Tej Kohli Personal Blog

Yesterday i came across an interesting article by By Michael J Beck. It is so well written that I can’t hold myself from putting it on Tej Kohli personal blog.

ATTITUDE can change your reality

I’ve observed that negative people often adopt a defeatist mindset, taking on the role of a victim, while positive people often adopt a solution-oriented mindset and set about creating their own opportunities. Consequently, I’ve come to understand that having a positive attitude indeed makes a significant difference not only in a person’s level of success, but also in their enjoyment of their life. It even determines whether they succeed at all.

But here’s the unusual thing… NO ONE VIEWS HIMSELF OR HERSELF AS A NEGATIVE PERSON!

People who are negative view themselves as “realistic”. (Wait a minute… isn’t “reality” a matter of perspective?) So the challenge is to determine whether you’re a “negative” person.

Here are some guidelines:

• If you feel that your course in life and business is determined by others, then you need to adjust your attitude so you can shift your reality.

• If you feel that the cards are often stacked against you, then you need to adjust your attitude so you can change your reality.

• If you feel that your company, manager, agents, and/or clients don’t support you, then you need to adjust your attitude so you can change your reality.

We each have the ability and power to literally change our reality.

How does one turn a negative attitude into a positive one? The same way someone with a positive attitude maintains it. You need to eliminate the negative inputs, influences, and factors in your life and introduce positive ones. We’re bombarded with messages throughout the day and night. Some of them are good and some of them are just plain bad for you. We get “messages” from family, friends, coworkers, radio, newspaper, TV, music, the internet, billboards, books, magazines, and any number of other sources. If YOU don’t decide what goes into your head, then someone else will. You need to take control of what you feed your mind.

Here are some tips on how to adjust and maintain your attitude:

Eliminate the Negatives

• Stop reading the newspaper

• Stop watching TV news

• Stop seeking the negative on the internet

• Stop hanging around negative people

Introduce Positives

• Start hanging around positive people

• Start reading motivational or inspirational books - biographies, personal growth, success

principles, etc.

• Start listening to CD’s - motivational, personal growth, uplifting music, etc.

Does attitude really count? Can attitude really change your reality? I guess it all depends on your perspective…

Do you get a feeling that you have anger-management problems? Tej Kohli blog will help you to gauge the altitude of your anger.

Try this test to find out how severe your anger problem is.

Answer the following questions with a YES or NO.

• I often feel tense
• I have a hard time saying what is on my mind
• When I am upset, I try to forget it by watching TV or reading a book
• I smoke to help calm myself down
• I have trouble sleeping
• I often feel misunderstood or ignored
• People say I curse too much
• I have a tendency to hurt my loved ones and friends when I am angry.

If you answer positively to 0-3 question, you could benefit from relaxation. If there are 3 to 5 yes answers, you are moderate and need to learn more about anger management. If there are more than 6 yes answers, you have an anger problem and need to take steps to manage it properly.

Keep in mind that the only way you can succeed in managing your anger is to learn anger management techniques. If you fail to use these techniques in your everyday life, there will likely be consequences, such as the loss of a loved one or friend or even the loss of your job. Your failure will not be a reflection of the techniques suggested, but rather a reflection of your unwillingness to put them into action. Real change cannot take place without your cooperation. Regardless of how you have reached this stage, don’t abuse a sincere opportunity to change your life for the better.

Slow, deliberate and controlled deep breathing exercises will help you focus on your breathing and not on the problem at hand. Shoulder rolls backward and forward can also help to ease your tension. These relaxation techniques can help you to relax, and will have a positive side effect to stop you from focusing on being angry. They will provide you the time you need to think about the situation that has upset you and help you come up with appropriate solutions to the problems you are facing.

Tej Kohli personal blog adds another feather of information that would help prospective Mangers to restructure their strategies to mange people more efficiently.Tej Kohli, a businesman himself reveals the secret of people management.

Your business school might have taught you ‘what is people management?’ But what they miss largely upon is HOW of people management. Once you step into industry, you will realize there is lot more beyond the bookish concepts. Managing people is an art that requires practical know-how outside the unyielding conceptual realms.
Keeping in mind the current market scenario, where companies are vying with each other to seize the best human resources, it is imperative for the people’s manager to think outside the theoretical concepts and devise a new plan of action for bringing and retaining talent.
Moreover, as the demand graph is shooting upwards, the corresponding talent supply is falling short. So, its time for the Managers to implement lessons learnt from real life in order to avoid mistakes that others made.
Maslow’s need hierarchy set straight some of the indispensable needs that facilitate employee retention, apart from monetary benefits like:

1. Need of recognition
2. Need of importance.

So, what is the basic mantra to retain your employees and more importantly how to go about it? I’m sure your business schools must have overlooked this nitty-gritty of successful employee retention. Ponder the following points:

• Praise your employees, nothing on earth could do better than a note of appreciation. Word of mouth encourages people to achieve goals and retaining them.
• Involve people at the conceptualization stages and get them to support key initiatives.
• Make your employees feel important. Thus will inculcate loyalty in them.
• Help you employees achieve their goals in order to achieve the goals of your organization.
• Listen what your employees have to say, pay heed to their grievances, if any and be open to any new ideas they suggest.

