leadership

Why I don’t believe in personal / professional divide?

Throughout my career, I have never believed in keeping separate lives for personal and professional fronts, as people say. One big reason for this might be that I started my career in a startup, and have worked mostly with startups where the work culture and environment was uber-cool and the person sitting next to you was a friend first and colleague later.

There have been times where I have been advised to keep my personal and professional lives separate, and to think and act only professionally while at work. I myself have thought (for a brief duration) that keeping this separation was the way for peak performance, but I have failed miserably whenever I have tried that. In this article I will share my views about why this separation between personal and professional life no longer works. It might have worked a few decades earlier, but in this age of facebook and twitter, I don’t think peak performance is possible if we keep our personal self at home.

1. Sharing our Feelings Bring People Closer
It is no secret that honestly opening up to another person and being authentic about a situation taps to the deepest levels of the listener and helps to forge trustworthy relationships for the future. By sharing something which touches or moves another, we are building bonds of trust which will not only give us a friend but also a colleague who will be fun and easy to work with, and produce greater results.

2. Bring Yourself to Work Fully
Whoever thinks that emotions have no role to play in professional decisions probably has a blind tied over his/her eyes. We can put on a ‘all-work’ mask, but it is only a mask, as our emotions (and the level of comfort and trust) plays a big part in any business decision. We can try to pretend that we will not let our personal lives affect our work and vice versa, but the truth is that they do. People act differently at work depending upon the mood at work, because as human beings, a parent will not stop worrying about their child just because they are in ‘office‘.

3. Leaders are Humans too, and Leadership is not Perfect
Leadership (and leaders) are no longer seen as super humans, who are meant to be admired and respected, and their word followed like a war order. These days, true leaders are seen vulnerable to the same emotions we all are, and they generate more trust and loyalty by being authentic rather than being perfect. If you are late to office because of a personal reason, there is no point in hiding it just for the sake of personal / professional divide.

4. Working with Friends is Always More Fun
Nobody wants to spend 8 hours (the biggest chunk) of our waking lives daily with bozos. Life gets much more interesting when we are doing what we like to do, and with people we like to interact with. Working in a field which excites you in the company of friends makes work so much easier. We all know how difficult passing the eight hours at work becomes when there are just colleagues and no friends. Friends can make time fly by and you won’t even realize you are working. It also raises the productivity level of you as an individual and the team as a whole.

Having said that, this article should not be interpreted as a case for taking your work home or letting personal come in the way of work. What I want to say through the above points is that we can be much more interactive if we see our clients and colleagues as people first, and not stop ourself from understanding or forging a friendship with them just because personal lives must be kept apart (as per popular advice).

Jun 13, 2013
The Only Real Opponent You Have, In Work or in Life, Is Yourself

Mahatama Gandhi once said – “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.” And indeed, it is one of the greatest myths of this world that we have to fight our battles in the outside world.

Everyone who has reached the pinnacle of sport, business, or his/her chosen profession knows that there comes a time when you realize that the real opponent which you have to fight is you yourselves. To take our performance above a certain level, we need to break our safety walls and take new actions which previously we might not have even thought of. By changing ourselves we actually change the world around us.

Commitment

If we want to improve our performance manifold, instead of just learning new courses or reading new books, we need to work on our commitment to the goal we are after. We should make that commitment so unwavering that our own lazy and procrastinating self (and yes, we all have that) can’t stop us from doing what is necessary.

So don’t miss the morning walk, even if you are sick or it is raining outside. Don’t stop doing something just because it is getting tough for you. You have given a commitment, and it is your fight with yourself that you need to win to complete that commitment.

Excellence

If we can demand nothing less than excellence from ourselves and others in every little task we do, whether it is watering the plants or giving that presentation, the kind of results we produce will change dramatically.

We should strive to give our best to every second, and not just in the important events. We have to make things happen, by doing what we have never done before, or by doing them in a way that we have never tried before.

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.”
— Yousuf Karsh

Discover The Strength Inside

All of us have amazing strengths which we never realize or acknowledge unless we are forced by some sudden situation which requires us to act beyond what we think we are capable of. This is epitomized by the famous saying – “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

So the so-called ‘tough‘ people seem to get their strength out of nowhere in tough times. Our defeats tell us more about ourselves than our victories. We all have tremendous reservoirs of strengths hidden beneath us, but we have to dig deep and defeat our own ‘stay in comfort zone‘ self to uncover it.

I will end with this powerful quote by Arnold Schwarzenegger

“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”

Jul 2, 2012
How my biggest strength was stopping me from achieving results?

Time Management and prioritizing things have always been one of my biggest strength. First, as a student, and later as a professional, I have always tried to be ahead of time, and plan things in advance. I can’t remember how it started, maybe I just inherited this from my parents or my knack of doing something ‘extra‘ always made me manage my time properly. However, in the last one year, I have realized how this strength of mine has stopped me in achieving more and better results, and what I had to do to not let this strength become a barrier.

The earliest example of time management in my life came from my parents. I still remember my mother used to wake me up at 6 AM every morning while I was 7-8 years old and how my parents made me study for 30 mins every morning before leaving for school. The same used to continue after coming back from school with homework in the afternoon, some playtime in the evening followed by one hour of TV at night. I think the same planning of time carried on when I went to college in Jaipur and later when I started my career at Noida.

Now, as a student, and as a professional who was just starting his career, most of the work I did was individual in nature. It means I had the responsibility of doing something on my own, and I always enjoyed it as I was good at prioritizing and scheduling my time. Most of the success I tasted at work was primarily because of my ability to manage my time and schedule. All this was going well till I started handling the 99acres tech team. This moved me into a leadership role for the first time and I was responsible for the work of the whole team, and it was a team job rather than an individual job.

Are your strengths becoming your weakness?

During that one year in Noida, I found that I made good friends and had a good relationship with people who were good in their work and finished their tasks timely. On the other hand, I felt anger and frustration whenever someone was unable to complete their work timely. I started treating both sets of people differently. In other words, I enjoyed working with people who shared the same traits of time management and resented working with whom ‘I considered‘ poor performers. At that time, however, I was totally unaware that this was stopping me from achieving more results.

Only in the last one year, when I have taken some projects in the social space, like Waste Management and Anti-Corruption, that I have realized how my biggest strength was stopping me from achieving results. As my work grew from personal to interacting with people and teams, it was obvious (not to me 😉 ) that there would be differences in the way people think and work. Different people will be good at different skills, and for the success of any task or project, it is very important to leverage the complementary skills of people so that the output is bigger than the sum of its parts. Instead, what I was doing is aligning people with same sets of strengths and weaknesses together, making the project difficult and more prone to failure.

When I finally realized that how easily I used to get worried and upset when somebody did not replied in time, or doesn’t do what I expected him/her to do, I made a conscious effort not to let this become a show-stopper for the project, and for me. It was not easy in the beginning, as I was more concerned with somebody not replying in time rather than thinking about the project as a whole. The day I stopped seeing this behavior as ‘it should not be happening‘, life became a lot easier and I realized how this way of being has impacted my previous projects too.

Once I realized this, I started building systems, structures and processes that provide necessary help to the people to empower them so that delays can be avoided, or their impact be cushioned at best. This helped in creating a win-win scenario with the team working together with each member contributing in his/her own way and without any resentment, worries, etc. There is still a long way to go for me in this area, and I think the best learning will come when I encounter such situations in future, and how I choose to react to them.

May 27, 2011