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In October 98, when we were entering the period for annual appraisals, the PPDP Training mentioned that one of the areas of focus that year was on how to become self-reliant in our careers.

I felt this was something everyone knew, but did not understand. We did not know HOW to become self-reliant about our careers. I could imagine setting a career objective as simply as, say, “I will be doing what our MD is doing, in 10 years”. However, I could not define ANY action plans that would take me there. I could not define anything that I should do now, which would help me achieve that. I started talking to my team about all the things we could do, and I realized we could define some actions now that would make us self-reliant in our careers. I put these into a presentation, which I could run on a one-to-one basis with different

individuals. It took me about half an hour to prepare the presentation since I was simply putting down my reflections on my experience. I ran this presentation across my team of eight senior managers and added the learning captured during the presentation. The presentation took approximately 45 minutes. I subsequently ran the presentation on a one-to-one basis for over 200 people, and what I have put down here is the cumulative learning from all these sessions.

I thought it would be good if we began by understanding some fundamental concepts in the same way. Let’s try to answer these questions. Take the first one. “What is a Career?” How would you define a career? As you realize, the definition of a career that you came up with just now is in your mind. How do you know it is this definition that everyone has for a career? Similarly, consider the other questions, such as “What is Growth?” What you should realize is that if a group of people is not working with the same definition or understanding, the expectations of different people cannot be met. These questions led me to some very interesting answers. In fact, this

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presentation was a result of these questions and the subsequent answers. I found some answers in the Webster’s Dictionary.

On the net at http://www.m-w.com/ (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary) I found these definitions for the various meanings and implications of the term ‘Career’. Let’s keep #3 and #4 in mind.The keywords in #3 are “a FIELD for CONTINUOUS, PROGRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENTS…”.

This is another meaning of Career and some of us do follow this type of career as well . Well, essentially #3 and #4 of the previous slide seem to be what concern us so let’s take a closer look at what we can get from these.

If “…continuous, progressive achievement…” in “…a field…” is a career, then thinking about the development of this career, you need to first select the field, and then make sure your achievements are continuous and in logical progression. This implies we have to focus on choosing the field or the ‘career’ as in #4 and then on continuous, accelerating, growing achievements. To achieve more, we will also need to identify and develop skills and abilities in ourselves, to let us achieve more. Let’s first look at how we choose our careers, which will sensitize us to how we can improve the choices we make. We’ll then look at how we can achieve more in the career we have chosen.

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These are some facts about our choices in careers. Some of us do have access to structured, competent, and professional career counseling help, but it’s a fact that 99.9% of the professionals don’t receive any structured counseling help. Typically, the time when we select our respective fields, in classes 8 to 12, we solicit and receive advice from our parents, relatives, elders, and our social circle. Usually, our parents are more concerned about the field we choose. This is certainly changing, and children now are more conscious of what they need to do. Peer pressure, which is growing, has also added to this. Bullet 1: Working on the career definition that we arrived at, the progression for each one of us is unique. No two people in the world have exactly the same career. They might have the same field, but the progression characteristics differ. Then, why do they differ? Bullet 2: They differ because we make choices that affect our career or progression. Every time you decide to do or not do something, you change your progression. We exercise these choices whenever we get the opportunity. For instance, I might choose to take a break, or meet

somebody, or finish something right now. This also highlights the fact that every decision we make affects our career. We’re probably making career choices up to four times a day! We use our personal vision, mission, or values to decide on our choice. We make a choice that would, we feel, take us on the progression towards what we want to be in the world. Then, how do we build and think about our vision, mission, or values? Bullet 3: We build our vision/mission/ values based on our value system. I have a personal statement that defines what I value about myself, and I have expectations from different organizations. I expect that they will value various relevant strengths in me that will contribute to their growth. We inherit our initial values from our parents and family and later from our friends and peers. Let’s look at a structured approach to choosing our careers. I have a feeling that none of us follow this approach consciously, but many organizational systems do exist, which facilitate this approach unconsciously. Maybe there is some benefit in consciously using this approach as well.

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In the first part, I list down all the things I value about myself. For instance, I might value my ability to be punctual, to complete things on time, or to play a game like an expert.

