Lets have a cup of coffee.....worth reading!!!

Lets have a cup of coffee.....worth reading!!!

I am sure this applies to many of us...." A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. 

Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to hot coffee. When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. 

It is, but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. 

 What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other's cups. Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. 

They are just tools to hold Life, but the quality of Life doesn't change. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it." So, don't let the cups drive you... enjoy the coffee instead.

Build the Perfect Management Team

Building an executive team can be a daunting task, but recruiting, hiring and integrating the right people into a business are essential to growth and success. Most of the time, building the team is a strategic process - at other times, luck plays a big role. And just when the answers seem obvious something happens: Someone quits, a new competitor emerges, or the financial landscape changes. The process and adaptation to changes along the way is just as important as putting together the team. The talent leader has certain responsibilities to employees, since the people hired are a reflection of his or her leadership style, personal beliefs, values and organizational goals.

Here are 12 steps to help build the perfect team:

Step 1: Map an action plan.

Spend time planning to avoid wasting time and money in the long run, which will interrupt business operations.

 Step 2: Prepare the organization for prime time.

The most embarrassing and fruitless moments in establishing an organization or in the evolutionary phases of change in an existing organization often are the result of shooting from the hip and hiring familiar employees - perhaps those from sister companies - relatives or, worse, single-discipline focused, "pigeon-holed" individuals.

Step 3: Build organizational capacity.

Then overlay these talents with the technical skills for a specific position. This will make an organization more agile and better-equipped to share resources among departments. Job descriptions will be easily written after the talent manager thinks through the core competencies.

Step 4: Know budget and compensation specifications up-front.

Many executive placements are made via networking. Placing an ad in a trade journal or newspaper may or may not bring what the company needs in a candidate.

Step 5: Identify key management milestones early.

Once core competencies are identified, find the balance between hiring too early or too late. Knowing the milestones the company must meet will be a key factor in determining if putting in place an interim executive or outsourcing the executive's function would be better than hiring a full-time employee.

Step 6: Know it's OK to change your mind during the process.

That's the great news about planning and having core competencies established for a company: They ensure talent managers stay focused and create a framework to easily change courses should new information alter considerations about how the team should be structured.

Step 7: Stop.

Is the organization really ready to begin looking for team members? Let this process take as much time as necessary. Make sure all critical steps have been identified. If it's necessary to retool some aspect of the team-building process, now is the time to do it.

Step 8: Go.

Whatever recruiting strategy used, conducting the search and the interviewing process are the next steps. It may take a while to source candidates and schedule interviews. Be flexible. Use technology where possible - for example, webcams, video conferences and Skype

Step 9: Don't miss out on hiring opportunities.

Despite planning and searching, it's going to be hard to make a decision. Selecting a candidate means a commitment of people, compensation and personal chemistry. Choosing too soon or waiting too long will have a direct impact on the outcome of the search.

Step 10: Put your high performers together.

Don't expect new executives, whether it is one person or 10, to mesh instantly. Recruiting these people was the easy part. Now it's time to make sure they work together, share their talents and complement each other's ideas and experiences.

Step 11: Provide an orientation and training time.

Spend time with new team members, and have an orientation plan ready for them when they arrive. The plan could be as simple as spending time with some of the existing employees, or as extensive as visiting clients, reading briefs and interviewing staff.

Step 12: Remember to take care of yourself.

As the talent leader in charge, it's important to continue to develop yourself. Give a speech at a national or local conference. Participate in an industry council breakfast or lunch. Get involved in local efforts to link industry to education, such as giving a talk to high school seniors at career day.

Building a great team is time-consuming, but the organization payoffs are immeasurable. Following these 12 steps can promote success.

Business Anthropology Fuels Top line Growth

Helping Customers Know What They Want
Don't be intimidated by the term. Anthropologists study the origin, behavior, development, and interactions of people. They gain insight through observation in various physical, social, and cultural contexts. If you apply this skill of unstructured observation in your daily life, you can detect unmet or unarticulated needs in the marketplace, which can be converted into fuel for topline growth.

Spotting an Opportunity
To spot holes in the market, develop a keen eye to observe how consumers behave and what they are experiencing wherever you go. What do they like? What do they hate? You'll see it in their facial expressions and body language, not just their actions and words. What excites them and gets them to reach for their wallets? What situations are met with indifference?

Turning Observation into Action
What could you do with such an observation if you worked for Starbucks? First, you could double-check to see that the goods were being presented in the best possible way, and that their presentation matched the brand. You could visit multiple outlets to see if the problem was specific to one location, or was more widespread.

The Advantages of Business Anthropology
You experience personal growth and acquire a skill that can be applied to any business. Today, when organic growth is hard to come by, organizations appreciate those who can spot new opportunities based on unique insights.
Your experience inspires others. You show your direct reports the benefits of observation, enriching their collective insights and multiplying the likelihood that they'll spot growth opportunities.
You potentially create breakthroughs in value propositions for your company. Your observations and ideas might lead to new products or whole new trajectories for growth. They might even inspire a breakthrough product that changes an entire industry, like the iPod.

7 rules to become a master of interpersonal relationships

                                                     You want to move up the ranks of masterful communication, you have to watch what you say to others. Not just in the showpieces of communication such as a presentation, a memo, or a meeting, but in everyday interaction. Learn these 7 rules and you can quietly and unobtrusively become a master of interpersonal relationships.

1. Be kind. No matter what you say or how you say it, at bottom your communication will always reveal your true thoughts and attitudes.

2. Be aware of your effect on others. We often use language to criticize and attack others. Some people are masters of doing this in disguise; others do it openly.

