Principles Of Management - Learning and Experiences

Valley Crossing exercise

Let me show you something innovative which happened in our college.

 A video showing the Valley Crossing exercise which happened in NITIE below - 

Hope you enjoyed watching this video.

Let me simplify this and Explain of valley crossing through this picture:

Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to creation of  Teams.  The Valley Crossing exercise purely focussed on  Teamwork.

Learnings from this exercise:

1) Concept of Super Teams & Self Manager Teams: Super Teams or High performance teams is a concept which has been successfully adopted by many big corporations like GE, Krafts food, Boeing etc. It can be defined as a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of a corporation to solve problems faced daily. The valley crossing exercise had many characteristics of a super team like:

• Participative leadership – different from the tradition approach of a authoritarian team leader.

• Open and clear communication – Communication is the key to crossing valley effectively.

• Mutual trust – Every person needed to trust each other completely especially when their feet was off the ground.

• Managing conflict – dealing with conflict openly and transparently and not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team morale

• Clear goals – The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the gravity of the problem.

• Defined roles and responsibilities – each team member understands what they must do (and what they must not do) to demonstrate their commitment to the team and to support team success. Furthermore the roles and  responsibilities keep on changing depending on the situation. 

• Coordinative relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness

• Positive atmosphere – an overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future-focused and able to deliver success.

2) Task Interdependence - It is the extent to which a group's work requires its members to interact with one another. We see that in the valley crossing exercise it is of utmost importance to be interdependent on each other so as to mitigate the risk and achieve the task at hand. This also has brings lot of perspectives to the Team performance in reality. What I have observed is that the interdependence increases as we go higher up the corporate ladder. As a worker or low level employee, we can usually get away with completing the task without much interdependence (even though effectively using the team's collective strength may increase productivity). But as we go to strategic level, it is almost impossible to go about a task without the expertise/skill/opinion of your team mates.  Thus Interdependence and its effective usage is crucial for a manager.

3) The Flip side: Quite often we come across people who get their tasks done by their team mates. One of the flip side of team work is that our efforts may go unrecognised or even worse credited to the wrong person. In a competitive and performance oriented environment like ours, it is important to see through these ploys. Some of the good work practises that I have found in good team players in my previous organization includes:

• Pro actively helping members in need.
• Properly communicating the work done to superiors.
• Pro actively using the teams strength for overcoming problems.
• Effective participation in meetings and team events etc.

These are some of the learnings from this exercise.

Digital Media - Leveraging for Managers

For those of us that use the net during work time, there are two types of networking sites, those that can aid learning, productivity and build business relationships and those that can slow or even stop work in its tracks. In this article, We explore the risks to individuals and businesses in the growing use of personal contact sites.

Personality types
For some of us, personal messages from people they know (or don’t know) causes excitement and fun. The feeling is almost addictive. What am I talking about? Well do you have your Gtalk or Yahoo messenger running while at work? Ready for people you know to chat to you? Do you feel compelled to talk when someone you know appears online? At best, this is a distraction; at its worst, it can disable some individuals from doing any work at all. But this is not the worst of it. With people we know our feelings and reaction to people we know is more often or not within reasonable control.

Are you ‘addicted’ to instant messaging?
Checking your email once or twice a day is one thing, but being permanently connected is quite another.

How can you tell if you are addicted to messaging? For some this can be quite easy. It is about how far you go to get your ‘fix’ of chatting with people you know.

If you work for a company that has blocked your favourite messaging site, then you use search engines to find alternatives – you use one of the ‘framed’ or java based sites, as the chances are your IT department has not blocked that yet… One of the better known MSN/ Yahoo replacements is ebuddy. This is a great site which allows you to access your instant messaging site and avoid the block on some company firewalls. When your company stops one you happily spend time searching for another.

Where are we spending our time?
Research has shown that the sites with us spending the most time on are: Myspace, Yahoo, Msn, ebay (being the top 4) with an adult dating site in the top 20. Sites like Myspace , Facebook and Youtube have little/ no legitimate place in the world of professional networking. As for dating or chat room sites…well that goes without saying. Yes, all of these can be great places to spend our hobby or down time, but as business tools – no.