I then list what I don’t value about myself, but what other people and the organization seem to value. This is actually a list that shows you opportunities. You already have these strengths, but you don’t value them unlike others. For instance, I might not value my ability to sing but somebody else might. Alternatively, I might not value the fact that I always look at things optimistically, while others might.

Now, I think about what the organization values about itself,

including its people, which includes me. Some of this might be what I don’t value but the organization does.

Finally, I think about what the organization does not value but I do. Thinking through all four of these ‘value’ questions gives me a very good idea of the fit, conflict, and opportunities I have.

After going through the previous four lists, I take my decision. This decision is what defines my career choice. We must realize that we never go through structured questions and responses as shown here, but imagine the enormous improvement in our area of choices.

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I have not discussed ‘Choosing your career’ further in this presentation because that’s a different story, and I assume we have already made a choice that we like.

After talking about choosing your career, let’s take a closer look at the second part of Career Development, which is Achieving more.

Let’s see how we can achieve more. We can achieve more most simply by being good and better at what we have to do. This is the most obvious strategy and often the only strategy that we identify for our growth. And that is where I think we fall short. Apart from achieving more by being better at what we do, how can we achieve more? Well, by enabling others to contribute to our achievements. This multiplies our achievements and is the other largest

method to achieve more. Others who contribute to our achievements could be people, events, or processes. We also need to become visible or known. Visibility is important to the extent that whoever needs to know and can benefit from knowing about you should know so that more opportunities come your way. This is something like – “I might know how to swim, but I’ve never shared the fact with anybody, and therefore, when a need for the ability comes by, I am not thought of. We should also broaden our activity base to be able to widen our vision. Finally, we should take more responsibility, and value ourselves. Let’s spend some more time on each of these points in the following slides.

To be better at what you do, you need skills, knowledge, experience, and passion, among other things. Passion is what drives you to do better; the stronger the passion, the faster you achieve. It accelerates the progression of your achievements. Being better at what you do increases your personal power. You are also managing yourself by objectives (MBO) when you are better at what you do. One opportunity is to do the common things uncommonly well. To stand out, most people are worried about doing uncommon things well. A huge,

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simple-to-achieve opportunity is to do the common things well. And because everyone is anyway worrying about doing uncommon things, they miss out completing the common things. When you do common things well, it becomes uncommon.

Why is it important for you to enable others to achieve more? Because you are a factor in what the team achieves, and what you achieve is affected by what the team achieves. For instance, you performed outstandingly but the team achieved only satisfactory results. Your achievements are going to be divided by the teams. On the other hand, if you achieved only satisfactorily, but the team achieved outstanding results, you are definitely going to bask in the glory. This (enabling others…) is the essence of ‘people management’. It is also essential to manage yourself. You also need to enable yourself to perform well. This is also when you are managing a team or others by objectives.

Why is visibility important? This is a frequently trivialized and misunderstood aspect. It can be, quite often, confused with arrogance or misrepresentation. Visibility is important for you so that you become a PREFERRED NODE of REFERENCE for other people to refer to and for them to WANT to refer to you. It is important for people to want to refer to you because that keeps you ‘alive’ while you contribute to them through the value you add by being good at something. In all likelihood, you will be a node of reference for something that you do better than most people. A simple way to gain visibility is to get involved in a ‘high-impact’ project. Because the world’s attention is on the project, people see more of you. To become the node of REFERENCE, however, you need to do well also in the project. Of course, you will become a real node only when you do something well. You might say you are good at something and people should refer to you, but if they feel they are not getting value from you, they will stop referring to you, and you will stop being the node of reference for them.

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You need to broaden your base, or widen your experience, of doing a variety of things, and doing them well. This is important because as your career progresses, and you get into teams to lead them, you will be expected to have a ‘vision’ of the ground realities. You cannot have a broad vision without a broad base. If you don’t have a broad base and you are a ‘specialist’, you run the risk of becoming a pillar instead of standing on a well-supported platform. And we all know that pillars have a delicate equilibrium, depending on their height and base.

