s). In this post, we are going to try answering the question: While Ravi is the smartest guy and the leader in the team, he is also the bottleneck. How can he manage his work (delegation or empowerment…