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.

  • 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 team member to a team than when you join as a leader. As a leader, it is easier (than when you are a team member), since you have the option of changing the team operating style and culture since you have the authority (though this is a difficult task: changing something in a team is an extremely hard undertaking if you look at the absolute scale of difficulty).

    When you are team member, most of the time you need to adapt to the team culture rather than change it (at least in the beginning). In couple of previous posts on Teams, I examined the ways you can try changing the team even as a member, but it is an extremely hard thing to do, and rarely successful. This post focuses more on getting to be part of a team and I assume that it is a team whose overall culture you subscribe to (if you don’t, you have a bigger problem at your hand than just getting acceptance!).

    Most of the ideas in the joining the team as a leader applies here too because they help you establish a relationship of trust with team members and leaders and that is vital for getting acceptance in the team. However, there are some unique issues that you should watch out for, and this post is about two of those: (more…)

  • 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. 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 have in these meetings and which I let them know is my desire to understand how I can help them. When someone has lost a leader he or she was working closely with, there are bound to be concerns and apprehensions which are best addressed if you let them talk about them and then ask them how they expect you to help. I have had great many people tell me exactly how to go about being a good lead in the team, which makes my work easier! If you have not tried it, try it whenever you can; you will be surprised by the results.
    2. Use Team meetings to set the tone: I use my initial team meeting to explain what kind of person and leader I am. Specifically I focus on my leadership and operational style, mention a few names from my previous teams in the company I have worked with (should they need reference checks, which they should), and finally summarize what I have heard from them in my 1-1 meetings and how it is going to influence my working style going forward. (more…)

  • 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 MBA class notes and case studies.

    I am just sharing my experience here rather than offering the lessons from there, since it is hard for me to generalize this; different methods will work differently for different people, in different situations. Hopefully having a case study in front of you will help you pick and choose ideas.

    In this team, I identified following broken pieces:

    1. Lack of Trust: The team suffered from severe lack of trust. Very few, if any, individuals felt confident that their peers were capable enough to deliver on what they own or were assigned to. (more…)

  • 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 points describe what can be done to identify the type of your team and how do you know it is a dysfunctional team. They are presented in no particular order so use them as you see fit.

    How to find out if you are part of a dysfunctional team?

    • Getting disengaged: Try to get yourself out of the equation once in a while. My way of doing this was assuming that I do not care about the outcome and so I stopped participating in some of the discussions even though I had strong opinions. This was my style, you may use your own, but getting disengaged is important if you want to.
    • Communication patterns: A dysfunctional team typically will have one person monopolizing the discussion on a given topic, with little or no counter-arguments. If one of the person is specially strong because of position (mostly the leader) or expertise (product expert, external ‘expert’ hire), it may even be one person doing all the talking and making decisions. (more…)

  • 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”‘]

    In my last post about characteristics of high-performance teams, I discussed the tenets of high-performance teams (as given by The Wisdom of Teams). In this post, I want to discuss the characteristics of a dysfunctional team, as defined by The five dysfunctions of a team, a fable about a dysfunctional leadership team, and compare and contrast them with tenets of a high-performance team where I can.

    Here are the five dysfunctions of a team (from Wikipedia article about the book):

    1. Absence of Trust: Trust is critical in building a high-performance team and lack of trust is very visible in a dysfunctional team. Most telltale sign of lack of trust is that no one would bring up any issue/problems which will show him/her weak or vulnerable. ‘Having the guard on all the time’ is a characteristic of a team member in a dysfunctional team. I remember my experience with a leadership team; even though the project was in very bad shape, the manager in charge would always talk about great things the team was accomplishing and any uttering by other team members to the contrary was termed by the leader as ‘lack of team work’! Needless to say, there was no trust in the team.
    2. Fear of Conflict: Fear of conflict means that conversation and feedback cannot be candid and difficult questions can’t be asked, because they can give rise to conflicts. This in turn happens because lack of trust causes people to suspect the motive of the person doing the questioning/commenting and it becomes a personal matter rather than team’s. (more…)

  • 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 who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

    Notice the key words (which are very well explained in the book, what follows is my interpretation and usage of them):

    1.       Small number: This is important. It is very hard for a large group of people to come together and form a team, primarily because it is hard to meet other criteria with a large group. Typical size that works well is 5-8 in my opinion. Anything big, and you should consider splitting or having a ‘working group’ (another term defined in the book).

