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THE TRIBUNE Jobs&Careers

Feedback, feedback, feedback:

Others have the best view of
you, so be humble and seek
feedback on everything you
do. There is no better way to
grow. Spend more time listening and understanding
than talking. If you are listening 90 per cent of the time
to the person in question,
that means you are left with
10 per cent of the time to talk.

from it. Set realistic goals

and work toward them a step
at a time. Dont forget to
establish quality of life metrics for yourself and assess
your well-being. Your mental
and physical health has to be
on the top of your priority
list. You are the best judge of
the rest, travel, hobbies outside work and sleep you
require for your well-being.
Be adaptable: The more flexible you become, the more
you grow. Also, the more you
listen to others and accept
their opinions as well, the
more you develop your ideasand yourself. In the world of
ideas, two and two usually
make far more than four. On
your own, you are a meager
one. Make the most of the
opportunity at hand. We need
to understand that a new
door can also lead to better
prospects. Sometimes a challenge is all you need to
understand your mettle.

THINKSTOCK

At some point in life, most

likely during our career, we
all come to realise that we
have been making use of
less and less of what we had
learnt in college and are now
more open to develop new
skills that are vital to our
success. Here are a few soft
skills that we pick up after
our college life, which stay
with us through our career
and beyond.

Find a mentor advisor: Engage

someone you can trust to
help you understand opportunities and growth paths for
yourself. Understand the culture of the organisation,
ensure your fit with it and
plan how you will reinforce it.

CHANDIGARH | WEDNESDAY | 14 OCTOBER 2015

Work basics they didnt

teach you in college

ABHIJIT NIMGAONKAR

Set and honour boundaries: In

this manner, you are responsible for your actions and
decisions. As and when you
stick to your boundaries, you
become a responsible and
reliable go-to person. You
cant go after everything, so
identify your strengths,
weaknesses and passions to
decide what is important for
you. Then prioritise and put
your heart and soul into
those areas. This way, you
will deliver value the way its
most impactful to others and
to you. If you go for every
opportunity, you end up chasing everyone elses dreams
but your own.

| Worklife

Spend 90 per cent of that 10

per cent asking questions
and that will give you much
insight and open up a world
of awareness for you.

winner. Try to develop the

strength to get up every time
you fall. Once you become an
expert in that area, you will be
an inch closer to success.

You are answerable for your

actions and decisions and need
to own them: Take pride in
your work, think outside the
box, do the work well and
learn from mistakes. The
consequences of every action
and decision are your responsibility and the sooner we
understand that, the more
pride we can take in our ownership and individuality.

Always to try to surprise your manager-in a good way: Go beyond

what was asked for, bring
your own ideas into the mix
and ensure that the finished
product will delight by checking along the way. Above all,
do very high-quality work,
which makes the managers
job far easier and prepares
you for the next level.
Remember, you need to make
the most of their experience
and learn from their advice.
You need to schedule one-onone time with them to ensure
they are in the know of your
progress and that you are
moving in the right direction.

Its okay to fail: Its okay to be

lost and miserable sometimes
as long as you have the inner
strength to grow out of the
phase. If you learn from every
wrong decision, you emerge a

Be comfortable in your skin:

Understand your limits. You
dont need to venture out of
your comfort zone at every
opportunity and make yourself miserable. As long as
you push yourself as per
your strengths, its okay.
On the other hand, also
identify areas where you
want to grow and commit to
tasks that challenge you,
make you learn and thereby
grow. Having said that, your
focus needs to be on your
strengths and developing
an area of expertise that
excites you. Go for it.
Recognise good in others: As
you move out of college, you
gradually learn to recognise
minor misunderstandings for
what they are, and begin to
take notice of the good in oth-

ers and their intentions. The

ability to sincerely express
appreciation helps build and
mend relationships, personal
or professional. In most
organisations, its the power
of the team that creates success for everyone, so you
dont have to win at someone
elses cost. In the process,
you grow to become someone
on whom people can depend.
Focus on the bigger picture,
perform to the best of your
ability, be accountable, honor
commitments and meet
deadlines.
Growth takes time: Adjust your
perspective to a longer time
horizon. If the process was
faster, it wouldnt have
helped us develop. There are
no shortcuts to wisdom.
Enjoy the process and learn

Make your own financial decisions: Be responsible for

your finances. College doesnt teach this life skill.
Moreover, it isnt taught in
traditional education that
its okay to earn money
through freelancing or any
unconventional
career
options. You need to think
beyond the rat race of 9-to-5
jobs as a mentally and
financially
independent
individual.
Investing in learning and education never fails: Remember
how Steve Jobs accidentally
attending courses on calligraphy
contributed
to
Apples famous friendly
fonts. You never stop learning or making use of the
cumulative awareness of
subjects and skills.

