My Writings
Reflections on Life and LeadershipGet Started
Emotional Intelligence
- How to Deal with Your Emotions In The Workplace And Make Them Work?
- Why Our Emotions Can Be Overwhelming? Learn 5 Steps to Deal with Them Effectively
- How To (and not to) Deal with an Emotional Employee?
- The Role and Importance of Emotions in Our Professional and Personal Lives
- Discover 10 Myths and Realities about Emotions, And Change Your Life?
- Do You Know Your Emotional Triggers? And What To Do When You Are Triggered?
- How Can We Overcome Negative Emotions And Create Joy And Fulfilment?
Conflict Resolution
- Understanding Conflicts Better – The First Step to Conflict Resolution
- What Not To Do When Conflicts Happen?
- How to Prepare for a Conflict Resolution Conversation?
- Eight Practical Tips for Making A Conflict Resolution Conversation More Effective
- Focus on Interests, Not on Positions – And Make Every Conversation More Productive
- What To Do If You Can’t Achieve Consensus in a Conflict?
- There Are Only Perspectives, No Truth. And Five Perspectives You Can Use Anytime
Most Recent Articles
7 Key Reasons Why Asking Powerful Questions & Coaching Works Better Than Giving Advice
We’ve all got an irresistible urge to offer advice. It’s a basic human instinct. We often switch to our expert, advice-giver, answer-it, solve-it, fix-it mode. A recent medical research study revealed doctors interrupt their patients with advice within 11 seconds. (Phillips, K.A., Ospina, N.S. & Montori, 2019) But why do we feel compelled to...
9 Steps To Make The Most Out Of Difficult Conversations
“The right word at the right time will unlock the door to treasures - the wrong one will close it forever” - Rasheed Ogunlaru Think about a discussion you have been planning to have with your manager. For example, to ask for a raise. Perhaps as a manager, you may need to terminate an employee or resolve a conflict with a co-worker. These are some...
8 Things Leaders Can Do To Create a High Trust, High Engagement, and High-Performance Team
Many people have a rather simplistic view of how people and teams perform. People don’t perform based on their abilities alone. Any person’s performance is the sum total of their own abilities and effort plus the prevalent culture in the company (and team). A high-trust and high engagement culture can enhance performance just like bad...
Want To Improve Performance? Before Giving Feedback, Give People These Four Things
Do you use feedback as a tool to improve performance? If your answer is yes, you are not alone. Most managers see (and use) feedback, most of which is negative or critical, as a tool to improve performance. If you give positive feedback too along with the negative (the sh*t sandwich), we all know that people tend to focus on the negative and...
6 Reasons People Are So Unhappy At Work
According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Gallup surveys show that nearly two-thirds of employees are disengaged at work. In my own experience of the last 15 years and the numerous stories I have heard from people in multiple countries, I have heard and witnessed the same. Why do we wait for Fridays...
How to Expand the Capacity of Your People and Enable Them to Do More Than They Think They Are Capable of?
People are often capable of far more than we realize. It is not uncommon for people to work below their true potential (Kaplan, 2008). With the right knowledge and tools, we can learn to expand the capacity of our people, and get them to perform at a level they themselves never thought possible. Just as your company cannot succeed without the...
5 Simple (But Not Easy) Steps Every Manager Can Take To Improve Work Culture
If you are lucky enough to be someone’s employer, then you have a moral obligation to make sure people do look forward to coming to work in the morning. - John Mackey I have been leading teams for 12 years in companies such as Yahoo, Booking.com, etc in India and Europe. When I look over the last 12 years, I get a smile on my face on recalling...
How To Respond To Anger Like The Adults We Are Supposed To Be?
In my previous article on anger, we saw that anger hides what we care about. If we look deeper and take the time to introspect, anger can tell us what we really value, and which value has been violated that resulted in the anger. Anger can communicate a lot of important information, but only if we are willing to listen. Can you control the...
Why True Joy and Real Happiness Doesn’t Come from Winning But From A Dignified Struggle?
