Leadership at work for women

One key differentiator that women should bring to the table is to be less patient with non performance. Most mothers I have seen seem to be very patient and understanding with their kids at home. This is fantastic. Extending the same behaviour to the work place will be misplaced as we are not demanding / driving our teams enough to succeed in the new age work place. Our inherent belief that given more time, things will change at the work place is often misused. So don’t employ the time strategy. Instead, employ a goal driven strategy against tight deadlines to give the non performers an opportunity to rise up to the challenge.

We are not in the work place to take care of other people’s personal shortcomings, problems etc and be the emotional bonding agent that we play at home. We are here to be effective in the roles that we play. While we should be sensitive and try and support our team through their life problems, we need not be the agony aunts at the workplace. Move away from this mentality. Infact, I would be happier if team members were able to arrange their personal life in the fashion that they deemed important. I have an interesting anecdote to quote here. Our variable pay is tied to the performamce ratings. One under performing employee during his appraisal discussions told me that the rating was disappointing because he had mortgages to pay off and this impacted the financials. Am I expected to rate a non performing employee differently owing to his personal situation?

Prayer and Peer Pressure

When my son was all of six years old, he refused to wear the holy ash on his forehead. For tamilians like me who are hindus, this was closest to blasphemy and I was trying to lay down the rule that he has to do it every day after at least praying for a few seconds. Seeing an approaching standoff, my husband tried to intervene by gently asking me to find out the reason why he was refusing. Aha…that made sense. So I called my son and asked him why he did not want to wear it. His answer astounded me. “ My friends at school will think I am a prayer!” I was dumb founded and realized that in his world it was absolutely “uncool” to be religious or show yourself as someone who prays. All of six years old and look at the mysterious ways that peer pressure intervenes in our lives.

Yes, I stopped forcing him to wear holy ash on his forehead. And yes, whether he realizes it now or not he and his twin sister are God’s benevolent answers to my prayers!