Widespread changes in the

organisational environment
have led to fundamental
changes in how work gets
done. Team members are
highly interdependent on
each other to get the work
done. Thus, a managers
task has become even more
difficult with these changes
and he/ she gets pushed
from both the sides.
To simplify your work life,
these are the nine things you
can do as a manager to drive
high performance in your
team especially if are working in a new age organisation
or if your sector is getting
disrupted by new players.

A motivating managers dossier

from laying down their roles
and responsibilities, managers need to help them by
clearly specifying how their
role makes a broader contribution and how they specifically can contribute to the
company growth. This will
keep your team members
charged up and as result,
they would remain in high
performance league.

Facilitate relationships
with colleagues and
stakeholders

Provide fair and precise

informal feedback

Fair and precise informal

feedback from you can be
the most effective strategy for driving high performance at work. In a more interconnected,
fast-changing
work environment, employees often feel they dont get
fair and accurate feedback on
their performance and that
its given at the wrong time.
You as a manager must
ensure fairness and accuracy
of informal feedback by
obtaining it from a knowledgeable sources, providing
it at the right time, and verifying it reflects an individuals contributions rather
than the team output.

Emphasise employee
strengths

2
CUBICLE TRENDS

By focusing on employee strengths, you are

reinforcing
performance-enhancing behaviour
and helping your team mem-

bers in identifying where to

contribute to the enterprise.
Employee engagement and
performance effort will fall
substantially, if you focus
excessively on performance
weaknesses without targeted
feedback for improvement.

Clarify performance
expectations

As a manager you
should strive to provide
specific, result-oriented
clarification on performance
expectations; by doing so,
you will improve the performance of your team members. Clarity on performance
standards what success
looks like is much more
important than precisely
defined company wide goals
or annual plans. Your team
member wants to know what
he/she needs to do to make
the company grow?

LinkedIn for job searches;

Facebook defines reputation: Report
Both employees and
recruiters
are
going
mobile and using social
media for professional
purposes, with LinkedIn
emerging the most popular platform for job searches and Facebook being
used for personal branding, says a report.
According to Adeccos
2015 Work Trends Study,

Provide feedback on skill

sets needed for future

Given the increasing

pace of change in the
new work environment, employees contributions to the organisation
can change dramatically
from year to year. Focusing
reviews on what needs to be
done versus what has been
done is of more benefit to
employees and helps them
in being long-term contributors. Providing feedback
on both past laurels and
future skill needs can give
your organisation multifold returns in future.

Get wider feedback on

employee performance

To accurately gauge
employee contribution
in an environment
where employees are coordinating with 1020 other

employees daily, managers

need to get wider feedback
from other employees.
However, you should elicit
feedback only from the people who understand the
employees work. You can
gather peer feedback from
employees with accurate
and relevant knowledge of
their colleagues work. A
word of caution, be cognizant of the fact that
employees from the same
team should not be ideally
considered for giving feedback on each other, unless
you are planning to do a
360-degree review.

Tell them how they are

making a difference
to the company

Employees find it difficult to navigate the

broader responsibilities
of the organisation. Apart

Going the online way

social media can be used
for professional purposes
and its effectiveness can
be utilised in matching
job seekers with open
positions. Among social
networks,
LinkedIn
remains the most popular
platform for professional
purposes
for
both
recruiters (61 per cent)

and job seekers (34 per

cent), whereas Facebook is
the go-to network for all
social activities, including
personal branding.
While recruiters already
stated in the Global Social
Recruiting Study, 2014 that
they have rejected candidates based on their social
profiles, now job seekers

also make it a point to

research the company they
are applying to, the report
said.
Noting that job seekers
are more mobile than
recruiters, it said a total of
65 per cent of job seekers
frequently or sometimes
use a mobile device for
online job searches, where-

As a manager help the

employees to navigate
relationships by facilitating key connections and
allowing them to use those
connections to direct and
support their work.

Encourage external
network building

In the new work environment, employees

performance is more
than ever affected not just
by people in the organization but also people outside the organisation. In
fact, employees extended
external networks (outside
their immediate team)
impact employee performance more than coworkers
in their business unit. As a
manager,
help
your
employees in growing
their network.

