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.

  • Being Effective at workplace – Active learning

    This post is a part of the series of posts I am doing on Being Effective at workplace.

    Active Learning is the most important attribute of an effective person. Learning in workplace could be a tricky thing though. Learning while working requires reflecting on the work, the results and the process, but we tend to be so focused on the tasks and outcomes that learning takes a backseat most of the time. However, effective learners find time to step back from even the most crunch time and attempt to synthesize their work into bytes of learning that they can absorb and apply.

    Most organizations have processes like retrospectives (reviewing lessons learned and areas of improvement in an agile development model), postmortem, RCA, etc. in order to learn from their experiences, but they tend to become about process and less about learning. Effective learners create their own process for learning from their work and environment and continuously apply it to the next set of work they do.

    Here are a few ways of active learning that I have observed and found useful:

    • Set learning goals before starting the work. This allows you to focus on exactly what you want to learn rather than getting influenced by the pressures of the work. You need to know what to learn, what not to learn, and what to un-learn. “What to learn” (more…)

  • Being Effective at workplace

    Performance review time is coming close, and this affords me an opportunity to review my personal performance over last 12 months, as well as those of my reports, my peers and my manager as I prepare to write my feedback. While doing this, I was struck by the differences in results among individuals I have worked closely with, and I was forced (out of my curiosity and interest) to think deeper into these performance reviews (mine and theirs). Performance differences happen because of so many reasons; however, one of the underlying themes I have observed is the notion of ‘being effective’.

    Effective is a very commonly used word, and is often mixed with being efficient, and sometimes with the idea of being right or wrong. Therefore, let me define them first, in the context of organization: (more…)

  • Career Lessons from Indian Movies – Taare Zameen Par and 3 Idiots

    Over last few months, I watched 2 Hindi movies, both by Amir Khan, which reminded me of some of the career lessons I have found useful to follow and to pass-around via my blogs and discussions. The 2 movies are Taare Zameen Par (movie review here) and 3 Idiots (movie review here). While Taare Zameen Par talks about a dyslexic kid totally misunderstood by his parents and finally salvaged by an art teacher in a boarding school, 3 Idiots is the story of 3 college students and friends as they navigate their college days and adult life with different aspirations and different interpretations of what learning and success mean.

    These have been commercial successes (3 Idiots is now the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all-time), and they are great films to watch for their entertainment and inspirational values (typical Hindi movies J).

    However, here are some of the lessons about career and life that these films depict very beautifully (much better than the ways I have been saying them in my blogs! J): (more…)

  • Poll about appreciation

    In my previous post about appreciation at workplace, I talked about lack of appreciation. Here I want to do a quick survey about it.

  • Appreciation at workplace

    I was talking to someone from my last company and this came up: why is it that I don’t get appreciated when I do a good job, but no one forgets to blame me when something goes wrong?

    It definitely sounded familiar to me: in every company I have worked so far, I have heard this complaint from my peers, my reports (yes, I am guilty too) and from me. And when broached this topic with people around me, I got similar comments of not getting as much appreciation as they would like and getting more blame and problems than they can handle.

    Wikipedia defines appreciation (or gratitude): “A positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive. According to University of California-Davis researcher, Robert Davis, gratitude requires three conditions: a gracious individual must behave in a way that was 1) costly to him or her, 2) valuable to the recipient, and 3) intentionally rendered”

    I looked around to see if a motivated manager can find the resources necessary to do a good job, and I could find plenty. There is a lot to be found on Internet: (more…)

  • Effective 1-1s – Fostering trust and creating no-harm zone

    Effective 1-1 is the cornerstone of a successful management career, and acquiring necessary competencies in order to have a great 1-1 with your reports is a great career enhancement technique.

    I have referred to this topic many times in my posts and have couple of posts devoted to this topic (see Managing 1-1s and Effective 1-1s). Those posts talk about tips for making 1-1s effective and efficient.

    One of the basic premises for a successful one on one is to be able to build the trust and openness that can let communications happen. This is what one of ex-boss called ‘no-harm zone’. This is the place and time when participants can be open, truthful, critical, candid and emotional, and still can rely on the other party to keep all this in confidence. Notice that I am not saying that only one party (your report if you are a manager) has to feel and act that way; both parties have to feel and act the same. (more…)

  • Change Initiatives – Managing self-fulfilling prophecy

    In a previous post on taking initiatives to advance your career, I had discussed about handling peers when you take initiatives because they may cause your initiatives to fail. Here I want to talk about another phenomenon that one needs to be aware of. Here is the term I use to describe it: self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Wikipedia describes it this way:

    A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.

    In organizations, this is seen most commonly as resistance to change (in process, strategy, technology, etc.). All changes are hard, and organization-wide changes are very hard. Successful changes require 100% commitment and support from 100% of team members and leaders, which is obviously very hard to achieve. This means that every change initiative will have a set of dissenters. Here are typical behaviors dissenters show: (more…)

  • How do you evaluate your performance?

    Everyone I have met at workplace wants to make sure they are being evaluated fairly and are given right indications about the result of their evaluations. Most of the time, they rely on the process of evaluation that organization has put in place: manager feedback, acceptance and respect among peers, performance evaluation process, etc. The visible outcomes of these evaluations that people expect are: salary increases or rewards, praise and appreciation from their manager or peers, excellent rating and ranking in performance evaluation process. Lack of these usually signals to them that their performance is not up to the mark.

    I have been talking to many individuals recently, and when I ask them how they evaluate themselves in terms of career growth, they always mention one or more of the above. When I ask them the impact these have on them, they mention that they get very unhappy when there is no recognition from their manager or when their rating is poor even when they thought they did very well. And they get happy and feel good when managers praise or rating is excellent.

    However, there are many, equally good if not better, career growth measures that can be used which do not depend so much on external factors. (more…)

  • Managing conflict at workplace – II

    In the previous post, I described the scenario of two smart people in conflict in an organization and why they need to engage in a deep conversation.

    Here are some of the aspects of such a conversation that A and B need to keep in mind:

    1. Create shared goals: Without such a goal, no conversation or work relationship can happen. Assuming A and B feel they want to belong to this organization; they have a good place to start creating a shared goal. If they want to contribute significantly to the organization, this is another shared goal to use. A and B need to have at least this conversation before other kinds of conversation can take place.
    2. Empathize: Putting yourself in other person’s shoes is critical to understand why the other person is behaving the way he is. If you can truly see things from other’s perspective (and hold off your own biases), results are sometimes very surprising and insightful. Both A and B need to try it.
    3. Be charitable: Both A and B need to be willing to give the benefit of doubt to the other, and assume they have good reasons to behave the way they are behaving. Just changing to this perspective can make each of them understand the other better. Ask the question “Why would a rational and smart person behave/say the way they did in all these examples?”. (more…)

  • Managing conflict at workplace – I

    I would like to talk about one of the topics about work relationships that come up very often (and came up again very recently).

    Scenario

    A is a smart guy, well-established and on track to be promoted to next level. He is admired by others in his group and he is proud of himself.

    B is a new hire in the team, equally smart (maybe more), who is trying to establish himself in this team. He has better skills than A in some areas and his hiring manager had mentioned he could be the next lead of this team.

    Expected result

    A and B work together to improve the performance of the team manifold because now the team has two smart guys to leverage.

    Actual

    A and B get into conflicts way too often and these conflicts drag down their performance as well as performance of the team. Net result is that team is less productive than when only A was around.

    Sounds familiar? This is a very frequent occurrence in growing organizations where smart existing people have to work with smart new people and the result is not always on the expected lines. (more…)