Emotions impacting TEAMS!

"Team player", "Team", "Teamwork" - are terms that are so so so often used in our lives whether it's at college or getting your first job and even as we progress in our careers. Everybody as an individual talks about being a team player and many of us are true team players too.

Everybody knows the traditional definition of a TEAM and what it takes to be a team-player but in this blog I'll talk about something more deeper than accomplishing a common task. I'm going to talk about the impact of EMOTIONS in accomplishing that one common task.

Let's boil down a team of 'x' members to a team with just one member - that's you. Now imagine, you're working on a project to accomplish a goal. You set a plan and start executing the plan. The good thing about this project is that there are no external dependencies so it's perfect right! You don't have to depend on anyone to move forward in your project. The first few days are super, you put in the 10-12 hours daily and everything goes well the first week. By the end of the week you're extremely motivated and plan your task for the next week. On completion of your week 1, you decide to take it easy over the weekend and go out with your friends for a drink. The party you thought would get over by early night really ended the next day morning. You're extremely tired and want to hit the sack as soon as you reach home. So now your weekend goes for a toss and you're running a bit late on your schedule but no worries still. You're motivated and tell you're self that I'll cover up in the coming week. You then begin your work motivated but then at the start of the week itself run into major technical issues and start getting worked up because you're not able to solve them. You put in another day's effort but still the issues dont get resolved. Finally, you decide to make some desperate calls and you don't find the intended solutions. You've started to get a headache and just try to get some rest. Once you're up, you think about the situations and start getting angry at the fact if you hadnt partied, you could've got 2 additional days. Everything starts turning glum and demotivation starts setting in. Your project now takes 5 weeks to complete that could've just taken 2.

What I want to highlight with this story is that with a 1-member team and no external dependencies things can go for a toss due to the impact of emotions. In this example, it started with high motivation, happiness, sense of accomplishment, relaxation then turned into extreme stress, anger and demotivation.

Now imagine a bigger team. Everyone in the team when working towards a common goal bring a wide range of emotions towards the work. Some of the members may be very highly motivated and think about the organizations success, some may be highly motivated but may think only about their success in the goal, some members may just be doing the tasks for the sake of doing them and instead prove to be a hindrance in other's work too and some may bring their outside emotion to work maybe like a fight in the family, a sudden loss, failure or success and even internal/external competition.

The bigger task is for the leader who needs to manage everybody's emotions and also his/her own emotions while working on achieving targets.

So for the leaders out there: achieving your goals with your team is one thing but managing your team members emotions while achieving goals is a whole new story!

The growing need for Employability Skills in India

Recently I attended a webinar co-hosted by the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) and National Skill Development Corporation of India (NSDC) discussing the opportunities in skill development for businesses in India over the next few years. In the one hour presentation they spoke about initiatives, programs and competitions undertaken by the NSDC and how businesses must focus on skill development for a country which will soon have the largest working population in the world. Though the opportunity is great and the platform might seem perfect to tap the commercial potential, the information and numbers raise a bigger issue (and one that was left unanswered in the webinar) that what are the skills that an emerging India needs?

Academic skills and technical skills have often been the core focus of the government and the result has been fairly limited, with minimal increase in opportunity or empowerment. Of late, there has been an gradual shift towards vocational skills, which is definitely a breath of fresh air, for both job-seekers and employers alike. In fact Corporate India, with each passing year, renders the current crop of graduates more and more unemployable. For a country where the working age population will very soon be far in excess of those dependent on them and will continue to do so till 2040, this is a very disturbing statistic. (source: World Bank).  Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, in my opinion, hit the nail on the head when he said 'India does not have problem of unemployment but that of unemployability'. Hence the focus must undoubtedly be on developing skills that transcend technical or academic capability and help create professionals who are not only ready to face the challenges of a dynamic and competitive business world but also have the flexibility, intelligence and practical skills to sufficiently excel in their respective roles within an organization.