Take it on. Unless YOU take responsibility and own it, there’s no point in running the risk of giving it to you and you not owning it. If you don’t accept responsibility once, you will not take charge when others

expect you to, which will lead to disasters. You need to manage yourself by responsibility, and believe in the two principles of MBR (Management By Responsibility). The first principle states that, “You are hundred percent responsible for what happens to you.” And the second one states that, “You are hundred percent responsible for your reaction to what happens to you.” Look at it like this. If you don’t believe in either of these principles, you are not taking responsibility. And if you are not responsible, how can you be given the responsibility. You HAVE to believe and act according to these principles for you to be given any responsibility. As you take more responsibility, you will be faced with risk. And you will need to discover whether you are a ‘trader’ or an ‘investor’. Traders react to market situations and requirements and follow what the ‘market’ says. Investors, on the other hand, invest in their ideas, principles, and output, and stay firm in spite of contrary market indications, risking failure while they work at succeeding. Each of us, at various times, is either a trader or an investor, to varying degrees. Trading is simple, but to invest, you should know the market trends, your own abilities, and your confidence in what you know. Finally, to get more responsibility, take it! The simplest way to take responsibility for a situation is to respond to the situation. And the reverse is also true. The surest way to lose responsibility is to stop responding to the situation.

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Periodically, you need to value yourself and evaluate your value for the organization. You must evaluate your contribution to the organizational team to ensure that you increase your contribution and value towards the organization. Do this by observing yourself and your achievements objectively, standing beside yourself as you look at yourself. Once you are satisfied with your contribution to the organization, you must depend on the fact that something that is valued is also protected…just like your expensive watch or camera.

When I first made this presentation to people, at this point they said that they got actionable knowledge out of the presentation. And that’s what prompted me to add this slide because this is something we are very good at doing. We revel in the knowledge that

we have the ability, but we never act with it. So, if you think these points are worth your while, then just start working at them. Build your personal systems to track where you are on each of them and keep at it.

This is how I see it. We begin with Self Esteem, which we get from our parents, in the early years of our lives. This is also the single most important contribution parents make to their children – of teaching them self-esteem. Without self-esteem, we don’t even ‘learn’ at school. And learning is the next thing that we start on. We go on learning, more and more, until our learning starts spilling over into the Do phase of our lives. Here is where we follow instructions from somebody, to actually do something, and to carry out an activity to complete a task. We get better at meeting commitments made by someone else like our teacher or manager. As we get better at meeting these commitments, made by somebody else, we start making our own commitments and meeting them. As we get better at meeting our own commitments, we develop the Just Do It value in ourselves. If we acquire the ability to make and meet our commitments, we have the

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opportunity to help other people develop the same ability, and we multiply into more people to get into the Manage stage. At the same time, we also start working at improving our People Management skills. At the base once we have the three attributes of Self Esteem, Just Do It, and People Management, we can say we have Personal Power, and we start working at Visibility, Broadening our Base, and Taking more Responsibility. As we take up more responsibility, we realize we are taking responsibility that nobody else or very few others are taking. That is when we are at the Lead stage.

As growing trainers of NIIT, we have built some paradoxes for ourselves. I’m describing one below. The first is that we, as trainers, know that all training is defined by the Terminal Objectives defined for an audience. By knowing more about the audience and the terminal objectives, we arrive at achievable actions Enabling Objectives for the training. These enabling objectives are what are addressed by the training, and once these are met, we assume that the terminal objectives are also met. We never address the Terminal Objectives directly.

Then why is it that in our careers, we set the terminal objectives - as in money, power, position, and authority, – without a clue as to ourselves, or the enabling objectives? We then don’t have any actionables to work at, and when we don’t achieve we feel we’ve lost out. If you think about it, what was your plan to achieve what you wanted and how predictable were the results of what you did? Set Terminal Objectives but also know the audience, yourself, and the enabling objectives you have to achieve. Train yourself!

Your responsibility is to develop your ability and look for opportunities where you can contribute to the organization.

The organization’s responsibility is to recognize your abilities and identify or create opportunities where you can contribute most to the organization.

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You can see growth in different ways, and I articulated three ways in which we grow. I named them Apathetic, Sympathetic, and Empathetic.

Apathetic This is when the leader ‘grows’ leaving the team behind, usually by adding new people at intermediate levels. This is when the leader’s growth is apathetic to that of the team.

Sympathetic This is when the entire team grows together with no relative difference perceived in relationships between the leader and the team, but the entire team doing better work and taking more responsibility. This is normally not perceived by people as growth because no relative difference is perceptible. But it is growth for all.

