Mindfulness: The power of being ‘here and now’

In today’s competitive environment, we often complain about having no time for peace and happiness.  We are so much engrossed in “doing” that we don’t get time “being” in the moment.  Our minds are constantly meandering; we are often physically present at a meeting or discussion but mentally elsewhere.

Distractions arise either through our internal dialogues or through external objects.  With the advent of technology, our distractions have gone up significantly primarily due to cell phones, tablets, emails, texts, WhatsApp messages etc.  In our fight for survival in a competitive world, our internal dialogues are diverting our minds to wander in our troubled past or uncertain future, taking away our sense of being in the present. 

How big is this problem?  According to research articles, our mind wanders 46.9 percent of the time. In other words, we focus on our tasks a little more than 50% of the time we assign to it. This also means that our business is losing on effectiveness due to limited concentration.  The loss in productivity resulting from limited focus underlines the importance for leaders and people in organizations to be mindful. 

Mindfulness is an art of striving to focus on the present – being at the moment “here and now”.  Our conscious level mind tries to fill any emptiness with internal dialogue by dwelling on the past or future.  Not taming our mind results in it going into an auto pilot mode. 

Our mind continues to be noisy even when things are calm in the external world, resulting in emotional instability. When we keep ourselves engaged in internal dialogues, we lose a lot of energy and peace.  This impacts our emotional and intellectual well-being; our productivity reduces, and our ability to manage our emotions depletes. 

Hence it is important that we shift to moving our mind to the present. When we focus ourselves on the quietness of the mind without the temptation to stray, we live the very core purpose of our existence, the purpose of being at peace, happiness and love. 

In the spiritual world, mindfulness meditation enhances the power of concentration, peace and happiness for practitioners.  In real life where one is dealing with pressing situations, it is highly recommended to pause from the daily schedule for two minutes periodically to experience being in the moment and observe the feelings, and emotions of self as an observer.  Mindfulness is not an ultimate purpose; it is the journey of being oneself.

We know that we have no control over our past and yet, we keep thinking about it and lose a lot of energy.  In Hindi, we refer to the past as “bhoot-kaal”.  The word Bhoot indicates an entity that has no life or existence. Any reflection of the past that is done without being emotional, and with the sole purpose of learning from previous lessons is constructive, and will not drain your emotional resources.

Similarly, our future isn’t ours for the taking.  Our lives may come to an abrupt halt at any given moment for us to even experience next dawn.    

The moment we realize that both past events and future events are distractors, we are better equipped to concentrate on the present moment; our efficiency and effectiveness double and our tasks become more productive and effective. 

Practicing Mindfulness

Some principles and practices which can enable us to be mindful are listed below –

1.      When you wake up in the morning, spend a few minutes meditating.  This could be in a form of breathing exercise or following a guided meditation.

2.      While doing or performing any activity, just concentrate on the same and don’t let your mind wander elsewhere. For example, if you are brushing your teeth, observe the process, feel the brush and experience the overall activity.   

3.      Try not to overload yourself with a lot of information. Social media, in today’s age, provides a lot of information that is mostly noise.   As far as possible, avoid your exposure to negative information during the early hours of your day. This includes reading newspapers in the morning as newspapers thrive on negative information, and the information you consume stays with you.

4.      While at work wherever your mind is taking you to past event or to some anticipated future event, bring it back and promise to spend time on the topic it is taking you to. Reserve some time during the day when you could reflect upon these events with some constructive objective.  This also means that you don’t let your mind wander on these events or topics again after you are done with reflecting.

5.      Remind your mind that you have no control over the external world but on the inner world.  People will not be your way; you must need to accept this instead of getting angry on people or situations.  When you get angry, mind accelerates the thinking and becomes noisy. 

6.      Last but not the least, take regular pauses during the day. Close your eyes, focus on the emptiness of the mind, observe your breath for concentration.  Be in this state for two minutes.  This will help you recharge yourself and you will become much more effective, calmer and energetic.

Mindfulness and Leadership

According to management guru Peter Drucker, we cannot manage others unless we learn to manage ourselves first.  Mindfulness leadership is all about developing high levels of self-management and being aware of the environment around you. 