3. Emphasize the positive. Really masterful communication doesn’t just depend on getting your message across or even clarifying what someone else is trying to say to you. 

4. Don’t assume you’ve been understood. The history of relationships is littered with the history of misunderstood communications. 

5. Know when to shut up. If you’ve ever attended a workplace meeting, you’ll know how hard it is to say nothing. 

6. Don’t interrupt. If you’ve ever eavesdropped on a conversation between two people, you’ll probably have noticed that, instead of there being a progression of ideas building one on top of the other, most people talk over one another. 

7. Don’t gossip. Gossip is a particularly pernicious form of communication. It is idle, often indulged in merely to pass the time, and serves no real purpose other than to make ourselves feel better at the expense of others. 

                                                     Working on improving your communications is a broad-brush activity. You have to change your thoughts, your feelings, and your physical connections. That way you can break down the barriers that get in your way and start building relationships that really work. Communicate with others like rays of sunshine, not poisoned arrows.

Motivating the TEAM...

"People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?"
Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Monk)

In our careers as hoteliers managing a wide range of people, we have all been exposed to people who enjoy being part of the "team" and others who are viewed as or seem to regularly act contrarian. While most of us as managers and supervisors would rather avoid conflict and confrontation, reality has shown us repeatedly that we need the "team" in a business that is open to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

While leaders often may seem inspirational, they often do not have the interest or stamina to be involved in the every day necessity of managing the process of delivering results through other people.

Managers are the ones often responsible for handling, directing, organizing, monitoring and yes, motivating the team. Each of the global leaders in hospitality had a group of managers who assisted them in immense ways to launch the vision and thereby change the industry.

Recognize that money is not the answer to everything.
Provide meaningful work, not errands.
Set and communicate team goals.
Create and use individual scorecards for individual accountability.
Practice Public Praise and Private Criticism.
Consider Merit Increases rather than those based on seniority only.
Coach your team as a strong way to help them reach beyond where they are.
Counseling can be both a verb and a noun - learn to share both!
Commit to a goal of 100% quality - every day!

Bypassing the Obstacles to Change

Olympics-style events can be used to carry out a variety of learning and workforce development activities. Here's an example of how an Innovation Olympics can be used to drive change practices in large organization.To help managers and other support groups (a total of about 85 people) see change as something desirable and possible, the executive team of a large company worked with an outside partner to deliver a Creative Change Course, one part of an Innovation Olympics.In a large hotel ballroom, facilitators created a mini-amusement park. The initial goal was not to provide serious, comprehensive training on change, but to have people get out of the office, team build, have fun and play while still experiencing the important basics of change in a memorable way. The objective was to set the stage for the more extensive change-management work to follow.Before the event started, a trainer/consultant gave a three-hour presentation to a group of 85 on the more detailed aspects of organizational change, including leadership, teamwork, barriers to change, strategies for success and other key topics and how they related directly to the activities they would experience. Each participant received a reference booklet with condensed but important information about the change process and real-world case studies to add further substance and meaning to the training.Organizers put together a network of giant G-gauge electric trains, large, detailed model building, bridges and other structures to create a navigation/obstacle course in the hotel ballroom. Multicolored, carpet-adhesive tape and hundreds of plastic pylons defined the roadways. The course represented a simple but powerful metaphor for an organizational- change process.Each team had six people, including a team leader, who assigned specific tasks for others to do in navigating the course. Three team members were selected to drive a professional model remote-control truck through a winding course. Along the way, they had to knock down scale-model dinosaurs, push aside barriers, break through brick (paper) walls, go over bridges and avoid knocking down pylons placed along the route.The other three team members had to operate motorized toy cranes and run a large-scale train to move resources needed for change, pick up and align robots, move knights and superhero action figures into place to counter villains and other adversaries of change and do other activities symbolically associated with a real-world change.Three teams of six entered the room at one time to participate. While one team ran the course - which averaged about 12 minutes - the other two teams were having fun observing and playfully laughing at the performance of the working team. When each set of three teams first came in the room, a facilitator described how the course related to an organizational change process and then reviewed the scoring method and how to best navigate the course. The team that effectively completed all the tasks and the entire course most accurately in the least amount of time won.After the event, teams were debriefed on the learning experience. The executive team gave out several awards to the winning team, most creative team, worst remote-control truck driver and other worthy or amusing awards.The trainer created a DVD containing the television segment, a three-minute custom slide show and a video version of the event as a giveaway for each person. People went back to the office understanding the core basics of change and were sensitized to their feeling that they were in no way a "dinosaur," "robot" or other adversary of change.

Dedication and Devotion

Dedication & devotion... Both words are indicative of a certain state of mind, a certain inner position you come from. When you act from either of these positions, such action is selfless, is fulfilling in itself irrespective of the short term results it may produce. Your life finds its meaning in what you dedicate or devote yourself to.

But then where is the difference?

Consider a doctor going to a temple, to offer his services in a free medical camp being conducted there. His devotion to the Lord, takes him to the temple. His dedication to his profession determines the degree to which he stretches himself when caring for his patients. He is devoted to the Lord, dedicated to his profession.

You are dedicated to a purpose. Mother Tersa dedicated her life to care for the dying. She was a devout christian.

You stand before the Almighty in devotion. Meera lived her life in devotion to Krishna.

Devotion has a religious connotatio n.

Beyond a point it is semantics. word is just a pointer.. a sign-post.. you can use it to give direction to your thought. How far u think in that direction, determines the conclusions you come to. Happy thinking !