My learning’s — part II
4 min readJan 22, 2019
- Every month I have a team member come to me and say they want to take up a new role/challenge as they are bored of their current role or they think they have nothing new to learn. I remember going through the same thoughts few years back. Having done BD almost all my working life, I was keen to explore a product management role, a cool thing to do at that time. Thankfully the plan did not materialize. I would have never been as good a PM as I am on the business side of things. I now tell this story to my team members but with low success rate. Imagine in football, a striker coming up to the coach and saying he/she is bored of scoring goals and now wants to become a defender. It sounds stupid. And this is exactly what I tell my team. Recently I read a chapter by Rolf Dobelli on Circle of Competence — a term that describes the above point. It advocates knowing your circle of competence and staying within it. The size of the circle is not important but the boundaries are. As Tom Watson, the founder of IBM says, “I am smart in spots and stay around those spots”. Rolf explains that the temptation to step outside our expertise or broaden our skills is high when we are successful in our current role. Resist it. Skills are domain specific and not transferable. So keep working hard and become the best in what you are good at.
- Conflicts — on a daily basis we see teams and individuals getting into conflicts or disagreements. I go through them as well. I also often see logic taking a back seat when this happens. People tend to like their ideas more, specially when other folks disagree. I used to get into heated debates but realized there is no winning when this happens. I now follow a different strategy. If I disagree or feel the need to call out something or someone, I sleep on it first. If I feel as strongly about it the next day then I put forward my points. 99% of the time, I end up realizing that the conflict is not worth it and move on. The times when I feel differently, the discussion is healthier as the other person has slept on it as well.
Teams/businesses also end up trying to solve a conflict with another conflict. Imagine borrowing a book from a library and paying a late fee because you returned the book 4 days late. If the fee is high, the next time you think twice about borrowing a book from that library — the opposite of what a library should do. Similarly if a merchant/partner is not happy, as a business we try to impose fines, penalties, notice periods. If I am a disgruntled partner then all of this will only bug me more. We need to work to win the partners back and not penalize them because they currently don’t gain from what we are offering. I find performance improvement programs in many companies comparable. If an employee is not motivated or performing well, then a plan that adds more pressure with increased expectations is not going to help. - Meetings with important stakeholders — 90% of the meetings we do are not helpful. How many times have we heard or thought this. While I don’t have a solution, I have tried a few things that make them more productive. During my entrepreneurial days board meetings were big (and scary!). We had great board members from some of the biggest funds in the world. We used to paint the best picture we could about the company and our numbers. What an absolute waste of everyone’s time. Imagine having 5–6 super smart people in a room and you waste all the time on things that are going great (and some vanity metrics). I now e-mail a deck/bullets 2 days before an important meeting — covering all the good points and specially highlighting all the things that are not working out or not going as per plan. I urge the stakeholders to think about possible solutions/reasons before coming for the meetings. Now we spend the time discussing solutions/problems and the takeaways are much more solid and productive. This is specially important for founders of early stage companies. Also encourage your teams to put forward their ideas if they disagree. A room full of people who speak the same language is no good.
