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.

  • 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 past, I now have the perspective on managing people in 3 biggest economies of the world! Given this, let me share some comparisons and contrasts across these three countries.

    Commonalities

    1. Effective people management requires customization to individual needs – Some individuals require you to be very direct and brutal in communication and feedback, others need you to be softer in your message and be more sensitive to their emotional needs. This variation occurs in all teams in all countries and I couldn’t find any pattern of cultural or geographical preferences; an effective manager needs to be adaptable and have a set of styles to suit individuals reporting to him/her.
    2. Career growth and development is #1 concern for everyone – Most of the concerns and problems I have faced over last 8-9 years across these 3 countries can be traced to concerns and insecurities around where the career is going and whether they control their own career. Sometimes it has required effort to figure the root cause out, and some other times it has been masked by the skills requirements and weaknesses of individuals, but a focus on career topics have helped a large number of 1-1 I have had over this time. (more…)

  • 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 out of managerial roles.

    This is a shift from their traditional focus on promoting employees for managerial roles as they seek more complex projects from customers that need highly skilled people to execute them.

    Now, employees can opt to be a designer or an architect and climb the ladder conceiving or building large projects.”

    Having worked in product development companies in India (2000-2006), I can attest to the need to develop strong individual contributor (IC) track of growth; we struggled a lot to get our bright ICs to stay IC and not opt for management career path. (more…)

  • Personality Style or Weakness – you are the judge

    One of the persons reporting to me mentioned he has bad memory and so he cannot quickly respond to out-of-context questions. He further inferred from this that this weakness will stop him from doing his job effectively.

    After more discussion, it was clear to me (though I leave this decision to the person himself) that it is not so much a memory problem but instead a manifestation of his personal style where he is not very good at quick response when put in a spot. So my advice to him was to understand this aspect of himself more deeply and see how he can avoid being put into such situation (or use his other strengths to get out of it!), rather than treating this as a weakness and trying to acquire skills (memory enhancement, public speaking courses?) to mitigate this. (more…)

  • Developing career by taking initiatives – Handling peer pressure

    Taking initiatives and proposing ideas are some of the best ways of boosting your career. However, be careful when taking initiatives, your peers may not like it. Here are some of the reasons why:

    1. They may lose the limelight they are used to
    2. It may put them in bad light
    3. It may mean more work for them
    4. It may increase competition for that coveted promotion

    What can you do about it?

    1. Anticipate: If you are willing, it should not be difficult to anticipate reactions from your to one of your initiatives or idea. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they have to gain or lose if this gets accepted. (more…)

  • Do relationships matter in a successful career?

    Whenever you meet a hotshot with a bad temper or big ego who doesn’t extend basic courtesy, you inevitably ask this question because relationships don’t seem to mean a thing for such a person.

    However, for every brash but successful career you see and meet, there are thousands of brash and unsuccessful careers that you don’t. Good relations at workplace are pre-requisite to many of the qualities needed to have a successful career today: influencing without authority, selling ideas, getting the best out of others, leveraging knowledge and network across the organization, etc.

    However, having a good relationship with someone requires effort. You need to build a relationship (say, when you join the group/company), you need to maintain relationship (as good/bad times come and go), and you need to mend it if it does go wrong.

    Here are some of the themes I have used when I have gone through above phases of relationship building-keeping-mending: (more…)

  • 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 kind is hard: whether it is you who is trying to change an organization, or whether you are the recepient of the change.

    However, one of the things that I am realizing as I reflect on these experiences is surprising: people who have brought in changes are sometimes not as good at being recepient of changes as you might think they would be. Even though they may pump their fist and push you hard to change, when it is time for them to change, they come across as change resistors! In one of the change management training I took, they gave us a test which evaluated us on whether we embrace change, we are neutral to change, or we resist change. Now I am much more inclined to think that (assuming such tests are valuable at all) there should be two versions of the test: one to test whether you are good or bad at bringing in change to an organization, and then there should be another one to test whether you are good or bad at receiving change when it is imposed on your organization.

    I will not be surprised if these two tests show different results for same individuals. Will you be surprised?

  • 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 for which they hold themselves mutually accountable

    This immediately (and rightly so in my opinion) shows that discipline-based teams (like dev team, test team or PM team) is not really a team but a workgroup since it doesn’t have complementary skills and mostly they are individually-accountable. A real team in such discipline-based organizations (which is most of the organizations in this world) will be feature/product teams which are formed to create solution for a specific problem.

    However, this got me thinking again on the topic of leadership: how important is the role of a leader in a team? In a workgroup, a leader is obviously needed because someone is needed to hold people individuals accountable to their assignments.

    Most of the examples in Wisdom of Teams have designated leaders in the team (and the special role a designated leader plays in the team) but the definition itself doesn’t include the need for a leader. This may be because in a high-performance team, individuals step up to lead as needed and hence designated leader may not be needed on day-to-day basis.

    However, in most real-life teams I have seen, the designated/natural leader is the one who takes the additional responsibility (call it individual accountability) to keep the spirit of team alive by continuing to strive for common purpose and mutual accountability when things go wrong or get stuck.

    When we discuss the forming-storming-norming-performing model for team, storming is the phase where most teams get stuck for a long time, and again it is the designated leader who has to get the team moving on to the norming and performing phases by being creative in storming phase (without short-circuiting the process of storming of course).

    In my opinion, self-managed team is a rarity and while it is an ideal goal to have, we cannot plan for such an ideal outcome and try to work without a leader. As a manager, if you get a chance to form a team, it is your responsibility to designate a leader for the team (with clear roles and responsibilities, which are different than when you are a manager for example), and you would have tremendously increased the chances of success for the team.

    What do you think about this? Is a leader essential to a team, or do you think he/she will hinder the performance of the team in most of the cases?

  • 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 by your manager as what organization wants to achieve. You then need to identify your personal goals and figure out a way (working with your manager) to write the goals and execution plans in a manner that can incorporate personal goals without compromising organization goals. This creates a win-win situation for you and your manager. (more…)

  • 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 performance of a lead/manager.

    Here are some values I believe a lead/manager provides to the organization and should be used for performance measurements:

    1. Judgment – Take difficult decisions even with incomplete information
    2. Mentoring and Coaching – develop better Individual Contributors, new leaders and managers
    3. Vision –Provide roadmap (new or interpretation of existing one) to employees, both for personal growth as well as for organizational growth (employees need both), do long term thinking
    4. Change Agent – Change is very hard, leaders/managers need to be the change agent by figuring out when a change is needed, as well as ways of successfully implementing change while continuing to show results
    5. Role model – Leaders are what employees want to be, and hence their behavior is closely watched and often emulated by others. As such they need to reflect right organization culture and values at all times. (more…)

  • 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. However, this takes time, patience, and some skills. How does Ravi manage this along with all the other responsibilities he has, given the fact he doesn’t have enough time on his hands given so many reports?

    Career Management is the theme for this blog and I have written extensively on this topic, both from the perspective of a person managing his/own career, as well as a manager doing it for his/her reports (see Career Development and Perf Management categories for example). If you survey other resources on the net, you will find everything from survival tips to research papers, see How Not to get Laid Off, 25 Hot Tips For Managing Your Career, Managing Careers in Large Organizations, etc. However, this doesn’t make the job of a manager with 9 reports any easier, given the fact that there is no silver bullet to be used when managing your reports’ careers is concerned. Career Management takes time, and time is something a busy manager like Ravi doesn’t have. (more…)