Networking –v- Social Contact sites

Here let us make the distinction between the two types of networking sites. Networking sites tend to have forums and ways of finding people that have skills or experiences we are looking for. The forums tend to me places where people can share thoughts, questions and solutions, but they do so in a way that does not encourage a ‘conversation’. These sites include HRZone,TrainingZone, CIPD, TrainerBase, Linkedin etc.. Sites that can help us solve a business problem have a legitimate place in our ‘toolkit’ of solutions and organisations should encourage their use to help remain competitive and cost effective.

Are Blogs – social networking sites?
Yes and no. For me there are two types of blog – those that use social networking sites, and those that are on an individual’s professional website. For me that latter is a professional too, the former is not. In this day and age of personal networking, we need to be careful about our image. 

What happens if we go for a job and someone ‘Google’s’ our name – and all they find is a blog with not very business like language on it?.

Tower building - Goal setting and Management

Data for  Tower Building exercise in terms of No. of CUBES is given below.

	Factor  1 to 8	Scenario - I	Scenario - II	Scenario - III	Scenario - IV
1 & 2	Historical Tower height achieved by team	Low - 5 High -  18	Low - 5 High - 20	Low - 5 High - 21	Low - 5 High - 23
3	Achievable Performance -          ( Estimate / Guess )	18 +	20+	22+	25+
4	Goal proposed by the Manager	18	22	22	18
5	Goal proposed by the worker	12	12	12	20
6	Goal Mutually agreed for building the tower between worker and manager with the support of the manager	15	22	18	15
7	No. of cubes Tower manager and worker team could build / achieve at the end of the exercise	18	18	18	18
8	P O T E N T I A L T O W E R   H E I G H T	20	25	25	30

 Potential tower height as per my understanding is stated above.

Sl. No.	Measure for Managerial Excellence	Scenario - I	Scenario - II	Scenario - III	Scenario - IV
1 2  3  4  5     6 7 8	1. Gap if any between Tower height Performance so far achieved and Achievable performance of tower ( Factor 3 and 7) 2. Gap if any between goal proposed by the manager and mutually agreed goal by team  ( Factor 4 and 6) 3. Gap if any between goal proposed by the manger and the goal proposed  by the worker   ( Factor 4 and 5)    4. Gap if any between goal proposed by the worker  and mutually agreed goal by team  ( Factor 5 and 6) 5. Gap if any between achievable performance  and potential tower  ( Factor 3 and 8) 6. Gap if any between  performance achieved ( at the end of the exercise ) and  goal mutually agreed by manger and the worker   ( Factor 6 and 7) 7. Gap if any between  performance achieved ( at the end of the exercise ) and  achievable goal    ( Factor 7 and 3) 8. Gap if any between  performance achieved ( at the end of the exercise ) and  the potential    ( Factor 7 and 8)	Acheivable performance = Performance of team. This is a condsiderable situation with drawback being that limits are not being pushed. Team performed better than what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has high expectations. Employees are complacent. Mutual agreement lies in middle of worker and manager aspirations. Exceeded expectations. Yes.Gap does exist.This is a condsiderable situation with drawback being that limits are not being pushed.	Acheivable performance > Performance of team.  Team did not push their limits and performed below expectations. Team performed as  what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has very high expectations. Employees are complacent. Mutual agreement is completely manager aspirations.He has been able to convince workers of his goals. Performance below expectations. Yes.large Gap does exist.Team did not push their limits and performed below expectations.	Acheivable performance > Performance of team.  Team did not push their limits and performed below expectations. Team performed not as good as what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has very high expectations. Employees are complacent. Mutual agreement lies more towards manager aspirations. Workers have been successful in negotiating a little. Met expectations. Yes.large Gap does exist.	Ac heivable performance is much  greater than Performance of team.  Team did not push their limits and performed very badly and  below expectations. Team performed not as good as  what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has low expectations. Employees are motivated and have set high expectations. Mutual agreement is lesser than worker and manager aspirations. Poor manager will eventually lead to complacent employees. Exceeded expectations. Yes.very large Gap does exist. Team did not push their limits and performed very badly and  below expectations.