Are you losing your temper at work? - By Sunder Ramachandran

Long and hectic work schedules, lack of sleep, colleagues you dislike, a domineering boss -- these and other factors could lead to one becoming snappy at work. The result -- we slam doors, yell at co-workers, pull faces, snap at our boss, and end up saying things we may regret later.
It takes years to build up a reputation, and only seconds to destroy it. No matter what, you shouldn't snap. Replace negative emotions with self-confidence and manage difficult situations with grace. Here's how you can keep your emotions under control at work and maintain an unblemished reputation.

Identify your hot buttons
Be alert to the types of situations that put you on the burner. Is it waiting in a long queue at the departmental store or being put on hold by the customer service person from your bank? As far as possible, stay away from situations that trigger an impulsive and unpleasant reaction, especially while you are at work or just before you get to the office. You may realise that the real reason you are angry with traffic is because of your inability to start from home on time. Wake up early instead.

Be prepared
Anticipating and planning a positive reaction will help defuse your anger before the situation gets to you. For instance, if you don't like questions interrupting your presentation, plan how you will handle interruptions. You could give out an FAQ leaflet at the start of the presentation or ask the audience to e-mail questions to you for an elaborate response. Create a back-up plan for the possibility of a technical glitch freezing your PowerPoint presentation. For instance, you could have an overhead projector and some transparencies or hand-outs. If it's a performance review meeting you are attending, have some accomplishments ready to offset any negative feedback, so you don't respond in anger. The bottom-line: Be on the offensive.

Clarify before reacting
We sometimes misunderstand the other person and react impulsively. Is your boss asking what time you arrived because he's keeping an eye on you or is it because he was also stuck in a traffic jam? Ask a lot of questions before jumping to conclusions. If need be, repeat what the other person just said. This ensures you understand the comment and gives your colleague or client the opportunity to clarify any miscommunication.

Don't throw tantrums
In the age of team work, a 'head-heavy' attitude will get you labelled as the spoilt brat in the office. Learn to be more accommodating. The 'my way or the highway' approach will not get you any points. If your idea has been overruled by the boss or ridiculed, talk to him and understand his/her perspective rather than losing your temper. If you are dealing with nasty colleagues who keep shooting you down, smile and behave in a cordial manner.

Don't call or e-mail when upset
Wait before writing a strong emotional e-mail or phone call. Never disrespect others, even if you're right. The angry mail you sent three months ago may make a surprise appearance at the performance appraisal meeting. Hold that strong e-mail or letter until the next day and re-read it. Ask someone to proof-read any correspondence you think may be construed as surly, condescending or rude.

Be ready to say "I am sorry'"
If you end up erupting in a meeting, criticise a colleague's work or make ill-timed comments that you regret, how can you bounce back? Apologise immediately to the targeted person and to everyone around. Don't offer a long justification about work pressure or the misunderstanding. Just say "I should not have reacted that way and I am sorry". This will show that you are professional and will reflect positively on your character.

-- The author is a corporate training consultant based in New Delhi.

Delegation - An Art : By Alan Chapman

Delegation is one of the most important management skills. These logical rules and techniques will help you to delegate well. Good delegation saves you time, develops you people, grooms a successor, and motivates. Poor delegation will cause you frustration, demotivates and confuses the other person, and fails to achieve the task or purpose itself. So it's a management skill that's worth improving. Here are the simple steps to follow if you want to get delegation right, with different levels of delegation freedom that you can offer.

This delegation skills guide deals with general delegation principles and process, which is applicable to individuals and teams, or to specially formed groups of people for individual projects (including 'virtual teams').the steps of successful delegation

1 Define the task
Confirm in your own mind that the task is suitable to be delegated. Does it meet the criteria for delegating?

2 Select the individual or team
What are your reasons for delegating to this person or team? What are they going to get out of it? What are you going to get out of it?

3 Assess ability and training needs
Is the other person or mpeople capable of doing the task? Do they understand what needs to be done. If not, you can't delegate.

4 Explain the reasons
You must explain why the job or responsibility is being delegated. And why to that person or people? What is its importance and relevance? Where does it fit in the overall scheme of things?

5 State required results
What must be achieved? Clarify understanding by getting feedback from the other person. How will the task be measured? Make sure they know how you intend to decide that the job is being successfully done.

