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Leadership Coaching Reflections

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  Leadership Coaching Reflections #1: As I now engage with senior leaders as an executive coach,  it often makes me reflect upon when I could have used an executive coach to guide me thru at crucial stages of my career… In this series, I will be sharing some of the key milestones where a coach would have made a great partner… Instance 1:  First direction change in career!  About 20 years back, I had to make a hard choice to move from line management to a support function due to personal constraints. I was a program manager, leading complex projects in the high tech field of Telecom and I chose to join the newly formed Quality team in one of the best companies. Every family member, friend and colleague advised me against it but I really had no choice.  The decision having been made, from being responsible for ONE team’s outcome to driving change that would impact almost everyone in the delivery center meant I had to change my thinking, approach, dealing with people – something I did not
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5 Outcomes From Partnering With A Personal Coach

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  5 Outcomes From Partnering With A Personal Coach Executive coaching or leadership coaching is a growing field in India, though it is quite common in the Western world. A lot of mid-senior leaders hesitate to consider engaging a coach for several reasons, some cultural and some due to lack of information and understanding. So, why should you consider engaging with an effective executive coach and what should you expect as outcomes for yourself, your colleagues, and your families – Yes, as we all know, whether we like it or not, for most of us, how we feel after a workday impacts our families and loved ones! I’m outlining the top 5 tangible results you can expect from a coaching partnership with the right coach: 1.     Know Yourself Better : To relate to others better, we have to know ourselves well – including what perceptions we have about ourselves and how others see us, our beliefs and biases, what triggers our unwanted behaviors, behaviors we want to continue with and other self-l
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Loneliness at Work Place

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“Loneliness does not come from having no people around one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”  Carl Jung One of the clients I was coaching recently is a senior leader (COO) at one of the big consulting companies. While the topic brought up for the coaching session was something else, to begin with, one key theme that kept coming up was how difficult it is to find someone to trust at the workplace to be able to share and consult openly. I looked up some research and it indicates that more than 60% of people report they feel lonely at the workplace. The epidemic of loneliness at workplaces is common across geographies and it gets worse as one goes up the hierarchy. And it is only growing… The effect of long-term loneliness includes an increase in stress, anxiety with physical manifestations of blood pressure, obesity, and its effect is found to be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarett
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Location: India
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Impostor Syndrome?

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Seeing the growing readership of my last article on LinkedIn last week, I kept thinking – I don’t write often and don’t even have a huge number of followers, so how did this happen? Must be that I just got lucky!!!   And my efforts to understand what was happening more lead me to Impostor Syndrome and its role in our lives 🙂   Impostor syndrome or experience occurs when we have difficulty owning our successes and feel like a fraud – when we feel that our successes are perhaps undeserved, despite all our efforts that have gone into making it a reality. The success or accomplishment is attributed to luck, right time/right place, and other factors outside of ourselves. The bigger the accomplishment, the more intense the feeling of being an impostor.   In my case, despite sincere comments and re-shares from readers showing that it struck a chord with many of them, it took some effort for me to accept that it was real!   Many well-known people admit to experiencing it, including Albert Ein
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Technical to Business Leadership

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Transitioning from technical to business leadership? What are the top skills to build on? As a lot of my clients are from the technology industry, one of the common situations I come across is when a technically strong person is at the inflection point to move into a broader business leadership role – by choice or by lack of a choice to grow within the company without making that move!   Many large technology companies now offer clear technical and business leadership paths to grow – on the technical side go from an engineer to a designer to architect to fellow/scientist, etc. And the managerial or business leadership path commonly goes as project manager, program manager, client engagement manager, practice head, business unit head. And a person can choose to pick up one of these or a product management path to becoming a product owner.   In several companies, even MNCs these choices don’t exist and as a technology expert, you may have to pick up a business leadership role if you want
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Biases and Leadership

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  Biases and Leadership - Are your biases holding you back at work? We don’t see things as they are – we see things as we are…Anain Nin In the last article, we looked at some key leadership behaviors expected at the mid-management level to be taken seriously as a leader instead of just a manager and be able to grow further. This article let us look at what are the common biases at the workplace and how they could derail your leadership journey. What is Bias? Wikipedia defines it as Bias is disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases are generally based on our strong beliefs and most of the time we are consciously unaware of the belief or bias or both that we carry. But they can have a huge impact on our behaviors and actions. So, what are the 5 most common biases, in my experience? 1.Affinity Bias: In simple terms, it means we have an affinity for people who are similar to us. That sounds normal
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