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

Today was yet another day in my life. However, I got an insight for me to improve myself. It was the birthday of a great colleague of mine at work. It was the wedding day of a relative I attended today at Mysore. In the evening, I lost a dear classmate, who died due to kidney failure.

God balances our life by giving the good and the bad news in equal measure. I felt good in wishing my colleague on her birthday. I was happy to attend the wedding of my relative since his father has supported me a lot during my childhood. However, in the evening when I came to know about the sudden demise of my college mate, I was shocked. I knew he had been admitted to a hospital last week and was undergoing dialysis. I knew from the my classmates, who had visited him that his condition was not good. But to hear the sad news of his death out of the blue in the evening numbed me.  

I saw a lot of good qualities about him being showered by classmates in our whasapp group. He deserved every word of appreciation. He was modest, shy and reticent. All of us admired his noble qualities. But, it suddenly struck me after reading all those wonderful words of praise as to why do we need to wait for someone to die to share what we admire about them. Why are we reluctant to notice, admire and share all the good qualities of our friends, colleagues and relatives while they are with us on this earth. I am guilty of this reluctance and may be some of you too.

 Is it possible for me to resolve to day to myself that I will never miss an opportunity to observe, admire and share my appreciation of all the goodness I see in all my colleagues, friends and relatives. I will not wait for them to leave Mother Earth to share what I liked about them. It may look silly but for me it was a great insight. I could be stingy in criticism of others but can be more than generous in my praise of others goodness.

Life is short. Let us make it sweet.

S Ramesh Shankar