6 Consider resources required
Discuss and agree what is required to get the job done. Consider people, location, premises, equipment, money, materials, other related activities and services.

7 Agree deadlines
When must the job be finished? Or if an ongoing duty, when are the review dates? When are the reports due? And if the task is complex and has parts or stages, what are the priorities?
At this point you may need to confirm understanding with the other person of the previous points, getting ideas and interpretation. As well as showing you that the job can be done, this helps to reinforce commitment. Methods of checking and controlling must be agreed with the other person. Failing to agree this in advance will cause this monitoring to seem like interference or lack of trust.

8 Support and communicate
Think about who else needs to know what's going on, and inform them. Involve the other person in considering this so they can see beyond the issue at hand. Do not leave the person to inform your own peers of their new responsibility. Warn the person about any awkward matters of politics or protocol. Inform your own boss if the task is important, and of sufficient profile.

9 Feedback on results
It is essential to let the person know how they are doing, and whether they have achieved their aims. If not, you must review with them why things did not go to plan, and deal with the problems. You must absorb the consequences of failure, and pass on the credit for success.

WHY EMPLOYEES LEAVE ORGANIZATIONS?

Every organization normally faces one common problem of high employee turnout ratio. People are leaving the company for better pay , better profile or simply for just one reason - “ pak gaya ”. This article might just throw some light on the matter …………..

Early this year , Arun , an old friend , who is a senior software engineer , got an offer from a prestigious international firm , to work in its India operations , developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer . He had heard a lot about the CEO of this company , a charismatic man often quoted in the business press for his visionary attitude. The salary was great . The company had all the right systems in place , employee friendly human resources policies , a spanking new office , and even a canteen that served superb food. Arun was sent abroad twice for training. “ My learning curve is the sharpest it’s ever been,” he said soon after he had joined. “ It’s a real new high working with such cutting edge technology .”

Last week , less than eight months after he joined , Arun walked out of his job. He has no offer on hand but he only said that he could not take it any more. Nor , apparently , could several other people in his department who have also quit recently. The CEO is distressed about the high employee turnover. He’s distressed over the money he’s spent in training them. He’s distressed because he cannot figure out what happened. Why did this talented employee leave despite a top salary and other perks ? Arun quit for the very same reason that drives many good people away . The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization.

The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called “ First Break All The Rules ” . It came up with this surprising finding : If you are losing good people , look to their immediate supervisor. More than any other single reason , he is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he is the reason why they quit , taking their knowledge , experience and contacts with them. Often , straight to the competition.

“ People leave managers not companies,” write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. “ So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people – in the form of better pay , better perks and better training – when , in the end , turnover is mostly a manager issue.” If you have a turnover problem , look first to your managers. Are they driving people away ? Beyond a point , an employee’s primary need has less to do with money , and more to do with how he is treated and how valued he feels. Much of this depends directly on the immediate manager. And yet, bad bosses seem to happen to good people everywhere. A Fortune Magazine survey some years ago found that nearly 75 per cent of employees have suffered at the hands of difficult superiors. Phew – that is a high percentage for sure.You can leave one job to find – you guessed it , another wolf in a pin stripe suit , in the next one.

Of all the work place stressors , a bad boss is possibly the worst , directly impacting the emotional health and the productivity of employees. HR experts say that of all the abuses , employees find public humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been definitely planted. The second time , that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he starts looking for another job. When people cannot retort openly in anger , they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they have been told to do and no more. By omitting to give their boss crucial information.

The general feeling is : “ If you work for a jerk , you basically want to get him into trouble. You don’t have your heart and soul in the job.” Different managers can stress out employees in different ways – by being too controlling , too suspicious , too pushy , too critical , but they forget that workers are not fixed assets , they are free agents. When this goes on for a little too long, an employee will quit – often over seemingly trivial issues.

It is not the 100 th. blow that knocks a good man down. It’s the 99 that went before. And while it it’s true that people leave jobs for all kinds of reasons – for better opportunities or for circumstantial reasons, many who leave would have stayed – had it not been for this one man constantly telling him , as Arun’s boss did : “ You are dispensable. I can find dozens like you.” While it seems like there are plenty of fish, especially in today’s waters, consider for a moment the cost of losing a talented employee.

