Don't brood! Tell us what is your great idea today?

In our company we hire people who are ready to learn on the job.  We don't fear failures and hence put the most inexperienced at the deep end. The reason we do that is because we take pride in our experience and our ability to get the best out of 'everyone' who have latent talent but was not given a chance in the rat-race to bottom; that is solely built on grades, education and ivy schools.

The team that we built had very little collective experience in a 5-star industry, but had great vigour, and in two years we have bewildered our critics and pleasantly surprised our enthusiasts by performing at far greater heights and retaining most of our people. We may have lost some chiefs but no toughened sergeants.

A company has to offer a vision, a goal, and a self-training programme where people feel a change in their life, as if they don't go to a job but to a learning institution. Whatever they do, help them to give their best shot, and life is theirs to conquer. If they squabble and backbite and talk about each other it is their failure and their lack of confidence that see others as easy target. A leadership will not frown but expose those ills and handle them eye to eye and help change attitudes. Ills that are part of most cannot be cleaned by lectures but by face-offs.

The above remarks should be the cornerstone strategy of any person who wants to make a breakthrough in life as a worker or a manager.  Just do it, give your best shot and follow the agreed script; say what you have to say in planning but once decided and agreed, follow the line and don't try to stop the moving train.
 

Great managers/team players have some characteristics which can be learnt by upcoming and young managers through replication, that is, the simulation of the leadership styles of good managers to achieve results. If novices can thoroughly learn from and emulate characters of experts, they will certainly develop their skills. A manger that always has to be guided is no good.  'Where is my fresh new idea?’  A manager should ask himself every day.  

Don't expect breakthroughs if you like mediocrity and rotas to define your work, don't spend time doing routine, add value if you want to improve , look around and pick up, every second you do that you create a new opportunity of self discovery and self improvement .

The greatest skill of a great Manager is that he will create a team of commonplace individuals performing and punching far above their individual weight. A great manager’s absence is felt, his ideas are missed and he leads the whole team’s performance to far more than the sum of the performances of individual members of the team.  Lot of indispensables are sleeping in graveyards, without touching indispensability, a great manager will make himself the idea man. 

Great leaders have exhibited diverse kinds of management styles. Great leaders are visionary people who are able to attain results by people. They exhibit authority in themselves and exhume confidence in their team members. Circumstances make men, just as much as men make circumstances. Some leaders are democratic, allowing team members to air their opinions. Some are dictatorial, explaining what they want from their teams to the team members to execute.  All styles provide opportunity and challenges and may be used in definite circumstances.

Great leaders share one feature in common: Experience. It is their priceless jewel and in decision making that originally looks awfully wrong, they need to prove the crowd wrong  again and again. Originality of style and highest form of decision making is the hallmark of great managers, they change the routine and bring fresh approaches to where rust is overpowering.

What is a Team? A team is "a group that works towards a single, common, objective." Teams have been used since time immemorial by common men to achieve uncommon results.

Teams were used to construct the Pyramids in Egypt, The church of Babylon, built in 11th century, the Great Wall of China and the Empire State Building completed in 1931. Some of these teams were ruthlessly organised by tyrants, others with passion and love. Numerous projects have been finished and built before the beginning of project management through the help of teams. Team is an orchestra and has no place for a player who is not in sync.  Either be a living ocean or be a living fish; a dead fish cannot stay in a living ocean and a dead sea does not harbour life.

Any member of the team who does not work in synergy with the objective falls out of sync and is left behind. Team discusses pros and cons 100 times but sticks to the decision once taken. Dilly dallying of leadership decision destroys the fabric of a company or an organisation. Gurus define a team as "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable". "A team is a group in which members work together intensively to achieve a common group goal."

The end result is a good manger will never speak more than a necessary word, will never back bite, and never carry a word. And a good team will follow once the decision is taken and not drag their feet on the ground. One last thing: accept your mistakes and learn to say sorry and correct your bearings; all that will help greatly in making you an outstanding individual.