My Lessons from the Field

The year is almost over, and most of my colleagues and clients at work are off for the year. This is the time of the year when return emails all come back with a tag of "out of office". I'm still at office because I am a slow worker. My brain cannot process on-off messages fast enough. I want to maintain the always moderately on approach.

This morning, as I was getting up for work, on Christmas eve, I did not feel reluctant, instead I felt fresh and alert. This is why I would share one of the most important lessons I learnt this year.

Take two minutes to think about this if you are reading this. It does not matter if you are reading it at work, or at night as you are unwinding or in a meeting.

Whatever you are doing, it will not change the world just because of you. The problems still remain and issues still to solve. It will not go away just because you take off on time after work or skip lunch or start scolding your colleagues. Whatever will be is already set by the actions of the things in the past. If you feel your blood rising, just think that we can do more to prevent more blood rising incidents in the future, but we can never prevent it all. The mind is very strong, it influences what we believe in as well as what we want to make out of things.

5 years ago, I had started off at a client working my way up. I used to do 1901 hotdogs every lunchtime, just because I wanted the 15 mins off but also because I never had time. Now, I never hesitate to take up a lunch offer. No matter how busy we are, we need to eat. And eating well serves to fuel me for later challenges. The world will not fall apart just because a bunch of people spent time to eat. How about that?

Thanks to you who taught me this important lesson from the field.

Take two minutes and enjoy your moment. This will help other moments in the future. Panicking or rushing will not help.

Leadership by Humility

It was a lunchtime discussion. I shared how I try to teach people in my team or my organisation. I am terrible at motivating people by face to face discussions, although I have found that counselling sessions have been quite revealing. I am one who like to see people make the leap of capability on their own.

The method I wanted to share is that I practice leadership by humility. It starts with the belief that we all hire smart people to work with us. Smart people are motivated by self assessment of their own capability, and I found smart people to make a leap of capability when they conciously know that they have limitations or have made mistakes. Smart people do not like to be told what to do, or fail to reach their goals. The only way to coach smart people is to show them humility and motivate them to reach for their own the next level. Humility means accepting that you may not be as good as you are, and understanding and seeking the way to overcome that.

I would like to ask all of you, who have teams to lead or is in a team - tell those who work for you something new everyday, and learn something from them. Humility could work both ways.

I am still learning how to do this well.

My luck can only get better...

Would you be one who believes in Luck?

I cannot believe I have not been blogging for the last 1 month + for this blog. Spate of events and spate of bad luck happened, which included my being down and out in a series of flu and coughing fit which lasted almost 3+ weeks. I have been drinking cough medicine for the last 3 weeks. I wonder if that helps explain my sluggishness...

No great idea or story has come out of me since I've been under the daily influence of cough mixture. I cancelled two big client meetings with many important people, missed the Singapore Marathon, and could not speak for 5 days last week.

As in all days which has been bad, a good leader does not blame the luck factor, but if one will let me word it differently, I tried to be positive - I do think my luck can only get better.

My esteemed organization's international chairman, who was previously leader of the group I was in, told us this once when we were at a global leadership seminar - he said - there are three things you must do to be successful - you must work hard, you must be very smart, and last of all, you must be lucky.

If not, I'd just start the next year 2008 afresh ...