    2.       Complementary skills: For a team to function properly, it should have all the necessary skills for the common purpose it exists for. However, many times, team members are picked because of their organizational positions, being closer to the problem, and other extraneous reasons. Beware of such team, they are more likely to have team members with similar skills and/or a big skill  gap in the team, both of which are dangerous for team success.

    (more…)

  • Series on High-performance and Dysfunctional Teams

    I have planned a series of posts on teams. I planned this because of two reasons:

    1. 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 huge lessons learnt.
    2. I have joined a new company now, in a new country, and in a new role (one reason why I have virtually stopped posting here, till now). This offers me a different perspective to evaluate my lessons with, as well as provides new opportunities to practice them and see them work or fail.

    Rather than using good and bad adjectives, which are highly subjective and vague, I will use ‘high-performance’ and ‘dysfunctional’, which are subjective too, but at least there is some sense of meaning to them. I am borrowing these terms from The Wisdom of Teams, the landmark book that gave us the definition of a team, and from The five dysfunctions of a team, a fable about leadership with great insights. Both the books are must-read if you are interested in understanding teams. (more…)

  • Is Annual Performance Review a waste of time?

    Recently someone forwarded me this post about the fact that Performance reviews are a big fat waste of time. This is a long post talking about why it is so and proposes that we should just lose them. Here are the reasons the post mentions as to why this is the case:

    • Everybody hates them
    • They try to do too much
    • They become an excuse for not talking for the rest of the year
    • They are too structured and formal
    • They focus too much on the quantifiable
    • They may not be formally connected with promotions and salary negotiations – in reality everyone knows they are
    • No one says what they really think
    • They take a LOT of time
    • They become a crutch for bad managers

    The post really set me thinking about my previous experiences in administering and receiving performance reviews. Annual reviews (and semi-annual in some cases) in my experience have some positive aspects too: (more…)

  • Review of career sites – Mission impossible?

    As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reviewing some of the career sites that seem to be popular in India. The goal was to understand how good (or bad) these sites are and then hopefully recommend some sites that are useful. However, while going through these sites, I realized that I promised to deliver something which is very hard to achieve. This post discusses my insights from this exercise in a broad sense.

    Here is what I tried: I looked up popular sites (based on search results and my review of local ads of these services in India), and proceeded to review their content, presentation and layout, and overall value they offer. In most cases, I had to register for the site, which I did rightfully. Based on what I saw on these sites and what I claim to know of career management, I started to capture comparison parameters to be used across sites. However, most sites fell woefully short of any reasonable utility value to their target audience.

    Here are some of the observations I have, based on this exercise: (more…)

  • List of career counseling/information sites for review

    As I mentioned in my previous post, I plan to review some of the web sites/companies that offer services in the general area of career counseling/guidance/management. Here is the list that I have come up with. Here is how I picked these sites:

    1. Listed some of the web sites that I heard about via TV channels or friends
    2. Did Google search and Live Search on “career management india”, “career counseling India”, and “career guidance india”, and looked at sites listed in top 2-3 pages. I picked the sites which looked useful as well as those which seemed to be used by people (testimonies, client names, etc).

     I have categorized them in 3 buckets:

    1. Counseling/guidance services – These are the sites which offer career counseling and guidance. They typically include training, psychometric tests, some articles, etc.
    2. Career Information Aggregators – These are the sites which have a large list of courses and universities and other study opportunities. They typically have a subsection about career counseling etc, but their main focus is information aggregation.
    3. Job site adjuncts – These are the career center sub-sites of major job sites. (more…)