Leadership | Esha Abrol's Blog

Just finished reading The One-Minute Entrepreneur. Good book – offers logical counseling in an interesting format wherein guidance for entrepreneurs/ intrapreneurs is shared in the format of a story. For this post, I wanted to hone in on a point covered in the book that’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks: leading people and the importance of coaching.

The authors, Blanchard, Hutson, Willis, provide the following anecdote in a chapter on performance management:
They talk about DW40’s CEO, Gary Ridge’s stance on leading people. At DW40, Gary employs a “don’t mark my paper, help me get an A” approach. Actions speak louder than words. This wasn’t something he just said. He was so insistent on this performance management system, that he has terminated managers of poor performers rather than the poor performers.

Dilatory behavior, mediocre quality work, minimal contributions are not a result of stupidity or laziness. These symptoms can be attributed to a root cause, poor team leadership.

A leader’s responsibility is to provide teammates support through good coaching, maximizing their ability to succeed. A question raised in the book: What if you work closely with an employee and they still don’t deserve an A? It’s possible that the job is just not for them – it doesn’t allow them to excel in the areas they are strong in. In this case, coaching is best to be shifted towards career development counseling, directing them in the right area for them.

The day I hired a group of talent for my company, I very quickly learned that my responsibility grew threefold. Not only was I responsible for the business (which involved me wearing multiple hats), but also managing my team’s productivity, and providing a clear vision though leadership.

I’ve worked with more than ten different employers, have asked for counseling from mentors, lead my own teams, and have given back though coaching aspiring entrepreneurs. Looking back, the strongest leaders I’ve worked with, share some common practices. I’ve grouped some like-practices/qualities I find important and listed them below (in no particular order):

1) Understand the Benefits of Good Coaching: Not only was when employees are off-base with their work, but providing employees with regular feedback on how they are doing in achieving their goals and the company’s objective, recognizing good intentions, offering development opportunities, both personal and career-wise contributes to engagement levels and helps build relationships. Coaching sessions can allow the leader to better understand their employees’ strengths to better leverage them in the team and ensure they are engaged and passionate about their role

2) OK with showing some humility: Demonstrating confidence, genuineness, and an approachable demeanor to connect with employees, creating a stronger team environment. If you’re the type that always needs to be right, consider opening-up to new perspectives and showing more openness towards new ideas by team members to create an environment that encourages creativity and innovation. You don’t even have to like the ideas, but appreciation for your teammates sharing through acknowledging the idea by taking note of it can create a very positive culture shift

3) Committed: Developing a set of goals and a plan for the year aren’t enough. Often, goals are jotted down in December while developing a plan for the next year, then, never looked at again. Rather, structuring all tasks around the end goal is a way to ensure high productivity. Focus and dedication are key, but also allowing some leeway can generate new ideas and improvements. Demonstrating enthusiasm and recognizing actions that work towards achieving strategic objectives ensure everyone has the ultimate goal in mind and continues to work towards it as a unit

4) Open-Minded: Although creative abrasion and different opinions/areas of expertise are necessary for innovation and continuous improvement, openness to new ideas and perspectives is essential in empowering everyone on the team to be a leader, to love what they do, encourage them to take initiatives, offer opinions, and work together to improve what they love, THEIR company

5) Strong Communication skills: This skill is an obvious one that never goes out of style. Being mindful of the words used to deliver a clear message in an open, honest, direct, and appropriate manner is a key quality. Imagine someone you know who is both, successful and well-respected. Odds are their communications skills are robust

Three words: Strat. E. Gy. Or lack of it.

RIM is choking on a piece of rotten fruit, it has been for a while — why are they only seeking medical attention now? RIM needs CPR, now. No miracles needed, just a lot of focus and strong leadership can bring it back to life.

Yes, I DO think Research in Motion’s business is fixable.

As I work on finalizing a business plan for a new business to be fully launched in early 2012, I am relieved I’m almost done with this dreadful phase of developing a start-up. Putting together a good business plan is always painful because of the countless hours of work and re-work required. However, after discussing sections of the document with my business partner last week, of course, we were reminded of the importance of this thing. It forced us to look into areas we didn’t think of before, to answer questions that we didn’t ask ourselves before. And, this is exactly what a strategic business plan should do, if done properly.

Addressing areas of the business that were not previously looked at or answering questions that were never asked should be approached with strategy, supported with clear business objectives. Now, I think most would agree – this all sounds logical, simple and straight-forward, but business decisions are often made without any strategic- thinking.

Without strategy, business operations can quickly become tactical and meaningless. Multiple activities being performed, just for the sake of getting something done because you have realized action needs to be taken. That can work for a while. After sometime, this approach can lead to a domino effect — one, tactical quick-fix will eventually lead to another, and so on. Although everyone is busy, productivity sinks. Business operators become caught-up in getting things done without stepping back for a minute to ask, WHY. We forget to evaluate the impact of business activities being performed and exploring better of doing things. There may be approaches out there now that are more cost-effective, efficient, or just cooler that can provide a competitive edge.

In my opinion (there are currently a lot of these on RIM), I do think RIM’s business is fixable. But they need to go back to the original business plan template and write-up a plan.

Leadership has moved at pace which can be called reactive, or worse. In the competitive mobile communications space, the first-mover advantage can be vital, especially when your competitors are Apple and Google. Blackberry’s R&D seems to be based on Apple’s or Google’s actions with iPhones or the Android system.

To get the obvious out of the way: Yes, support for innovation is weaker in Canada, than in the U.S., but Canada does have a large pool of talent. So I do think RIM is comparable to Apple and Google.

For example, we only heard about the Playbook, which was then called the BlackPad, after the first iPad was already launched. Was it smart business to take-on the heavy costs that would eat-up cashflow to develop a product so quickly even though the competitor had already had the chance to develop, launch, test, and learn from their mistakes?

The problem is, I don’t think they can honestly answer this question even now.

The company’s failure to understand their competitive edge and to fully capitalize on it has been the ultimate cause of their current position. Eventually, their reactive, tactical approach was bound to catch-up to them. With financial analysts and investors’ reduced confidence, a disoriented team culture (with the recent news of laying-off 2,000, or 11% of their workforce), tough critics, and even tougher competition, RIM’s got a bit of work to do.

Esha Abrol's Blog

Tag Archives: Leadership

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