trust

There are 5 posts tagged trust.

How to Prepare for a Conflict Resolution Conversation?

A conflict resolution conversation is one of the most critical conversation in any organisation. The success or failure of this conversation will determine how the inherent energy in a conflict will be used, and how the relationship between the involved parties will be in the future.

As I have written previously, conflicts have a lot of energy, like an overflowing river. It is upto us to build a dam and channel all this extra water (energy) into electricity? Because if left unchecked, all this extra water can cause flooding and devastation in its path. The most effective tool to prevent the flooding and use the energy in each conflict productively is the Conflict Resolution Conversation.

Below are the 5 steps I think all of us must take before/in any conflict resolution conversation:-

1. Create A Foundation of Trust and Respect among all involved parties, which is essential for any productive conversation to happen. This is more like a step 0, as trust is like oxygen in a conversation.

Take steps to apologise or forgive for any past behaviour, and prepare a clean slate by setting any prejudices aside. This will help create an environment of trust and mutual respect. Work together as partners, and not adversaries, as you set about resolving the conflict.

2. Decide Ground Rules for the conversation before you start. These rules will allow you to proceed amicably in the face of differences and disagreements. They can include what is the common goal both parties are seeking, how would you treat each other, and what do you do if you can’t agree on a common solution?

Having such ground rules will assist both parties to keep their egos in check and keep the focus on a mutually beneficial solution. Even in the case of an unproductive conversation, these rules will leave you with respect and understanding for the other person’s position, rather than with resentment and cynicism.

What Not To Do When Conflicts Happen

How To Prepare For A Conflict Resolution Conversation?

3. Listen. The freedom to speak your mind includes a duty to listen and understand the other person’s perspective. Walk a mile in the other person’s shoes to see the situation from his point of view. Acknowledge the validity of the different perspectives without making any one perspective right or wrong.

Walk into the conversation with an empathetic attitude and care for the other party’s concerns. Understand that the conversation is not productive unless the concerns of both parties are met. If you work to address what the other person cares about, you create the possibility of a win-win result which might be even better than what you initially wanted.

“Courtesy towards opponents and eagerness to understand their viewpoint is the ABC of non-violence.” – Mahatma Gandhi

4. Differentiate Your Positions from your Interests – Ask yourself what do you really desire? And why? Let go of your attachment to your position and seek to discover yours and others’ common desires. Asking the question “why” a couple of times can help you do that.

This will help you understand the other person better and create space for collaboration and flexibility. Understanding the concerns of each other will turn you into partners rather than adversaries, and it opens up the possibility of making 2 + 2 = 5 happen.

5. Prepare your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiable Agreement) – The BATNA is your lower boundary, the minimum you are willing to get out of the conversation. Knowing your BATNA increases your negotiating power.

When you enter a conversation knowing your BATNA, that gives you assurance and confidence. If nothing else works, you walk out with your BATNA.

To sum it up, doing this preparation before any conflict resolution conversation prevents us from reacting impulsively when the going gets tough. Conflicts are a natural order of life, and being prepared will allow us to turn them into an opportunity to build a strong foundation (relationship) not just for immediate but also long term results.

It is also important to note that the above steps do not guarantee a successful conversation, or the results we desire. But they will equip us to deal with conflicts with steady and not shaky hands, which is always a good skill to have.

Five Things A Leader Must Do By Default

In today’s corporate environment, after a few years of doing your job well enough, chances are that you will be asked to step up and lead a team. You trained and studied to be good at your job, and now getting to manage people seems like a reward for a job well done.

By promoting the good performers to be managers and leaders, people have assumed for centuries that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor would also make you successful as a manager. If you have led people for any considerable amount of time, you would know how false this assumption is. Yet in the business world, this continues to be the norm.

Today I want to list down five things which you must do, or are expected to do by default, to be effective as a manager/leader. And it is likely that nobody told you this when you were promoted. I have only figured them out after leading teams for over a decade, and I believe I am on a continuous journey to learn and know more about leadership.

1. Lead Yourself
The first thing you must do to be effective as a leader is to lead yourself. Your relationship with your team will be determined more by your trustworthiness than by any other skill or talent you might possess. Trust is the foundation of leadership, and you build trust by leading yourself first – by holding yourself accountable for what you demand from your team. Like any worthwhile endeavour, it takes time, effort and daily investments to build trust with your team.

If you want your team members to honour their promises, honour your promises to them. If you ask them to be on time for meetings, you must be on time first. Or you will lose their trust. If you ask them to be respectful to each other, you must respect them first. Or you will lose their trust. If you want them to be humble, you need to exemplify that in your behaviour. If you need them to be honest and sincere, you need to acknowledge your mistakes publicly and make amends for them. You can not lead a team if you can’t lead yourself.

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” - Unknown

2. Know Where You are Headed

When you are leading a team, people will look up to you for providing direction. Having a well-defined purpose clarifies why the team exists in the first place. Coming up with the team’s purpose together with your team will empower them to take decisions which are in the best interest of the team.