According to the survey, carried out by a number of agencies (and endorsed by the PM’s National Council on Skill Development and the NSDC), the top three most important general skills identified were motivation, reliability and teamwork, while the top three most important specific skills are entrepreneurship, effective communication and use of modern tools and technologies. This is some very important information coming directly from the corporate world and should almost become the tenets of basic skill-based training in India. The importance of the survey results and the focus on developing these skills (both general and specific) cannot be emphasized more, because they have a three pronged effect. 

First, they provide individuals seeking employment with a first hand account of what skills they must possess and, if necessary, develop in order to catch the eye of a potential employer. Of course, recognizing skills and developing them are only primary steps, putting them to practice and creating a habit of learning new skills is the ultimate goal. The onus to do this is not just on the job seeker but also training organizations and businesses to identify innovative methods of developing and teaching these skills. In todays digital age, the use of technology is imperative for educational and vocational institutes to attract the youth and make the learning as enjoyable as possible. Learning happens best when the learner is so engrossed and engaged that he does not realize he is learning. 

Next, by developing these skills individuals are not just molded to excel in corporate or government positions but also develop a sense of innovativeness and creativity. There in lies the hope that we are not just empowering job seekers to achieve career goals but also create a section of individuals that will take the entrepreneurial path, at some point in their careers, and will eventually become job creators. 

Last, through the development of these skills job seekers will find it mush easier to accentuate their core academic and technical skills and employers will find that (a) hiring candidates becomes much easier (b) their investment in training new employees and in turn, attrition rate is lower and, (c) productivity is greatly increased because now corporations can focus less on teaching people how to do work and more on actually assigning them to more complex, diverse projects. Hence, to summarize, the development of these skills greatly improves the chances of (a) getting hired then, (b) staying hired and finally, (c) personal and professional success. Could there be more valuable advice for new graduates and young professionals? I think not.

Here is an info graphic that Last-Bench created almost a year back highlighting the importance of soft skills for job applicants. In fact the development of these skills must become a compulsory module in a lll colleges and universities to ensure graduates receive complete education.

If you have any questions, comments or would like to learn more about any of the tools or techniques to improve your soft skills please write to us at chalktalk@last-bench.com

For more information on our skill development programs please click here.

What makes a great leader?

"Leadership" is a topic that is talked about so much nowadays, it would be safe to say that it's 'in vogue!' Everything you try to do or are doing, you either question yourself or get questioned about whether you're a leader in the particular activity or not. But what really makes a great leader? What separates the 'also rans' from the 'inspiring greats'? What traits or behaviors do great leaders have in common? Can YOU 'learn' how to be a great leader? 

Today, I'm not going to define or explain what  leadership is because there are so many great gurus who have already done so and so many of them who have shown the world by exercising it. Instead, I'll share an experience from my previous job who I thought was a great leader amongst the common folks.

Last-Bench!: The journey so far and what lies ahead...

Every couple months I ask myself questions like - "How have we been doing as a startup? What is our progress? Are we focussing on the same vision or have we deviated? What should we be doing as we power into the future?". This is when I call for the "SPECIAL" meeting outside work with my partners in crime - Sajid and Venkat, just to discuss these things and ideate with them.

Very recently, instead of me asking this time, someone from the VC community asked me this question and I confidently replied:

"We've been executing projects in the skill development and educational content design areas which has helped us get in revenue and also allowed us to do research towards our larger goal of delivering personalized skill development online."

Having said that, I'm very proud to announce that we've come into an exclusive joint venture with Cognetics Corporation. Both Congetics and Last-Bench! share a common vision and launched The Center for Agile Thinking in India too. The mission is to help businesses achieve their goals by raising the level and quality of decision-making within their organizations. As a team, we hold great experience, subject matter expertise, technology expertise and a network to tap into. We've taken a first stab at our online platform and have began our development activities.

I do believe we're going in the right direction and with the help of my super team and great advisors we are getting closer to our larger goal!

Will keep ya'll updated! 

-Rajeev (@rajeevchhajer)

Corporate Training Video (demo): 'Giving Effective Feedback'

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