Life Learnings: Fret Less, Find More!

A few incidents stay in your mind for ever and the learnings from those can be applied at different points no matter what the situation is!

So this is about two people at work, both at almost the same level of experience, a few common characteristics and a few differences too!

P1 and his first impression: Technically skilled, great communication skills, confident.

P2 and her first impression: Technically skilled, higher than average communication skills, confident.

First impression of these two people would tell you that they would manage their work and teams fairly well but when you work with them at what you say ground level, you will realise what is missing and what needs to be done to bridge some gaps.

P1 doesn’t take ownership, P2 does. P1 is lost at times when it comes to what the team does whereas P2 is on top of things and a miss is very rare. They however work differently with their teams; P1 is friendly with the team, or rather we can say he’s not demanding and at the same time keeping the team happy overall. P2 is bossy and some of her team members compare her to a school teacher. The team has issues with her attitude. And while P1 is friendly with the team, he doesn’t put a lot of effort in trying to get the best out of the team, or in evaluating improvement areas. P2 may not be too friendly with the team but takes up proactive steps to skill up her team.

Both P1 and P2 have scope of improvements when it comes to managing however another common characteristic of theirs is to find issues with everything even though the nature of issues might be different. P1 has a lot of questions on why certain things weren’t done in a particular way and P2 has a lot of issues in how the other teams have issues.

Why my life lesson comes into picture here is because at a certain point in time in the past, I had the attitude of raising every issue, big and small, so that those didn’t get missed out and convincing myself that a red flag was necessary. And then my then boss pointed out to me that while issues needed to be highlighted but during the time the issue was getting fixed, it is essential that one looks for the workaround and make slow progresses. To have technical skills is great but to be able to adapt is the key!

This lesson on finding workarounds and solutions even when the issue was raised to the concerned person/team has stayed with me and I, now, will be responsible in passing on the same lesson through word and deed to both P1 and P2.

The rest will depend on their willingness to make these little changes…