To explore the value of mindfulness leadership further, let me place it in context for further exploration.  Sometime back, I had met a leader who is the founder of his organization.  He had hired a head of sales for his business a few months back with the objective of improving his sales numbers.  The person he had hired was very promising, networked and had shown a lot of promise to expand the business. 

However, nine months down the road, the head of sales wasn’t producing results even after his tenure of nine months in the company.  The founder had set up a meeting with him to review the progress. The new recruit was very anxious, stressed about the review meeting as he was aware that he had no results to showcase. 

In the given situation, if you were to act as a Founder, how would you have conducted yourself?

This founder was very mindful of the fact that head of sales showed promise. He was also aware of the tremendous pressure and stress that the current situation had placed the recruit under. He followed the Choice Map as laid down by Marilee Adams (Co-founder & Partner of Institute of Inquiring Leadership).

According to Adams, people or leaders can choose to follow two distinct routes – the Learner Path or the Judger Path.  One starts down the Learner Path with neutral questions such as: “What just happened? What’s useful here? What do I want? What are my choices?” One starts down the Judger Path with judgmental questions like: “Who’s to blame? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with them?”

Learner questions generally lead you towards thoughtful solution-focused choices, says Adams.  Moreover, they tend to produce win-win relating styles which help build and solidify relationships.  On the contrary, Judger Questions tend to be automatic reactions; they often blame focused they typically produce win-lose relating styles.

In this situation, the founder made the sales head comfortable and reinstated his lost faith so that he did not lose his confidence. He was very well aware that had he pushed the head of sales into corner or blamed him, the head of sales would have probably reacted in a way that would have been detrimental to his own self or to the health of the organization. 

The founder followed the Learners path and had a discussion with the sales head to understand what was working fine, what were the facts, what was the big picture, what were the choices available, what could be learnt, what was possible etc.  This discussion helped them approach the situation from a positive perspective leading to solutions that benefited both the head of sales and the sales numbers of the company.

In leadership, being mindful to own emotions, values, feelings, and at the same time having the same awareness for others make a real big difference. 

Strategies for managing Multi-generational workforce

Interview meeting at “Dream Company”
(12 noon, Monday)

HR Head of “Dream Company” who happens to be from Gen X, meeting a fresher for an open position in his team.  Extract of one of the questions he asked -

HR Head: Where do you see yourself in five years from now?

Management Fresher: I want to be sitting on your chair, clearly to be HR Head of this company or some other company. 

Wondered with this response?  For people who come from Gen X and some part of Gen Y, they may find this response to be impractical and may even label the candidate with carrying attitude and unrealistic aspiration.  But when you look at this from the current generation perspective, they find it normal as they pretty confident and believe in themselves and have bigger aspirations. For them job does not mean monthly paycheck, it is the mean to fulfill and live their purpose.  Very recently I met a young fresher who had quit his company within few months of his joining as he could not find alignment of his purpose with the job he was offered.  This is a big loss for the company.  When I went deeper into this issue, I discovered that his functional leader who belongs to Generation X was not able to appreciate his aspirational need and wanted him to learn and contribute in what was offered to him.  This difference in thinking among generations require a good amount of orientation and sensitization.  HR needs to do a lot on orientation and sensitization of these multi-generational workforce so that they could appreciate each other’s perspectives and could work effectively under one roof like a family. 

India has more than 65% population either as Generation Y/Millennials or Generation Z. what does it mean? It means that this generation will be commanding the future. They are redrawing the rules of society, corporate world, and indeed politics.  Generation Z is about to enter the corporate world. With this new generation entering the organization, the rules of the organizations need to be redefined as well.  Organizations must need to gear up to make changes to make it future ready for its own benefit and advantage. Some of the suggestive changes are listed below –

1.      Purpose based Job: With the enhanced employability focus in the academia and exposure to ‘learn by doing’ and ‘e-learning opportunities from across the world’, Millennials and Gen Z have become more aware and clear of their needs and aspirations.  Unlike their parents, job does not mean a source of monthly income to them but they look at alignment of their purpose with the job being offered.  Very recently, I came across a fresher who onboarded us a couple of months back, he came back to us and mentioned that he was not liking his job as it was not aligned to his purpose and he quit.  Probably we would have never imagined this in earlier generations where somebody would leave their first job citing reasons like this and become jobless. There is a need for organizations to understand and appreciate the different thinking and thought process of new generation and offer them alternatives where they may find alignment to their aspirations.

