Utpal Writes          On Project Management, Leadership, Technology and Self-Help

1. You never drag your feet but ready to run in pace with your goals.
2. You are ready to attack the job each Monday after a refreshing and peaceful weekend where you had gotten great time to spend with family and friends.
3. You don’t focus on in and out time at the office whenever you think you need to get a specific task accomplished, you just do it and never look at the clock.
4. You are happy to help your colleagues – always just because it gives you sense of accomplishment. You’re in a good mood.
5. You think that your workdays are short.
6. Many of your good friends are at your workplace – you often love to organize gathering programs with your office colleagues.
7. You care. About almost all the things related to your work.
8. Things generally don’t bug you.
9. You see little to zero bad corporate politics in the organization.
10. You don’t know when did you last use Sick leaves even when you weren’t sick!

If you have few years of experience in project management, most likely you have come across agile practices. You are conducting periodical retrospectives at the end of each iteration or release. For agile practices, such retrospectives act like a compass which guides you towards true north.

Photo Credit: gothick_matt's Flickr photostream

In retrospectives, essentially you are inspecting what is expected in the specific iteration or a release. You learn through your mistakes and focus on what you can do better in the next iteration.

And, since your focus is on constant improvement, you see consistent improvements in the project. Isn’t it?

The opportunity here is to apply the same “improving by retrospection” principle in your personal life as well.  It can be applied to measure your personal performance. If we consider our life as a film, you are playing various characters in your life. Some examples of such characters are: Son, father, spouse, student, musician, friend, etc.  You can perform at your best given you have defined set of measurable goals attached with each of such characters.

So the question is how you can measure your personal performance in each of the characters you are playing?

Here is an agile mechanism to handle this:

1. At the start of every week define a set of measurable goals for each of the characters you are going to play in that week.
2. As the week passes by, record your activities in a journal.
3. In the weekend, pick a character at a time and perform a retrospective:
   • What went well?
   • What did not go well?
   • What can be improved and taken to the next level?
4. While starting the next week, align yourself with the answers you found for the above questions.

Such retrospectives enable you to align your actions and help you in going to the next level.  All you need is willingness to go to the next level and a pen and a paper!  Worth trying.

You are considered an expert in your field and you have recently changed your employer for a good package.

To produce great output in your expertise area, you need to spend only a few hours a day – you don’t need to come at a fixed time and go at a fixed time but your output are just excellent.

The other persons in your organization with similar experience level and position spend the whole day (and sometime nights also) to produce almost the same (may be inferior) results. They come before the office time starts and normally go hours after the office time is over.

Now there are 2 types of organization cultures.

1. Type – A: Organizations who measure your work by results.
2. Type – B: Organizations who measure your work by the time you spend at the office.

Wonderful if your organization culture falls in Type-A, annoying otherwise.

Such annoyance may lead you to do the efforts of changing organization culture – trying to convert it to Type-A.

In your career, it would be a very costly mistake. Organization Cultures are like countries – they seldom change!

Better decision would be to find a culture where you will be valued by the results you produce.

In my decennium long experience journey, I have seen organizations which have a great vision – a vision to become a world class company which is super-positive. 100% win-win for all the entities involved, performance centric, employee and society friendly, ultimate customer delight centric… the best!

But with very little actions.

Little actions lead to fewer results and thus little experience to count on.  But they have great measurability of the results.

Measurability is the lens of their vision.

The other type of organizations is “Action” centric. They do not have any permanent vision to stick with. For them “crafting vision” is an overhead. They are in fascination of actions.

High actions lead to more results and more experience to count on.  But they lack the essential – measurability.

And, anything which cannot be measured cannot be repeated with 100% surity, no matter if it is success or failure.

Actions are in harmony only when they are measured, chaos otherwise.