Be genuinely committed to
employee development

The simple presence or

absence of a development plan has little

as among recruiters, this

figure drops to 41 per cent
when searching for candidates or highlighting open
positions. Going forward,
flexibility in an individuals place of work will
become key to new styles
of work in the future, it
added. New trends are
emerging, such as smartworking, which will affect
the work environments of
companies and will require
new thinking on the tradi-

CREATIVE CONCERNS

Nurture
innovation
Innovation factory has three pillars. The first being
holistic knowledge of the market for your product and
services, thats knowing what sells, why and when?
What more do your customers want and what features
would attract them to make the buying decision. What
are things your non-customers are missing in your product and it is deterring them from buying your product.
The second pillar is your ability to select from many
creative ideas, zeroing down on products or services
that would have the highest likelihood of success in
the marketplace. The third pillar is taking the raw
idea and nurturing it into a highly successful product
in the marketplace. These are some of the steps,
which will help you in being adept at this process.

Know thy market

Inability to understand your surrounding can be fatal for
business; you need to know what were your customers
preferences in the past, which new products have succeeded, what do the customers buy today and what are
the new things that they are looking for and are ready to
pay for? You can gather this data by talking to your strategy team or spending time with your customers.

Understand creativity
While raw ideas are the starting point for innovation,
these ideas may not come from you only. Creativity is not
akin to logical thinking and most
of the times it does not follow
logical reasoning. The golden
apostle of being creative is to
avoid using existing concepts in
the same form; you have to look
at the solution differently. Creativity requires freedom and
openness coupled with
non-judgmental environment.

Managing creative
people
Creative people

The writer is Head of India CEC's and

Office Managing Principal, ZS

SMART STRATEGY: 9 THINGS THAT GREAT MANAGERS DO TO DRIVE HIGH PERFORMANCE

JAPPREET SETHI

CAREER SWEETENER

impact on employee performance contribution. But

managers who create quality plans that convince
employees of the organisations commitment to them
and their development can
improve enterprise contribution a great deal through
signaling a sincere, credible, and realistic commitment to the employee.
Employees perceive insincerity on behalf of their managers when development
planning does not stem from
a credible commitment to
their professional growth
and can disengage as a
result. In short, no plan may
be a better option than a
poorly designed, insincere
plan. Development plans
primarily impact performance contribution through
building employee engagementbut only when the
plans signal credible commitment. Credible commitments occur when the
organisation makes a series
of costly investments to
demonstrate it is sincerely
committed to employees,
will follow through on its
intentions, and, in short,
means business. Development plans achieve these
goals
when
managers
expend the effort to customise plans to individual
employee needs and provide
the necessary resources and
opportunities to support the
plans success.

are gifted and at times you would need to buffer and protect them from the routine organisational processes and
procedures. Creative people need time to muse, unfettered by the process expectations of other stakeholders.
In order to synthesize ideas, creative people have to
apportion a part of their time to study issues in depth,
bounce off their thoughts with others, and look for parallels in other ecosystems. Naturally creative people are
wired to think in contrasts when they are confronted
with a problem. Being detail-oriented or sticking to the
schedules is not something that most creative people
enjoy; they occasionally miss deadlines as they are in
the flow. Understating them will help you in managing
them better.

Selecting the idea

Ideation stage of creativity is heavily dependent on freedom, which has to be provided early on in the process,
but structure becomes a dire need during the next phase
of productisation. In this phase it is best to follow a scientific process of design thinking in managing the creative output. Once the team comes with the best notion
of what to do, it must pass all logical tests and criticism
as any other alternative is treated to. You dont need to
lower the bar for testing a creative idea's mettle. The difference is in how the ideas have originated.

Dealing with naysayers

Early on in the process of turning ideas into products,
resources are always a constraint. Companies are complex mazes with many detours, dead ends, short cuts
and options. Mostly in organisations, the optimum path
to get to your desired output is never linear. The key to
successfully maneuvering an innovation through complex corporate system is to find your way through the
complex matrix in the shortest possible time while making the least noise. Remember innovative ideas are closer to hand than you; all you need to do is to suspend
judgment and go with the flow. Happy Innovation!
Career Tips from www.careersweetener.com.
Follow on twitter @CareerSweetener

CAREERCATURE
SANDEEP JOSHI

The writer is an HR & Strategy

consultant and writes
www.humanresourcesblog.in

tional relationship between

employer and employee,
the report said.
Over 31,000 job seekers
and more than 4,100
recruiters from 26 countries took part in Adeccos
survey, sharing their opinions and experiences on
the use of social media for
recruitment and job search
practices. The study was
developed in partnership
with the Universit Cattolica in Milan, Italy. PTI

Sir, I think we should now have a face-to-face interaction to decide

the future course of action.