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

  • 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…

  • Career management gives better return on your talent investment

    I have had the opportunity to talk to many college going students and fresh college passouts about their goals, and most of the time I hear them talking about ‘getting a job with highest possible salary’. Everytime I end up telling them to look for jobs with learning and growth potential instead, and most of the…