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Conversations To Foster Greater Understanding
Recently this post by an organizational psychologist at Wharton, Adam Grant, went viral on LinkedIn. He said: The clearest sign of intellectual chemistry isn’t agreeing with someone. It’s enjoying your disagreements with them. Harmony is the pleasing arrangement of different tones, voices, or instruments, not the combination of identical sounds. Creative tension makes beautiful music. I commented there, which became most…
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From Jerk to Genuine: How These High Performers Built Trust With Their Teams
Result and efficiency-driven high-performing individuals often have a blindspot when relating to others. It can create unintended harm to team morale and trust. Others tolerate such “jerk” behavior as subject matter expertise, and “get things done” competencies are valued more. It is not that they don’t get any feedback to correct their behavior, but rather the opposite. They don’t get…
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Craft Your Vision Even When You Are Not A “Visionary”
As we grow in leadership roles, having a vision and communicating that to our teams becomes essential. Senior leaders often bring it to me as their challenge. Even though they already have a track record of delivering results, the executive level expects leaders to inspire through vision and alignment. Unfortunately, the new execs sometimes feel stuck on how else they…
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Life Lessons From Adopting A Pet
A few months after the pandemic started, we decided to get a kitten. Even though my daughter had been asking about it for a while, I was not looking forward to the additional responsibility. I was afraid of the mess the cat would create around the house. And it did. You can imagine the stress and the fights we had…
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How To Think Of Your Career Growth, Agile or Waterfall?
Anyone familiar with software development knows agile is the way to go when developing new software or a product. But when it comes to a career, what does it mean? I didn’t think about it until that moment when I was in the middle of a coaching session with a senior technology leader of a Fortune 500 company. Let’s call…
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Caterpillars to Butterflies : Human Maturity Stages
When I ask “What do YOU want” people sometimes get confused. Common responses are: “Wouldn’t that be selfish”? “I always think about others, I want others to be happy; am I not supposed to do that way”? Awareness of renowned development psychologist Robert Kegan’s Human Maturity Stages may help understand the dilemma. Kegan said humans go through several major stages of…
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You Were Asked To Be More Strategic, Now What?
Engineering and STEM Leaders often receive this feedback, “you need to be more strategic,” when they are passed up for a promotion. Yet, they have minimal idea of what that would look like for their context. I shed some light on what it means to be strategic and improve our strategic thinking while staying true to our authentic selves. What…
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“Never Looked Back” – Is a Myth
Recently I was sharing the story of my career change and someone commented, “…and you never looked back”! I was caught by surprise. The fact is, I did look back, many times. The past 10 years of my new career was anything but easy and many times I doubted and regretted my original decision. That comment invoked a deeper insight…
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Feeling – A Vital Missing Part from the Thinker’s Head
“What do you feel now?” I ask my client Tom in the middle of our session. “I think it is, …”, he replies. “What do you feel”, I ask persistently. “Well, I think it could be …”; little baffled, Tom reiterates his thoughts. In Tom’s mind “feeling” is a synonym of “thinking”, he(who is an engineer) lives and breathes in…
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Why Targeting A Job Title As A Goal Doesn’t Work – Sharmin’s Interview With Ascend Global Media
Q: Why is it important to set an authentic goal? When we are too focused on outside-in recognition like a job title, money, etc., we narrowly define our goal. It will be very hard to keep our attention to what is truly important, and we may get easily distracted by the hurdles. As a result, we may act and…
