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: Teams

  • New Managers: moving from 1 report to 5 reports effectively

    You were a management understudy and had a report (or 2) to test your management abilities. Now your manager thinks you are now ready to be a manager and you now have 5 reports. Congratulations! Once celebrations are over, you start thinking: is this going to be any different than before? Do my strategies for…

  • High-performance teams – Do they need leaders?

    Recently I attended a training which highlighted some of the differences between team and workgroups. The discussion started with the team definition. The definition used was the one from ‘Wisdom of Teams‘ book: A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach…

  • Joining a team as a team member

    In my previous post, I discussed ways in which a leader can be effective as he/she joins a new team. In my opinion, culture plays the most important role in how easy (or difficult) it is for a newcomer to be accepted in a team, and this is more pronounced when you are a new…

  • Joining a new team as a leader

    There have been many situations when I have joined a team which has lost its leader. Here are some of the things that have worked for me: 1-1s with each team member: This is extremely useful first step that I have used in many teams with good amount of success. One of the goals I…

  • Dealing with dysfunctional teams

    In my last post, I talked about how you identify a dysfunctional team you are part of. In this post, I want to discuss my experiences at dealing with one such team, and my efforts at changing the team being a member of the team. I had to resort to reading many books and my…

  • Are you part of a dysfunctional team?

    In the last post, I discussed the characteristics of a dysfunctional team, based on what the book talks about as well as based on my own experiences. In this post, I will present some of the lessons learned for me about how to identify the fact that you are part of a dysfunctional team. These…

  • Characteristics of dysfunctional teams

    [Credit: This post refers to a book by Patrick Lencioni, one of the most influencial books I have read in my life. From Wikipedia: ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a bestselling[1] business book by consultant and speaker Patrick Lencioni. It describes the many pitfalls that teams face as they seek to “row together”‘]…

  • Characteristics of High-performance Teams

    In this post, I would like to discuss about characteristics of high-performance teams as defined in The Wisdom of Teams. For more detailed review of the book that I wrote sometime back, see here: Part-I, Part-II and Part-III. The book defines a team as follows (my formatting) A small number of people with complementary skills…

  • Series on High-performance and Dysfunctional Teams

    I have planned a series of posts on teams. I planned this because of two reasons: I have left the company I was in for 5 ½ years and where I learned so much about teams, and had opportunity to work in great teams as well as rank bad teams, but all of these providing…

  • 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…