Stay hungry stay ….. successful??

Reading the famous speech of Steve Jobs with name “Stay hungry stay foolish” again and again. and the gist or the over all message conveyed get clearer and clear, we must “do what we like doing, or what we do best”.

Recently I have been reading the 7-habit classic from Stephen Covey and then a few articles from Watkins (HBR) and Ruben Gonzalel (www.lugeman.com) and here is what I think success is all about (following is an extract from Ruben’s article about goal setting, i have just restructured it):

“There are many facets to success. But you can not let success happen to you, you have to make success happen to you and for that to happen, you have to have a dream, a goal, a passion to achieve something – something you’re shooting for. Once your goals is defined, you have to believe in yourself, be sure your can achieve that. You have to take massive action with an attitude that you are willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes. Then and only then is success realistic.

More than anything else, your desire will determine if you will make it. How bad do you want it? Is your dream something that you’d like to do? Is it something that would be nice to do? Or is it something that you are obsessed about?

How badly you want it will determine whether you’ll realize your dream because how bad you want it determines what will make you quit. Burning desire allows a person with average ability to successfully compete with those who have far more ability. Desire allows you to give it everything you’ve got. It helps you reach your full potential. Intense desire allows people to win against overwhelming odds.

If your dream is not an obsession, as soon as you come across obstacles, you’ll quit. As soon as the challenge of reaching your dream becomes
an inconvenience, you’ll give up.

Success is not convenient. Trust me. In order to succeed you will need to inconvenience yourself in a big way – for a long time.

That’s why it’s so important to be driven, excited, and passionate about your dream. If your “why?” is big enough, the “how” will take care of itself.”

True Feedback and Performance

“The positive effect of feedback on performance has become one of the most widely accepted principles in psychology,” write professors Angelo S. DeNisi and Avraham N. Kluger in the February 2000 issue of The Academy of Management Executive. The impact of feedback on performance is nothing novel, new or recent, it is something as old as human resource management. Conducting feedback is always a positive task, if performed clinically with correct and pragmatic questionnaires that promote realistic reaction, it can bring up a fair bit of improvement in individuals and groups. This does not imply that performing feedback collection intelligently will result in positive feedback, the process may end-up making you feel great about yourself or it can give you a ‘reality check’ you may not be ready for. In either case it must give you a true response of what you are, where you stand on the basis of what and how and who you ask the questions from. Collection feedback or rather looking for personal feedback works just like a weekly project status: you will come across the variance between the planned (your view of your performance) and actual (the feedback) values. Like a project, once the variances are known, only then the tools can be used to get back on track.

Then comes the issues of digesting the response others may have of you, be it your team members, superiors, your wife or kids. Feedback may not always be very sweet or even suger coated, but it must always be taken with a positive mindset, this is the only way to identify where you actually need to improve. One may argue about who is giving the feedback or when the feedback was conducted, was it a bad phase during a project or a tough day at home, what was the team moral at that time, what external factors were involved etc., but within the bounds of one’s own personality, each comment must be evaluated for personal performance gain.

Ever tried asking your subordinates for a true feedback of your personality, performance and behavior? This is just as difficult doing as intimidating it may sound. Nevertheless, the importance of true feedback out-values the associated risks of conducting and receiving the outcome. Every individual -manager or not- wishes to know what others think about him/her but how many of them personally, and not as an organizational process, do go for it with intentions of gaining true opinions? Opinions, reactions and criticism always exist within a team or organizational structure; knowing them, however, comes with the risk of change of motivation index.

Selective Appreciation

Working as Project Manager at a mid-size offshore software facility in Karachi, Pakistan, I believe I had a fair chance to learn a lot about people management; dealing with young professionals and managing the level of expectation they have in a booming local software market.

Managing expectations at times can be very challenging in the above mentioned scenario, where employees will always have options open with other vendors in the local and international market. One of the small tools, however, can be to avoid helping expectations to grow at the first place, yet remain very positive in the way you work your team. You need to figure out, analyze and define the level of appreciation you need to give your team members at every occasion. Being selective does not mean being rude or ignoring small achievements, it, nevertheless, means saving right words and correct expressions for the appropriate occasion. Even saying “Thank you” for late sitting can be a fair appreciation (Anne Fisher: senior writer at FORTUNE). Organizations with appreciative environment have better productivity than those without. But this does not imply appreciating late-sittings with emails full of praise for the team; appreciation at every level should still remain an event or occasion that it keeps its value like a favorite perfume.

Also, at times you may want to review your appreciative comments in order to save communicating false impressions of being a start performer to a team member.

To be able to effectively manage team expectations, the project manager must start controlling expectations from growing unnaturally.