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.

  • Effective one on ones

    In my experience in working with so many employees and helping grow some of the leads and managers, I have found that one-on-ones is a useful framework for all managers who wish to manage people well. I think this is the case because 1-1s impact some core tenets of being a good people manager:

    • Inform, Involve and Inspire the team
    • Foster trust and transparency
    • Maximize individual’s results by aligning skills to job assignments
    • Actively develop leaders and managers within the team

    To be effective in doing all these, a manager has to understand his/her employees, their motivations and aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes (sounds like knowing your family :-)). All of this can be done by creating an effective communication channel with the employee, one that is based on trust and transparency, and mutual respect. 1-1s, if done well, achieve exactly this effect.

    So how does a manager create an effective communication channel via 1-1s?

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  • Manage your career, please!

    This thought again came to my mind yesterday while talking to a relative of mine. She has great potential, good educational background, but she seems to be stuck in a company and gotten into a comfort zone she doesn’t want to come out of. I tried very hard to make a case for doing something different for her career, but I am sure she didn’t get convinced about it.

    Here is the point I was trying to make: at least in the initial phases of one’s career, it is important to be very cognizant of the return one is getting from the time (and career investment) being made, and as soon as one feels that return is not good, some changes should be made in the career (changing manager, project, team, or company).

    This raises the obvious question: how do you measure return on investment (ROI)?

    In one of my previous posts on talent investment, I gave one way of measuring this return (salary) and made the point that it is a bad measure in initial years. So what is a good measure?

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  • 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 for manager and employee both. Also, trust requires ongoing effort, and hence both sides have to be cognizant of the need to keep maintaining the trust.

    In any healthy workplace, results-orientedness and managing for results are the most important competencies since that helps the business most directly. Hence, any creation and maintenance of trust has to rely on continuously delivering on time and with quality that meets the business requirements. This also creates confidence and reliability, other important constituents of trust. Once someone starts delivering results consistently and reliably, trust is not far away.

    Some of the steps employees can take to ensure  trust is created and maintained (also see “How to Manage your boss“):

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  • Let your manager help you

    Interestingly, about the same time when I was writing about how managers should assign jobs to employees, Scot Herrick on Cube Rules was writing on same topic from an employee perspective (“Help your manager help you improve your job skills“)! I liked his example of how employees can cause their own downfall by not using manager in right way:

    Think of writing code for your job but then asking your manager to help you become a loan officer because that is your career aspiration. That is a very difficult request to both justify and provide as a manager!

    I have seen many variations on this. One that comes to mind immediately is the case where manager had given explicit feedback (and others in the team were in total agreement) that a particular employee could not be a good lead and hence he should grow as individual contributor; however, in every performance review cycle, he would say “I want to become a lead”, would threaten to quit, and won’t really work on being a great individual contributor. Finally he left (3-4 performance review cycles later) but it was clear he didn’t want his manager to help him!

  • 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 such a way in my review that it seems like I was the  real contributor and Joe was just executing it.

    This scenario is possible because of two reasons:

    1. Performance reviews are confidential documents between me and my boss, my reports don’t see it, ever.
    2. As you go higher up, the information gap between you and your manager’s manager keep increasing, so my boss may have very little way of knowing what Joe really did.

    This problem can happen in case of peers taking credit for your work, though it is less likely (at least at junior positions) because  everyone knows what others are doing in their team, and it is more difficult to pull this off. However, if manager is aloof from day to day work people do, or has a working style where the reports don’t get to know a lot about what their peers are doing and how they are being measured, the same problem arises here too.

    Interesting,  isn’t it? Scary too! 🙂

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  • 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 these most of the time.

    To do this, first of all, the manager has to figure out the criteria that will be used for job allocation. If there are unique roles in the group that is being managed, this is not an issue because it is well known who can do what, and employees self-select into jobs. However, many organizations have generalists, or have many specialists (10 senior software design engineers for example). In these cases, having a criteria is a must. It is also important that this criteria be known to everyone in the team. Here are some of the criteria I have seen used:

    • Whoever has time to do it (as understood/identified by the manager).
    • ‘Most challenging job’ to the ‘smartest person’, both of these subjective evaluations done by the manager
    • Random – whosoever asks for it, or whosoever the manager sees first (believe it or not, it is very common)

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  • 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 don’t know how to navigate my company politics/power-structure. 
    • I feel I am under-utilized in my company. 
    • I feel that I am not learning enough. 
    • I don’t know what it takes to be successful in my company or industry.

    While there shouldn’t be any employee who will have all of these problems (hope not!), managers or senior managers need to deal with these on frequent basis. Also, acceptable and consistent response to these will help an organization remain successful and competitive because they directly impact the effectiveness and satisfaction of their employees.

    The reality is that most managers/organizations do not spend time in addressing these. However, there are some things an employee can do on his/her own even if organization is not geared to address these issues. I call it ‘managing your boss’, because most of what an employee needs has to come via the boss and he/she needs to manage the relationship with boss to get those. So, as an employee, if you want to be successful, you need to know how to manage your boss.

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  • 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 get it fixed, or get involved early enough to avoid the bug altogether). This is achieved by getting rid of most the process around role interactions and encouraging informal interactions. Getting the problem solved is the primary focus, rather than role preservation, and hence efficiency improves many-fold.

    Many groups in our company follow agile methodology for software development, and we have seen these benefit for these groups, and quality gets a boost too. However it is going to pose some problems when performance review time comes. This is because the traditional performance review models (and the one we use) focus on individual performances, whereas agile methods encourage team performances and many times it is impossible to extract individual performances out of a team performance. In such cases, it may not be possible (or fair) to try finding out who did what and hence try to get data for individual performance review.

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  • 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 need something more than just a performance review system to excel. While it is necessary to have good goals and metrices identified to enable good performance review (see Gautam’s post on “Getting performance appraisals right”), what kind of goals should be set to enable organizational goal and career development goal alignment is most tricky. This is also the topic for a recent article in Talent Management magazine by Josh Bersin which argues for a change in organization’s approach to performance appraisals. However, I want to look at this from an individual’s perspective who is supposed to be appraised.

    Most managers do try (in the limited time available to them) to align company goals with individual goals, 1-1s are tools to enable those. However, as soon as some of the individual goals start to conflict (really or potentially) with company goals, many mangers give up. Typical examples of such conflicting goals that I have seen come up in organizations I have worked in:

    • Employee wants to go for higher studies, but he is a star employee so you can’t just let him go.
    • He/She wants to work on something very different (or in some other group).
    • Wants to attend seminar/training which is very expensive and you have no budget for this.

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  • Family and Friends as career counselors – Revisited

    Couple years back, a cousin of my wife, a student of class XII then, was torn between her interest and  her college choice: she had been a gifted artist and painter as a child and in school and she wanted to pursue that as her career too, while her father wanted her to join some reputed  law college (because “everyone good in our family is in legal profession”). It was tough for her to argue with her parents, but finally she prevailed (I like to think I helped her in pushing this through by explicitly siding with her in animated conversations with her father, of course it was helped by the fact that this was my ‘in-law’s place’, and IIT background may have helped my case too since “IITians are supposed to be smart!”). Right now, she is in second year of a reputed fine arts college in Mumbai, and extremely happy. Of course, parents are happy too since while doing the research for this college, they found more details about how these careers (multimedia, animation..) actually make more  money now a days than regular engineering or medical professions.

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