Listening to your team and engaging in a dialogue will allow the team to define and own its purpose. You need to spend time with the team regularly to discuss, revisit or reshape the team’s purpose. Ensuring each member understands the team’s purpose and their role in the team will empower them to prioritise their tasks effectively.

3. Be a Coach
If you have people reporting to you, then you are their coach by default. You don’t have a choice in being their coach as people will approach you anyways. When they are demotivated, when they have a conflict, or when they need help for any other reason; it is your responsibility to listen, understand their concerns, and then coach them to align their personal motivations with the team’s shared purpose and goals. If you can’t do that effectively, it will impact the results the team intends to produce in the future.

While I assert that you are a coach by default, the skills and conversations required to be a coach don’t come by default. You must invest time and effort in learning and practicing your coaching skills. How well you coach people will be directly proportional to the results the team produces. Investing in learning these skills and making coaching a priority will be your best investment ever.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Lewis Carroll

4. Demand Commitment and Accountability
Just as every sport has a certain set of rules, each business team can come up with rules (or standards) which apply to their business and industry. These rules will govern how you work and define success and failure. Examples could be how you treat your colleagues, how complaints are handled, and what boundaries you set in matters important to the team. Once these standards are set, it frees up everyone to exercise their own creativity in making decisions. This gives shape to the ‘culture’ in the team.

After you set up these standards together with your team, you have to demand them. Of course, for this to work, you have to exemplify them yourself. Holding your team accountable to these standards (or rules) will bring the team members together and set the team up for high performance. The intention behind it is not to punish or penalise people when they slip up, but to ensure an open, fair and supportive culture in the team.

5. Serve Your People
I believe that leadership is a privilege, and that each leader is a custodian of the company’s values, beliefs and ambitions for the future. Leadership will require you to think beyond your own self-interest, and from your team or company’s point of view. In order to lead you must be willing to serve – to put your team’s interest in front of any individual interests, which might lead you to make some difficult decisions from time to time.

Leadership is not about power or authority, nor is it about popularity. Leadership is about character – which you will need to express yourself authentically, compassion – which you will need to grow and develop your people, and integrity – which you will need to serve your people with the respect and transparency they deserve.

I believe that leadership is standing for something bigger than yourselves. You show your team the way, give it what it needs to do the job, and then get out of the way. Your biggest job is to create an environment of respect and accountability, where people have fun and express themselves freely by continuously moving forward towards the team’s goals.

Leadership is Service

To sum it up, these five points above are not strategies or tactics which you can incorporate in your leadership style to get better results. These are the bedrock which will give rise to a myriad of strategies and tactics, which in turn will lead to those results. If you try to fake them, your people will call your bluff sooner or later, and you will lose all credibility and trust. An attitude of humble service will enable you to become a better leader, while taking care of your team and company’s needs.

People are the best investment

Throughout my life, I have seen my parents struggle for money due to some business decisions gone wrong or for health reasons. Due to this, we never had money to spend on anything which was ‘not necessary‘. Most of what my parents earned were spent in our (the two brothers) education and other long term investments, and rarely on movies, entertainment or traveling. Maybe due to this lack of financial resources, all of us made up for that by focussing on little things like spending quality time together, always helping anyone who is in need and getting connected with people on a personal level. I have seen and observed my father chatting and getting along very well with one and all. I very vividly remember my father taking me to his office sometimes and everybody, from the security guard to the peon to the street vendors outside to the receptionist inside, greeting him warmly. It felt like my father was friends with everyone in the building. This article is about people, and how they are the best investment opportunity for us.

Acknowledging and Greeting

Normally, as we go through our life we tend to focus only on what is important and ignore everything else. Think about how many people we passed through today from the time we left our home till we reached office. And to how many of these people did we stopped and said “Good Morning”. It is such a simple thing to do, and a good morning wish leaves both parties smiling, still we ignore it most of the times. Very often we forget that how good it feels when somebody appreciates us and believes in our abilities. So isn’t it natural that we should thrive to do the same to others?

It Always Come Back

We invest our time and money in our jobs, stocks, mutual funds and real estate. We buy cars, phones and other gadgets and take pride in owning them. But I have always believed that the best investment we can make in are people. You might or might not get your returns from the stock market or the real estate market, but investing in people always come back. If somebody needs our time and attention, nothing can be a bigger investment for us to help that person with honesty and compassion. There is no better sight in this world than seeing somebody smile and knowing that we are the reason behind it, that we could be of some help. And even if we talk in terms of returns, investment on people always tend to come back in life, and in proportions we can’t imagine. I am a witness to how many different unknown people have come forward to help my parents in times of need, without even their asking for it.