Winning and Losing Is Everywhere Most of us grow up in this world in a culture where the idea of winning and losing is omnipresent. Movies often celebrate the victory of the good over the evil. We cheer for our teams in sports when they win. We strive to get better grades in school and outsmart each other. We aim to get admitted to the best...
3 Ways Strong Leaders Manage Intimidating Employees With Poise and Confidence
If you are a leader or manage a team, it is not uncommon to come across someone in your team who intimidates you. This might be because they are better than you in a particular skill and that brings your insecurities to the fore. Or it might be because the person might be overly assertive, has temperament issues and you are trying to avoid...
5 Unconscious Ways We Limit Our Own Freedom
I still remember that morning of excitement. It was supposed to an relaxing long drive in my new car, but I had no idea how the day would turn up. As I started the engine and pushed down on the accelerator, I got busy admiring the posh interiors and the sophisticated dashboard of my car. As soon as I got on the highway, I turned on the cruise...
10 Powerful Conversation Questions to Connect with Others on a Deeper Level
Do your conversations seem artificial and meaningless? Do you find it difficult to go beyond niceties? What do you do when the answers you get are rote, scripted, and hide the “real” stuff underneath them? The innocuous “How are you?” at the start of a conversation often begets a rote and scripted response like “I am fine,” or “I am doing good.”...
Busting The Myth of Individual Performance. A Radical New Equation For Improving Performance At Work
What causes employees to put themselves between a customer and bullets from a terrorist attack? It is very difficult to imagine anybody valuing their work so much that they put their lives at stake to protect customers. Yet, that is what many employees of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai did on 26 Nov 2008 when terrorists attacked the hotel...
Tired Of Outdated Processes In Your Organisation? Here Is A Step by Step Guide To Change or Remove Them
Why would a monkey not go after a bunch of bananas placed within his reach? An experimenter puts 5 monkeys in a cage. High up at the top of the cage is a bunch of bananas. Underneath the bananas is a ladder. The monkeys immediately spot the bananas and one begins to climb the ladder. As he does, however, the experimenter sprays him with a...
How I Made My Laziness and Procrastination Productive, and Used It To Read Over 250 Books In the Last 5 Years?
The dictionary defines procrastination as "the action of delaying or postponing something”. There was a time when I used to believe that procrastination is a bad habit and that only bad or weak people procrastinate. However, after reading a lot of psychology and neuroscience research, I now realize that we are all lazy and procrastinate on...
How Can We Overcome Negative Emotions And Create Positive Energy To Achieve Joy And Fulfilment?
We all experience a wide range of emotions. If we are human, we can not escape feeling the same emotions as everyone else. In fact, the more psychology and neuroscience research I encounter, I wonder that a better name for us would be "emotional beings" rather than "human beings". Emotions (not logic) are what decide each and every action we...
7 Empathetic Questions To Ask At Work to Understand And Support Your Colleagues
One of the most important tasks of a leader is to support her people with the challenges they face. However, in the pressure-filled and fast-paced routine of everyday work, the challenges each one of us face might not be easily identifiable. Due to workplace culture and social taboos, people might be struggling with some very important issues but...
5 Research Backed Reasons Taking Regular Breaks Can Help You Get More Done
If you have a lot to do, take regular breaks. Find out about the counterintuitive advice of taking breaks to get more done. Are you surging ahead in life? Is your life becoming too fast for comfort? Why not take a break? What did I just say? Do you think you have a lot more to achieve and you just can't afford to take breaks? Does this sound like...
The 7 Most Powerful Investments You Can Make. They Are Not What You Think
What comes to your mind when you are asked about the most powerful investments you should make? Is it stocks? Is it bonds? Or a new house? Real estate is the safest investment, you might have heard. If you ask me, I would say, neither! Over the course of my life, with its few successes and numerous failures, I have come to see another type of...
Why Unreasonable Goals Are Better For Your Growth And Success?
Have you ever achieved something you aimed for still felt like "meh"? Do you feel "empty" on the inside despite being successful by usual standards? Here is how to achieve meaningful success by overcoming our deep psychological need to play it safe. If you have ever done any writing on a computer, you would have relied on copy and paste. It's...