There’s the cost of finding a suitable replacement. The cost of training the replacement. The cost of not having someone to do the job in the meantime. The loss of clients and contacts the person had with the industry. The loss of morale in co-workers. The loss of trade secrets this person may now share with others. Plus, of course , the loss of the company’s reputation. Every person who leaves a corporation then becomes its ambassador for better or for worse. When considering all the above implications, we are forced to agree that “ the cost of retention ( of an employee ) is far, far smaller that the cost of replacement .”

We all know of large IT companies that people would love to join and large television companies few want to go near. In both cases , former employees have left to tell their tales. “Any company trying to compete, must figure out a way to engage the mind of every employee ,”. Jack Welch of GE once said.

Much of a company’s value lies “ between the ears of its employees ”. If it’s bleeding talent , it’s bleeding value. Unfortunately , many senior executives, busy traveling the world , signing new deals and developing a vision for the company , have very little idea of what may be going on at home. That deep within an organization , that otherwise does all the right things , one man could be driving its best people away.

Time for introspection ……..Anyone ????

The 10 Biggest Mistakes People make managing Organizational Performance !! - By: Lucy Doss

Mistake #1: rely just on financial statements
Profit and loss, revenue and expenses these are measures of important things to a business. But they are information that is too little and too late. Too little in the sense that other results matter too, such as customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer advocacy. Too late in the sense that by the time you see bad results, the damage is already done. Wouldn't it be better to know that profit was likely to fall before it actually did fall, and in time to prevent it from falling?

Mistake #2: look only at this month, last month, year to date
Most financial performance reports summarise your financial results in four values: 1) actual this month; 2) actual last month; 3) % variance between them; and 4) year to date. Even if you are measuring and monitoring non-financial results, you may still be using this format. It encourages you to react to % variances (differences between this month and last month) which suggest performance has declined such as any % variation greater than 5 or 10 percent (usually arbitrarily set). Do you honestly expect the % variance to always show improvement? And if it doesn't, does that really mean things have gotten bad and you have to fix them? What about the natural and unavoidable variation that affects everything, the fact that no two things are ever exactly alike? Relying on % variations runs a great risk that you are reacting to problems that aren't really there, or not reacting to problems which are really there that you didn't see. Wouldn't you rather have your reports reliably tell you when there really was a problem that needed your attention, instead of wasting your time and effort chasing every single variation?

Mistake #3: set goals without ways to measure and monitor them
Business planning is a process that is well established in most organisations, which means they generally have a set of goals or objectives (sometimes cascaded down through the different management levels of the organisation) . What is interesting though, is that the majority of these goals or objectives are not measured well. Where measures have been nominated for them, they are usually something like this: Implement a customer relationship management system into the organisation by June 2006 (for a goal of improving customer loyalty) This is not a measure at all it is an activity. Measures are ongoing feedback of the degree to which something is happening. If this goal were measured well, the measure would be evidence of how much customer loyalty the organisation had, such as tracking repeat business from customers. How will you know if your goals, the changes you want to make in your organisation, are really happening, and that you are not wasting your valuable effort and money, without real feedback?

Mistake #4: use brainstorming (or other poor methods) to select measures
Brainstorming, looking at available data, or adopting other organisations' measures are many of the reasons why we end up with measures that aren't useful and usable. Brainstorming produces too much information and therefore too many measures, it rarely encourages a strong enough focus on the specific goal to be measured, everyone's understanding of the goal is not sufficiently tested, and the bigger picture is not taken into account (such as unintended consequences, relationships to other objectives/goals) . Looking at available data means that important and valuable new data will never be identified and collected, and organisational improvement is constrained by the knowledge you already have. Adopting other organisations' measures, or industry accepted measures, is like adopting their goals, and ignoring the unique strategic direction that sets your organisation apart from the pack. Wouldn't you rather know that the measures you select are the most useful and feasible evidence of your organisation' s goals?
mistake

Mistake #5: rely on scorecard technology as the performance measure fix
You can (and maybe you did) spend millions of dollars on technology to solve your performance measurement problems. The business intelligence, data mining and 'scorecarding' software available today promises many things like comprehensive business intelligence reporting, award-winning data visualization, and balanced scorecard and scorecarding and an information flow that transcends organizational silos, diverse computing platforms and niche tools .. and delivers access to the insights that drive shareholder value. Wow! But there's a problem lurking in the shadows of these promises. You still need to be able to clearly articulate what you want to know, what you want to measure and what kinds of signals you need those measures to flag for you. The software is amazing at automating the reporting of the measures to you, but it just won't do the thinking about what it should report to you.

