A new experience in my growth

Today was the first time I dealt in some personnel-management without taking RK's advice and guidance on it. Of course, to be fair, my company has been fairly tiny so far, so personnel management hardly was an issue.
Now that RK's group and mine work jointly on many projects and because I've also hired a new technician and obtained 2 new interns, we are getting pretty crowded.

Crowded place, new responsibilities, new projects etc leads to high stress; behaviors that might otherwise have been shrugged away become large pain points and bad behaviors that might have once been rare or ignored magnify to become real issues.

These past few weeks, I've been mostly absent from lab. In addition to my absence, the senior scientist in lab was also dealing with some family emergency issues and wasn't able to go to lab. This left the younger technicians in a position of high responsibility and independent decision-making. For the most part, it went very smoothly. However, yesterday I heard a complaint about somebody in lab and how their behavior was affecting workplace climate.

Before taking any action though, I discussed this issue with the senior physician at the clinical group and with the senior scientist from my group. We came up with a strategy which wouldn't point fingers at the person but would place this within the larger context of leadership and personal growth. Because, to be honest, I don't want to lose this person over something which is actually fairly easy to fix.

RK is someone I would have immediately asked help of, but he was busy. And the other person who would have been really helpful, his mentor from the US who is in town right now, was also busy. So, I took a few leaves from RK's book: I went online and read extensively; I looked at algorithms for cultivating a healthy work culture and I looked at images of leadership, work culture, personal growth, work place ethics and so on. This morning I still felt quite unprepared- I didn't feel like I had a cohesive message, I was afraid that I would ramble on without end and I couldn't figure out whether to focus only on workplace culture or personal growth or something completely different (all that reading while useful also confused the heck out of me... what exactly did I want anyway?).

The only thing I was sure of the attitude that I wanted to convey: one of trust and openness.


So I went in to lab, hoping to bumble through it somehow. I started out with asking people what they wanted out of their growth, what did they think contributed to personal growth. Many thoughtful answers, such as personal vision, education, learning from failures, and workplace environment (!) emerged. I asked them to to spend some time reflecting on what factors they felt had been critical for their growth so far. And while they were reflecting, I had a brainwave.

Last week, I had browsed through a book called "High Performance Habits" by Brendan Burchard. It made such an impact on me that I downloaded the book on my phone and have been going through it on and off. One of the first few chapters is about how actively reflecting on and improving one's perceptions of oneself (self), perceptions of what one would like others to think of one (social), a thoughtful approach to building skills critical for success and investing one's energy in service are ways to improve performance and effectiveness in life.

So almost automatically, my thoughts went to whatever I'd learned from this book. So I decided I would bring the conversation to this and have everybody talk about these 4S's (self, social, skills and service, as mentioned in the book).

Weirdly enough, when we discussed the personal growth aspect itself, even before I drove the conversation towards improvement, the person whose behavior triggered this whole session brought up many of these issues of behavior. And then there was a very honest exchange of opinions and thoughts about what triggered these bouts of bad behavior and what the underlying situation was.

Was it because this person suspected what had triggered this meeting and wanted to face it head-on?
Or was it because this environment of openness had been created? Or was I too, too obvious?
I don't know. But I was not going to let the opportunity go to waste! So I probed more, we spent a good amount of time talking about it, we all brainstormed about ways by which we could help and that conversation brought out many underlying confusions and miscommunications that I couldn't have even suspected.

We did the whole 4S thing as well- it seemed like a very good framework to address these exact same issues. And each of my team members came up with a goal list for themselves and selected other team mates to be their "coach"... and guess what? The same person about whom the complaints were, was the person most frequently chosen to be a coach for others to keep themselves on track with their personal goals! How amazing and awesomely crazy is that! I have to give full credit to this person for being honest and upfront about a lot of things- this truly is personal leadership.

And guess what else? We will continue these leadership sessions every month. I think there's some serious gold to be mined here.

So, all in all, feeling pretty good!

Why I feel happier in India

I never could explain this until just now.

In the US, when I was going through a bad patch emotionally, or was feeling down, I would feel alone. And truly, there would be days when I wouldn't (or couldn't) talk to another person for days on end- people typically don't begin conversations on the bus or on the street with others. In my lab, the need for professionalism kept most interactions to the superficial.
I saw innumerable people over multiple years, either on the road leading to our house, or in the daycare when I went to pick up kids, and they would have seen me, but we never struck up a conversation or had any kind of connection.
.
Here, in India, on my street, on the street where my parents' home is, in my work places, I matter. People come and talk to me. I don't feel invisible.

And that's why, despite all the pollution and the problems, I like it here.