Working at the speed of trust

Some time back I had this training from my organization. This was not necessarily the training I like to attend. But this was kind of a different training in a crazy way. It was really a lotus eaters delight. And as I am one such nut case, I really liked it.

Here are some thoughts on it

I definitely agree to the maxim that speed travels faster than light. If there is any thing that is going to cause a huge jump in productivity, it is basically trust that gets us to jump multiple levels in productivity. In software business, it is the next thing to the smart design and work allocation and tracking.

The training was by Franklin Covey institute and they have a book also along with it. I do not want to break their copyright by giving excerpts of their work here. So there are just some random musings inspired by the book and training. I am not even saying that you should go for that training or should buy that book. None of these two things have ever worked for me. Even if I am a self confessed self-help book junkie, the books that affect me most are the ones which are not written for doing so. So here is the divorce from the training and the book.

I think there is an interesting perspective of looking at trust, trust can be both directions, outward and inward. trust in others and trust in yourselves to achieve the desired goals. First thing that needs to be done when you want to trust some one is that you should build up that trust in others. It is a strange thing that comes back as much as you give it out.

The training really brings up this fact completely. Building trust is a very lengthy process. Losing it may not be. There are scientific steps which can be taken to build up trust. It needs the relationship to go through a set of levels before trust is built. It needs both the parties to be mature and winning. There is a high chance that trust can be broken and then it takes you down a very bad slippery slope. Inherently trust means that you would not have spent time building alternate solutions. If that happens, then once your trust-party fails you, you can never recover.

If this has to be a “fail-safe scenario” , this means that there is another angle to trust. It is of interdependence. There is another angle of making your dependencies soft. If your dependencies are soft, this means that you can still survive when everything else fails. And if every thing succeeds, you are at the pinnacle of success.

Trusting some one also means that the person you are dealing with should not have any exterior motives about your failure. If some one is fully inclined to make you a failure, it is very difficult to trust him. That's why trusting people is an issue in case of an environment where you are competing for survival. In an environment where you are losing ten percent of people annually you will be most probably collaborating with, it is really difficult not to think about stabbing people in the back when the opportunity provides. Some one trying to build trust is exactly giving the same opportunity to your competitors.

But in the long run, trust is the best way to achieve some semblance of justice in all this process is to be yourselves and ensure that people are always supported and helped. Working towards a greater goal and benefits of the collective may look like a day dream. but people have been achieving this even in case of worse situations than this. There are proofs of such behavior in extreme situations like the concentration camps. Then it should not so difficult to put it to use in normal office scenarios. You need not be a saint to reach there. As man is a social animal, soft power has been built by normal people and more competitive scenarios tackled effectively.

So we are just being our natural self when we behave in a collaborative manner. Only people with a deep sense of lack of confidence in their own abilities can rule this out. What is done is always more important than what is seen. If you do really stellar work, it can not be kept in cage because of just incompetence.

As a leader, the lead should ensure that the same thing happens in the team as well. Being the lead of my team, I am the owner of the direction, culture and success of it. My success should be measured with the ease with which I setup the culture of initiative, ownership, belonging and achievement in my team. In that sense, every team member should be like one to me. This is again some thing that is contradictory. How can I behave exactly same with all the reportees if I am the one who is going to differentiate between these two times a year. Or as the thing goes, I may be asking some of these to leave. but that is completely different track and I should be able to behave independently in both these situations. I think I need to do a bunch of stuff to track these things.

 

The TED talk that introduced me to myself

 

This is based on the TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

This really rang a bell some where. It made some thing in my life clear to me. It rarely happens at my age and at my stage. that's why I am thankful that it has happened and I would like other people to know about this.

750words.com, the site I use for writing my diary, rates this writing as self important. I am sure, it feels like that so take the things below with a pinch of salt. But I think these thoughts are important for some people I want to reach. Especially some of the dear friends who have been with me and really know me. I want to get them thinking in the same direction. I am just hoping they will find this at some point in time in some dusty unvisited corners of the web and then they will understand and learn. So I am daring to publish this .