 

Myself and friends at Noida in 2008

Myself and friends at Noida in 2008

It is a Challenge, but a Very Rewarding One

Now it is easy to say that we must invest in people, but it can get really challenging and daunting in real life. Many times we will come across people who are very easy to ignore, or who trigger our temper and we might want to shout and yell at them. But on the other hand, empowering someone and taking time to listen to them can sometimes surprise even them. Many a time people will realize this and thank you for the extra effort you are putting, and that is always a very rewarding experience.

Have Fun, make Them Laugh

If we try to remember the times when we have been angry, upset, frustrated or just unhappy, we will realize that we have been taking things too seriously. All the life’s so called problems occur mostly when we are lost in a moment and lose the bigger perspective. If we look at things in perspective, an annoying boss in office might not be as important in the picture of your ‘whole life‘ as important as we might have made him/her. So it’s always good to loosen up, and treat people as human beings first, rather than good or bad resources. Have some fun, crack some jokes and laugh. For many, this period of fun might be the best part of their day, and you can be glad you were a part of it.

Be Genuine, Truthful and Trustworthy

All what I have written above is not some trick and people are smart enough to find out whether you genuinely mean your affection or if you are bluffing. So what I am advocating is to really become the person who cares about others, whom others can trust and who doesn’t break promises. It takes effort to ingrain these features in our character, but if we can do that, we will reap the rewards. As I said before, compared to our bank balance, stock portfolio or real estate, if our investment in people start giving results, it can dwarf all other investments we might have.

Go the extra mile

Can you go the extra mile?

Can you go the extra mile?

Life can be wonderful,
Each second can make you smile!
But to see its true beauty,
It will need you to go the extra mile!!

Can you trust people?
On whom nobody will bet!
But if you can do it honestly,
It can become a big asset !!

Can you show goodness?
Even to those unfair to you!
It will reap you true friends,
Who can make miracles come true!!

Can you practice strong faith?
In times that will shake your patience!
You will reap all success possible,
Only if you can maintain your balance !!

You will definitely need courage,
To achieve anything worthwhile!
The only question you face is,
Are you ready to go the extra mile??

Challenges before Pick A Fight and Philanthropy in India

We have got a pretty decent start to Pick A Fight. We made the Pick a Fight website live on 15 May, and have been making continuous updates on it since then. We have been covered by MyBangalore.com, Bangalore Mirror and Deccan Chronicle as far as media coverage goes. More than 20 people have volunteered to join our team to help with Pick A Fight activities. We have started working with a few fights and on-the-ground activities / campaigns will start soon.

Having said that, giving and philanthropy in India is still in the very nascent stages. The world leader in philanthropy is US which contributes about 2.2% of its GDP whereas India only contributes 0.6% of its GDP to philanthropy. Most of the philanthropy in the west is from individuals while individual contribution is just 10% of India’s. So why has giving not picked up in India? What are the challenges before us? Can our philanthropy standards keep pace continuous economic growth?

Red Tapism

The way our government and bureaucracy works, there is a lot left to be desired if you consider the effectiveness of work happening. Many of the laws and regulations are outdated. Taking permissions and certificates is a slow process and can take up to a year in many cases. Add to them the problem of corruption and this hampers the intentions of people even if they are willing to help otherwise.

Trust

Apart from our families, we have a very small circle of trust. Especially when it comes to matters of money, we tend to see everybody with suspicion rather than trust. Most of the giving today is facilitated by government agencies and NGOs and other agencies in the non-government sector, where unfortunately, the levels of corruption is too high for anybody to feel trustworthy donating to them.

Accountability

Officers and people holding offices in our government and bureaucracy are rarely held accountable for their duties. It is very easy for them to go back on their promises and duties without fear of any penalty, loss of pay or punishment. This kind of attitude further discourages people and organizations to give their money and resources to philanthropy.

Challenges Ahead

Challenges Ahead for Pick a Fight

Measuring Social Impact

If we somehow ignore the above three factors and consider all the work which is happening in the social sector, it is very difficult to measure the social impact of philanthropic efforts of India. There are no set standards or benchmarks to compare to. It is very difficult to measure how many households have come out of poverty, or how many people have improved their standards of living due to a particular philanthropic effort.

Considering that Pick a Fight and other philanthropic efforts have to work in an environment consisting of the above four factors, it is surely going to be a challenge. Getting the trust of people, and holding ourselves accountable for whatever tasks we take up is going to be the key for creating a sustainable giving movement in India.

We will also need to devise ways of measuring the social impact we are causing. The work we do might have social, economic and environmental impact but measuring them is very important for them to be properly acknowledged by one and all. “What can be measured can be improved” goes a popular saying. Knowing how well you are achieving your objectives can help you plan better for the future. It also highlights the importance of the work we do, to our partners, customers, staff and volunteers, donors or to a government agency.

Although it is not easy or well defined how to measure social benefit, its importance should be evident to all. Only by constantly making efforts in this direction keeping in mind the interests of our various stakeholders will help us in creating a new culture of giving and promoting philanthropy in India.