Is it worthwhile to develop punctuality as a habit in life ? In my view, yes and I learnt it the hard way. Based on my mistakes and experiences, I would like to share how it has helped me discipline myself.

Forty years back, when I was passing out of school I missed the opportunity of leading the school march past in our annual day since I was late by two minutes. The chief guest was the station commander of the Air force station in which my school was located and the function started punctually at 2 pm as planned . It was a missed chance and I will never ever get a chance to lead the school march past again in this lifetime.

This was a turning point in my life. I decided that I will never be late in college or thereafter in my career. I have tried my best to be in time always and this has helped me to build my credibility. As a student, self discipline helped me improve my academic performance and gave me ample time for my co curricular activities and also social service.

In my career, it has helped me to grow. Many a time my own children have asked me as to how it makes a difference to be on time in a public sector, where I started my career. I used to tell them that our actions builds our character and our character builds our legacy, which is the only thing we leave behind after we depart. I used to be happy that nobody could raise an eyebrow on my timeliness. In my understanding, timeliness not only means being on time every time, it also means living up to our commitments. If we are expected to deliver something or give a report or even share some data by a date and time, do we do it without reminders ? This builds our credibility and people start believing that they would like to emulate this quality. On the contrary, if we are never on time or do not deliver on our commitments, then it is the other way around.

Another interesting dimension is the concept of “flexitime” at work. While we have officially allowed flexitime in all our offices, many employees think that coming late is ok but don’t realize that one need’s to stay late to compensate for the same. We also think that if we come late or leave early, it is ok if nobody is watching or our boss is not in office. It does not matter if someone is watching you or not, you need to live up to your own conscience. This is the principle of self discipline.

I am reminded of a senior colleague in my career, who used to come late and leave early from work whenever his boss was on leave or on tour. He thought he was smart till the day I had to call and inform him that even the pantry boy in the office used to comment that on a particular day if his boss was on tour, he would vanish after lunch. This sort of behavior reflects on your character and nobody other than you can mould your character. So, I called and counseled him that everybody around observes us all the time.

I love the way, the younger generation lives life today. Their attitude to life and work is energizing. They wear their passion on their sleeves in whatever they do. It is worth remembering that while one can party all evenings, it is equally important to be on time the next day at work. This will be a true reflection of our discipline.

If you are on time, every time and live up to all our commitments, we evolve as a leader, who leads by example and will always leave a legacy behind us, wherever we go.

With best regards,

S Ramesh Shankar

 

 

One of the many things we have imbibed from the western culture is to mark days to celebrate for our father, mother, valentine and so on.

The marketing whiz kids make us buy products and services by positioning them well and making us feel as if we are doing a service to our father or mother by buying the product or service they market.

I was wondering what would be a better way to pay tributes to our fathers today, 19th june , which the pundits state is “Father’s day”( the third sunday of June every year).   I would prefer to look at one great quality my father displayed in his every day behaviour and try my best to imbibe the same in my every day actions.

My father was an epitome of patience.  I was quite short tempered when I was young and was growing up.  I have learnt to be more patient as I have grown and matured as an individual and as a professional.  Today I am happy to be more patient than I was 30 years back.  However, I must admit that I have a long way to go to be as patient as my Dad was.  In his entire lifetime, I have seen him lose his cool only twice.  So, may be I can work further since once one of my office colleague politely gave me a feedback some years back that I lost my cool twice in the one year she worked with me.  So twice a year to twice a life time – I have a long way to go.

You could try to identify one great quality you could imbibe from your father and then check where you are on that quality today.  The gap could be your promise to yourself

Celebrate Father’s Day this way.

S Ramesh Shankar 

I have many times wondered as to why “How” is important as long as are able to achieve the “What” in life. I am sure many of you have the same dilemma. Why is it important to focus on how we do something as long as we achieve what we want to accomplish in life ?

I am reminded of an incident almost three decades back when I started my career. I had a colleague who used to sit next to me and was quite ill behaved to say the least. Our team members were scared of him because of his position but hated him for his antics. I used to sit next to him and sometimes wondered as to why people don’t take me seriously as much as they took him. I felt I was very nice to everyone around me and he was not that well behaved and was used to throwing his tantrums around. Sometimes, I almost came to a conclusion that if you have to have an impact on others, it may be necessary to throw your weight around.

However, as years passed by I realised that people remember you for your behaviour and not for your results. Whenever I visited that site again even after years of my leaving that place, people welcomed me with love and affection. My colleague whom I thought was more impactful was hated and forgotten. Nobody bothered to enquire about him.

Many a time as managers we tend to focus on the results and not on the process. The Japanese have always taught us to fix the process and forget about the results. It will come by itself. I also believe that we need to focus on the way we do something more that what we want to do. If you have to grow as a leader it is very important to remember that the way we treat our team is as important as the way we accomplish our goals through our team members.

On a lighter note I also remember once when I was leading a team to define a process in ISO, we had a lot of fun for three hours but we did end up defining the process. One of my team members told me that although we accomplished our task, we should not have had so much fun. But most of the other members felt that we accomplished our task ahead of other teams because we had a lot of fun. So the way you do something has a huge impact on your results as well.

One of the ways of measuring our impact on our team is to ask how many of your team members enjoy coming back to work on a Monday morning. If the majority say yes, it means that the way you go about leading your team is as good as the way you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you realise that many of your team members do not enjoy working with you, it may not be because you are a hard task master or you do not accomplish your goals. It means that the way you treat them is not ok.

Many organisations have also realised the value of “How” and hence have tweaked their performance management systems to measure the behaviour (how) and the results ( what) and given them equal weightage in assessment.

If we recollect, Gandhiji had taught us quite some time back that ” The means to an end is as important as the end itself” . So, it is high time that we focus on “How” we accomplish our goals as much as “What” we accomplish.

Let us start today.

S Ramesh Shankar