Empathetic This form of growth occurs when the leaders empower their team members to do better than them. This is the model all the trainers have to grow in. Your teacher in Class 10 empowered you to do better than her. In the process, she grew in her impact on people, although her ‘position’ remained what it was. This is also the model all the grandparents use to grow. The grandfather is not concerned about his own achievements. He is very concerned about how he can help his grandchild achieve. How We Grow You can now probably identify with the people who follow each of these models of growth at various times in their careers or lives. They might have grown apathetically at the beginning of their careers when

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they were on a faster achievement track than their teams. Midway into their careers, they were likely to grow sympathetically because their teams were likely to be more mature and capable and grew or slowed down at the same rate as they did. Towards the later part of their careers, they focused more on how they could empower others to grow, even beyond themselves. They would have, by then, achieved what they wanted. If you come to think of the ONE Growth that we all work towards, in view of all the above discussion, you would realize that all the visible signs of growth are mere enablers for this Ultimate Growth. This Ultimate Growth is the “positive impact on people”. Positive impact on more people, and more positive, greater impact on more people.

We tend to relate growth with our position in the organizational hierarchy, which is our position in the structure. Let’s see why this seems to be completely irrelevant. If the two parameters, growth and structures were related, then every node in the structure would have a value assigned to it, with the higher nodes at a greater value and the lower ones at a lower value. This would also imply that the organization is

structured around the growth or values of nodes. Surprisingly, nothing could be further from the fact. Organizations are not structured according to the values of nodes. Then, how are they structured and why? Let’s see…

An organization is structured to deploy functions. The organization needs to be effective at carrying out its functions efficiently. Therefore, we should ensure that organizational structuring avoids redundancy of skills and functions, retains effectiveness over a span of control, and facilitates communication and mentoring.

I thought of at least two approaches that could be used to structure an organization.

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One could be a Role Based approach, when the organization is structured around the need for roles, with the abilities of people getting a very small consideration. The IAS is one such organization, and you might find many government organizations following this approach in the socialist countries. The other is the Function Based approach, where the organization structures around the functions that need to be carried out. This is the approach that most of the functional or functioning organizations take.

Well, you can’t just define the structure and forget the rest. Structures need to change because of:

Changing market requirements leading to changing functional requirements,

Growing capability, visibility, and responsibility of the people

Growing maturity of the people and the business.

Essentially, structures need to change to account for and drive all the people arriving at different points on the Learning Curve. Let’s see how the Learning Curve can be understood.

This is how we’ve seen learning curves with the slope very high in the beginning declining over time to a less steep slope. What do you think happens beyond point X?

This is what I think happens beyond point X in our learning curves. Learning actually starts accelerating beyond X instead of becoming static or slowing down. It is only these ‘learners’ who go into the Leading and Envisioning stages, beyond the Learn-Do-Manage. Here, the obvious question is: What is it that predicts this inflection of the slope at X? The answer seems to be in when we get the ability to lead ourselves, when we become sensitive to our productivity of learning, or when we start learning from ourselves - when we learn to lead ourselves.

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This is a corollary to the learning-curves discussion. I realized we might have some loopholes in how we develop our people. The upper curve is for a ‘senior’, in the accelerating-learning mode while the lower curve is that of a ‘junior’ who joined the senior to be managed and mentored. In the beginning, the slope of the junior’s curve is steep because the senior provides instructions, values, guidance, and training so that the junior develops and performs. All the time, the junior is following his learning curve with the slope declining gradually. The senior ‘feels’ the change in the slope, but misinterprets it completely. By the time the senior perceives that his and the junior’s slopes are about the same, the interpretation is that the junior has now achieved the same rate of learning as I have and so he will be able to keep pace with me. They don’t realize the junior is actually slowing down not speeding up. By ‘leaving’ the juniors to learn on their own at this stage, we lose the opportunity we had of the juniors following the seniors’ learning curve close behind. Instead, the juniors now follow their natural, further slowing down of acceleration of learning to eventually going through the inflection. So what does this tell us?

Until when should a senior mentor his junior? The development of the junior must continue until the junior crosses the inflection; is able to lead himself, is sensitive to his productivity of learning, and learns to lead.

Let’s now see how we can chart the careers that we impact. Our own careers impact the organization’s career. This presentation applies completely to the organizational career as well. Let’s Learn, to Lead!