Expressing myself has always been a passion to me. This was from a young age. I found myself to be an excellent performer when I found that the subject mattered to me. At this point, I would be so involved with the subject, that it will be one for me to think about myself OR think about the subject.
One such thing happened today which took me back in to the early days of stand up mimicry in my school. I just built on day to day stories I was exposed to. I used material which I found on my way to school or day to day materials in use in school or at home. I took the Belan, I took car lining and built wonderful stories out of these. Most of the stories were impromptu. In fact I failed when I tried to practice before. Those were the days I was blessed by the stage goddess. The audience danced at my fingertips. If I remember it correctly, I continued doing this for around three years. It could have been a speech competition, it could have been an one act play or any thing else to do with standing in front of people and doing my stuff.
One thing I know now that I was always considering the forth wall to be opaque. That means that I would never consider and work for the forth wall, which in performing arts jargon is the spectators. I would be in the bubble of my own in front of a crowd of multitudes. And that was my key to success.
Several important things happened in life. These included matriculation, cut throat competition in college, movement from a small town atmosphere to a fully cosmopolitan environment like my engineering college.
The fun of performing and the ability to succeed has been visiting me on and off. On my best day, I would be the best programmer, I would be the best thinker, I would be the best designer and the best student. Thankfully for me some times it happened at the right times. I was at my puzzle solving and thinking best when these two opportunities arose, in terms of my first job and in terms of my most important jobs till now, that is MS. I did so well in the projects I liked. I sucked royally in the project which did not please me. Apart from far basic, physical limitations: for example, my pronunciation in case of English theater and enunciation and lack of thoroughness in understanding the interplay of emotions and convey them properly in my body language in case of Marathi theater; it was always my intentions and involvement that decided the extent of success or failure.
So I notice that my pleasure and my expectations have a great part to play in my success. Any thing, however easy it may be, can fail if it is not pleasing to me OR I am not interested in doing these.
But the most important thing I notice is that  I always failed when I did things to impress or please some one. Even theater gave me less pleasure when it was done to impress some one. Only when I did it for myself I liked it a lot. It is something like the TED talk I am referring to. Some higher entity would stay in the abode of my body and soul for these moments.In all these cases, I now notice that I never played to the gallery. The best / the ideal came to inhabit me for some fleeting seconds when I was the most dissolved in satisfying myself with the pursuit.
Now that this thought is complete, I am relieved. I am not a software engineer who draws a huge salary. I am not even the best coder and designer. I am not the best actor that ever was there. I am not the best stand up comic.
This is what I am. I am just a conduit to all these higher forms. My day to day life is blessed with comfort because I allow all these entity to reside in me from time to time. I keep my body and my thoughts clean for these higher life forms, which may be mine, but are short lived. I should do every thing in my capabilities to ensure that my body,mind and thoughts are clean to receive these. I should always ensure that my body is flexible,supple and strong enough to achieve greatness when the greatness comes to it.
Otherwise I am just a middle class small town boy. That is the reality and I should live this reality as profoundly and clearly as possible. Any deviation from this reality will not achieve anything else but just drive the djinns away who perform through me.

To dearest of them all, with love

Five years is such a long time and still I remember the first time I saw you. I was late to your home (my first visit). I do not know how I actually walked the steps and reached your drawing room. Maybe my parent told me. You were reclining on the sofa, sufficiently made up and resting there. As soon as you saw me you ran into the house. you were taller than my expectation. You were and have always been thin, bordering on frail. That is when I decided that it will be a very good idea to spend rest of my with you. The informality and the grace of your movements and attitude really struck me. That was the first quality that killed me then. It was one of my many impulsive actions that I decided that this is that and I told you so as well when we went to my college. Your have always been what cynics call a "low maintainance wife". But actually that was the only thing I watched. You were very comfortable eating at a nondescript place, going to the place where I spent my most importnat four years of my life till then. The place which changed me completely. This really meant that you were different, which was not as important as the fact that you actually matched me at some plane of existence. Though at other multiple planes we are as different from each other as possible. And thankfully that was one of my decisions that I never (mostly :) ) regretted. There were troubling time, there were discords and slightly different expectations and aspirations. I tried to take care of aspirations which I thought should be long term and viable. We had terrible fights for those which we thought should be trivial things or some thing wrong. I have been moving from my roots and in a completely different environment every ten years now. I moved from my small town Udgir to the district place, Latur. I moved from LAtur to my hostel. From my hostel I moved to Wipro. From Wipro I moved to Subex. Each of the move changed my life completely. So I know that it is very difficult to change things completely and start over. For you it was even more difficult. This was because you were in the same town and same place all the time. Things never changed for you. They changed drastically with a new family to stay with in a new town. You really did splendid to cope up with all that and do more :).
And while all this was happening we have our first born almost immediately. I think one of the most important and interesting things that happened to us together. Ojas ensured that our debates and fights that occur seldom do not tear us apart the way it is doing others at this moment. But that was just the side effect. Our life has been converted from the usual and run of the mill to the extra ordinary because our son is there in it. If in last five years giving birth to him is the only thing we did, we would still come out successful for first five years. But we did many more things. Apart form the really apparent physical prosperity (if you notice our income is almost double of what it was when we got married, we own a small flat of our own and a four wheeler), I think the most important thing we have is that we can still enjoy life and be happy without all these. Being detached from all the gains actually makes us worthy to go for more. And this is where I appreciate your contributions. This makes you very unique in my eyes. If there was any body who would have matched my way of thinking by actions, it is you. That is why I love you more than a husband loves a wife OR a father loves the mother of his loved children. Without you, I would not be living the life I wanted. Without you, I would not be so balanced and so free to do the stuff I like. Without me life would not hold me and give new meanings to every day. Without you I would not have the shine of my eyes, Oju and Aaroh. Without you life will be very less interesting and boring. I am lucky to have you as my wife for last five years and for the rest of my life. Thank you for everything and I love you for so many years.