However, these lessons one learn through life. But it’s high time for business schools to dump obsolete theoretical guidelines and adopt a pragmatic way of dealing with people.

Tej Kohli shares an interesting questionnaire on people management:

Take the following questionnaire and choose your answer from true, not true or partly true.

1. The human resources department is represented in srategy-building sessions of top management.
2. The performance of the human resources department and of the organisation are linked.
3. In your company, all human resources issues are closely linked to every other business process.
4. Line managers are recruited along with trained specialists in the human resources department.
5. The human resources department links appraisal and compensation to corporate objectives.
6. The human resources department has knowledge of behavioural sciences and industrial psychology.

To manage people better, the following processes should be top priority for the managers:

Communication

Performance Management

Training and Development

Competency Development

Compensation

Career Development

Participatory Culture

Create the right culture

Leading the people involved in corporate product creation can be extraordinarily difficult. It can also prove extremely rewarding. The people who gravitate toward innovation activities tend to be very smart, highly creative, and more motivated by recognition and the freedom to create than by the money they make. To lead and inspire such a workforce, senior management must find a delicate balance between seemingly contradictory forces: top-down direction versus individual empowerment; experienced judgement versus creative license; pressure to perform to expectation versus willingness to challenge convention; and by-the-book execution versus pragmatic adaptation. Achieving the right balance among such forces can give a company a true competitive advantage.

Allow freedom in context

Intelligent, self-motivated people generally desire—and deserve considerable freedom to deliver their best work. This proves particularly true for the creative individuals drawn to research. 3M pioneered an explicit policy that allows its staff members to devote up to 15 percent of their time to discretionary projects of their own choosing.

The policy encourages freedom, but puts it in context: 85 percent of a person’s time will be explicitly aligned with corporate objectives, underscoring the company’s understanding of the need to find the appropriate balance between creative freedom and project discipline.

Senior management should make sure that researchers and product creation staff participate in activities that connect them to the real world to help balance their instinctual aspiration for complete creative freedom and to ensure that their creativity is channeled into productive efforts. To stay grounded, researchers should regularly spend time on the more pragmatic, application activities of a product creation team.

Many people believe that to be a good manager you have to give orders to the people below you. They are wrong. You do not have to give orders. In fact, you should not give orders.

Don’t give orders

When you give orders, you tell someone to do something. “Put that file on my desk”, is an order. So is, “put Roger on the late shift”. When you give an order, you do not allow the other person any latitude to think about what to do or how to do it. All they can do to satisfy your order is exactly what you ordered. There are two reasons why this is bad. First, you do not allow the person to figure out the best way to do the task. Second, you do not let them learn.Sometimes it is appropriate to give orders. In the military, there are times when a leader has to give orders.

When you tell a squad to “charge that hill” you don’t want them to think about it. You just want it done. However, even in the military, leaders don’t give orders unless they have to. Instead of giving orders and telling someone what to do, good managers give instructions. Instead of telling them what to do, you tell them what you want done.

Give instructions instead

When you tell an employee what you want done, instead of giving an order, you give them the freedom to come up with their best way of getting that task done. It may not always be the best way, and you may have to do some monitoring and guiding, but there is also the chance that they will come up with something better than what you planned.

When an employee is given an instruction instead of an order, they have to think. They can’t just do what they were told and say they were following orders. They have to think of ways to get the job done. They have to decide which is the best way. They have to invest a little of themselves in the solution.

Also, when you give an employee an instruction, instead of an order, and let them decide for themselves the best way to accomplish the task, you are more likely to get their buy-in and support. If they have made the decision about the best way to accomplish the task they are more likely to believe it is correct and valuable. They will defend it against others who question it.

Be clear

Orders are generally very clear. “Get the report to me by Thursday morning”, does not leave much room for interpretation. So when you give instructions, instead of orders, you need to be as clear about what results you expect.

Instead of saying, “I’d like you to review the past month’s data and get back to me on it”, be more precise. For example, you could say, “Please review the past month’s data. By Monday morning, I expect your recommendation of the best course and a couple of alternatives for ways to close more sales.” Or you could say, “By our meeting on Friday, I want you to have consolidated all the department’s projects into a single master schedule. I want you to tell me where we are over committed and where we have excess capacity.”

When you give instructions instead of orders there is a tendency to be less clear about the expected outcome. A good manager makes instructions clear.