Hail Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey is no more. This news must’ve made many of us turn back the pages of his tome. Or re-look at the notes we made about being effective, along the way.


Keeping the Indian workplace in context I would like to make a few suggestions that could make us more efficient professionals.


1) Be punctual: There are no statistics available for how much lack of punctuality costs us as a country but my guess is it should be a substantial amount. Lack of punctuality means every day, each one of us waits for someone to join the meeting who is held up somewhere else because that meeting did not start on time because someone came late there….. Long hours are spent at the work place but few of those are towards work on several days. And arriving late bothers very few people. Just yesterday a young gentleman was supposed to come and demonstrate his novel, internet promotion idea to us. We were there by 10:15 for the 10:30 meeting. There wasn’t a sound from him until 11:30 a.m. He simply explained that he was held up and he was on his way now. We tried to impress upon him that this was unacceptable. He was unfazed. We did not have the meeting. So in effect he spent four hours on the road and did not meet the potential client. Little wonder that so many of us are working virtually round the clock. This isn’t uncommon. Being ‘held up in traffic’ happens so regularly that I wonder if it is some sort of an epidemic condition

2) Be prepared: That was the motto for us as girl guides. It seems so relevant today. It is a pleasant surprise when the people you are going to meet are well-prepared for the meeting. Often enough a person saunters in with barely a clue of what the agenda is. He/she generally contributes throughout the conversation and confuses the matter till it is like a tangled ball of wool. More than once, the outcome of the meeting has been that we must come and meet the next person and repeat all this. There have been few occasions that what was mailed in advance has been opened and looked at at least cursorily. And often enough, the needs identified are not what we are eventually asked to train for

3) Dress effectively: Casualness in dressing is a recent development and it is being taken to an extreme. I am no prude on what people should wear but we mustn’t, at any point, forget that we are yet at work, no matter whether it’s Friday or a Saturday. It is yet not a beach day. Casual or poor dressing is reflective of our attitude towards our work and where we want to go. We may claim that this is superficial and dressing doesn’t matter. But do you think you will willingly let your daughter go out say, with a fellow with long, matted hair and painted nails? Sorry, but I had to exaggerate to make my point.

4) Be courteous: Good manners and courteousness for some reason are often misinterpreted as weakness. But being courteous and well-mannered just makes you more bearable. And talking with a sneer or with slang or expletives isn’t ‘cool’. It is annoying to anyone ten years older than you and doesn’t make you appear any more intelligent or ‘with it’.

5) Be formal: In the workplace it may be safer to err on the side of formality. Don’t get into backslapping mode the day you join from your MBA college. People may humour you but I strongly suggest that you should let the boss decide if you can abbreviate his name. In our language training experience we’ve had, not surprisingly for us, many incidents where international clients complained about such things. There’s a difference between being friendly and getting familiar. The former is appreciated, the latter isn’t.

6) Take responsibility: The issue seems to belong to no one. It is nebulous, in the Corporate Scenario, where the buck stops. So you can be shunted from one manager to another, getting no wiser about what’s to be done.

7) Keep upgrading: This should be a daily quest. The routine can never be made an excuse for not improving every single day. Every day, every month you should be able to at least explain to yourself why you should get paid better. Reading on the industry, on your subject, on varied interests is for self-development.


Of course this is only my list. Would love to know what piques and pricks you about being one of the links in this corporate world chain.

ARE WE DIFFERENT? OR ARE WE ALIKE?

The response to my post on Resistance Learning has been considerable. Even more, friends and colleagues located in different countries and markets and from diverse sectors - the US, the UK, New Zealand, public sector and private; from the traditional manufacturing sector to the growing service industries; from marketing professionals to HR people- have responded. They all say that the post rung a loud bell as they experience much the same. A friend who lives in NZ says she literally made notes to remind her of the salient points and shared the piece with her boss. Another said it was her experience all the time- it wasn’t personal most often, it was the situation. Yet another interestingly pointed out from the participant’s point of view- he said he had never thought that he could be conveying this while participating in a program.

It may be interesting to study that while organisations are always investing in ‘acculturising’ their employees to fit into customer markets, there is a core which is common. While the top layers may be different, on the inside we all seem to live with the same fears and apprehensions; with common likes and dislikes; with the same needs for friends, mentors and guides. It becomes more and more awkward to express these needs as we grow in our jobs and age. But deep inside we yet have them if we haven’t been able to quell them.

I can recall some interesting incidents:

1)     Meeting an Indian CEO posted abroad, who needed to know how to open up with employees, and had spent sleepless nights over it.

2)     Identifying the primary cause of discontent and dissent in a company that called me as an external mediator. Turned out that it was the CEO- no less- who everyone complained about not communicating effectively with them. Kudos to the CEO for taking the criticism well and talking across the table. That was surely an amazing experience.

3)     Sometimes the foreigner is a threat: While working in a foreign market, I realised how my local counterpart felt threatened that I may try to wriggle into her company even though she knew clearly that I had to leave in a month.

4)     The new white factory manager with an impressive record spoke to me in private about handling the local factory shop floor workers. He felt them resisting all his proposals, albeit silently. The silent protest of the Indian worker flummoxed him.

5)     And at other times the foreigner is the friend they had always been looking for: I can recall a middle-level manager in a media company speaking professionally over the phone and then swearing, as she replaced the receiver. She confided in me in hushed tones that people in her country just didn’t understand communication! She complained that they were lackadaisical, nit-picking and resistant to change. I could have been sure that she was echoing the words I had heard so often back home.

In this fluid world of similarities and differences it is then oftentimes difficult to define the perfect work personality. However, sincerity towards the job, targeting a problem not a person, keeping an open mind and rising above the temptation of pettiness score as the highest attributes in my experience. But you are cordially invited to fine-tune this list so that we can jointly try to create a perfect prototype!