Mistake #6: use tables, instead of graphs, to report performance
Tables are a very common way to present performance measures, no doubt in part a legacy from the original financial reports that management accountants provided (and still provide today) to decision makers. They are familiar, but they are ineffective. Tables encourage you to focus on the points of data, which is the same as not seeing the forest for the trees. As a manager, you aren't just managing performance today or this month. You are managing performance over the medium to long term. And the power to do that well comes from focusing on the patterns in your data, not the points of data themselves. Patterns like gradual changes over time, sudden shifts or abrupt changes through time, events that stand apart from the normal pattern of variation in performance. And graphs are the best way to display patterns.


Mistake #7: fail to identify how performance measures relate to one other
A group of decision makers sit around the meeting room table and one by one they go over the performance measure results. They look at the result, decide if it is good or bad, agree on an action to take, then move on to the next measure. They might as well be having a series of independent discussions, one for each measure. Performance measures might track different parts of the organisation, but because organisations are systems made up of lots of different but very inter-related parts, the measures must be inter-related too. One measure cannot be improved without affecting or changing another area of the organisation. Without knowing how measures relate to one another and using this knowledge to interpret measure results, decision makers will fail to find the real, fundamental causes of performance results.


Mistake #8: exclude staff from performance analysis and improvement
One of the main reasons that staff get cynical about collecting performance data is that they never see any value come from that data. Managers more often than not will sit in their meeting rooms and come up with measures they want and then delegate the job of bringing those measures to life to staff. Staff who weren't involved in the discussion to design those measures, weren't able to get a deeper understanding of why those measures matter, what they really mean, how they will be used, weren't able to contribute their knowledge about the best types of data to use or the availability and integrity of the data required. And usually the same staff producing the measures don't ever get to see how the managers use those measures and what decisions come from them. When people aren't part of the design process of measures, they find it near impossible to feel a sense of ownership of the process to bring those measures to life. When people don't get feedback about how the measures are used, they can do little more than believe they wasted their time and energy.


Mistake #9: collect too much useless data, and not enough relevant data
Data collection is certainly a cost. If it isn't consuming the time of people employed to get the work done, then it is some kind of technological system consuming money. And data is also an asset, part of the structural foundation of organisational knowledge. But too many organisations haven't made the link between the knowledge they need to have and the data they actually collect. They collect data because it has always been collected, or because other organisations collect the same data, or because it is easy to collect, of because someone once needed it for a one-off analysis and so they might as well keep collecting it in case it is needed again. They are overloaded with data, they don't have the data they really need and they are exhausted and cannot cope with the idea of collecting any more data. Performance measures that are well designed are an essential part of streamlining the scope of data collected by your organisation, by linking the knowledge your organisation needs with the data it ought to be collecting.
mistake

Mistake #10: use performance measures to reward and punish people
One practice that a lot of organisations are still doing is using performance measures as the basis for rewarding and punishing people. They are failing to support culture of learning by not tolerating mistakes and focusing on failure. It is very rare that a single person can have complete control over any single area of performance. In organisations of more than 5 or 6 people, the results are undeniably a team's product, not an individual's product. When people are judged by performance measures, they will do what they can to reduce the risk to them of embarrassment, missing a promotion, being disciplined or even given the sack. They will modify or distort the data, they will report the measures in a way that shows a more favourable result (yes - you can lie with statistics), they will not learn about what really drives organisational performance and they will not know how to best invest the organisation' s resources to get the best improvements in performance.


Lucy Doss Manager - Training Coordination (Singapore)
Oscar Murphy Life Strategists P Ltd
772, 10th Cross, 10th Main,
Indira Nagar 2nd Stage Bangalore - 560038, India
Phone: 91 80 5116 1534 / 35
Email: omls@oscarmurphy. com
WEB: www.oscarmurphy. com