2.      Empowerment on Job: Micro management will not excite or engage the new generation.  They will soon become disengaged and the price organizations will pay for this would be huge.  Managers need to be orientated and trained to become more empowering Managers.  Accountability shift with responsibility is imminent.  The new generation does not appreciate Bossy term, they need somebody who could coach them and empower them and also mentor them so that they are successful. 

3.      Regular Performance Dialogues: Regular performance dialogues are essential today.  No surprise feedback conversation at the end of the year.  New generation appreciates constant conversations on their performance. They need instant feedback.  I am glad that there are many organizations which have already moved away from annual review process to regular dialogue based performance process.

4.      Feedback vs Feedforward: Most of the times, performance discussions are based on what went well or bad in the past which is feeding the ‘back’ and rarely it moves to feeding the ‘forward’.  The new generation requires developmental discussion where the discussions are happening around how to enable them reach their aspiration.  What are the key and critical expectations from their job and role in future.  How their strengths can further be leveraged and what developmental support is to be provided to enable them overcome their improvement opportunities. 

5.      Promotion vs Growth: Mere career progression/promotions would not make individual feel happy or satisfied. Growth means continuous learning and hence companies must need to detach title progression with growth alone.  Limiting people to same job for long will not help, providing opportunities to people to rotate their jobs, leading newer assignments, attending career focused learning programs and conferences will rather be looked as Growth by them. 

6.      Preferential based Rewards System: ‘One size doesn’t fit all’, offering standard reward framework to everyone may not be the right approach.  HR needs to relook at its offering, benefits basis preferences or segments of the population. One example could be to look at CTC structure and make it flexible so that within same CTC, people have opportunity to distribute their compensation to different components basis their liking. This will create a sense of empowerment and satisfaction among the Millennials and Post-Millennials.  

7.      Listening vs Active Listening: Sounding listening through engagement surveys once in a year is not sufficient.  They are vocal lot with enormous opinion, hence would prefer an environment where their voice matters and is heard.  So companies need to become creative in lending their ear out to them through various platforms and initiatives and this would definitely make them feel wanted.

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Employability Gap, Challenges, and Solutions

Employability Gap, Challenges, and Solutions

Nitin Pande’s dilemma on fresher hiring as Delivery Head of BeDifferent.org
Monday 1200 HRS, BeDifferent’s Office

Taking a sip of the coffee at noon in his office, Nitin talks to his HR Leader and shares how frustrated he feels when he sees these resignations of freshers who joined BeDifferent last year.  He had ensured they were trained effectively for last one year and now after having invested too much on their development and readiness towards becoming productive, a few of them had resigned.  He has started to believe that instead of providing technology solutions to his customers, his company is turning into a factory of training hired candidates for other companies. 

The situation which Nitin is facing is not unique in Indian IT Industry.  There are two issues associated to this. One, companies don’t have enough stickiness to retain the young. Second, due to non-employability of young candidates, companies are forced to put them through rigorous training programs. By the time the new candidates become productive, the company would probably have invested over 10 to 12 months on their development and readiness for putting them on to live customer projects. 

Addressing the Issue of Employability at its root:

A few months back, 3DPLM – Dassault Systèmes R&D Lab in India, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to set up Product Innovation Lab at Walchand College of Engineering-Sangli.  This would be the sixth such Product Innovation Lab in Walchand.  The primary objective of these labs is to create and provide a platform to all the young minds in Engineering colleges where they can “Learn by Doing”. This proactive method would not only enhance their employability but also cater to the Skill India mission.  All our labs have been well received by all the colleges where we have entered into such arrangement.  Students that are actively participating and engaging themselves in these labs have benefited the most from the practical orientation and hands on experience provided by these labs.

As a 3DExperience company, our objective is to transform the learning experience by offering academic and research institutions opportunities to leverage the power of experience to transform the way people interact with and discover the world around them.  To help today’s students be better prepared for tomorrow’s real world experiences and research scientists empowered to find better answers to difficult challenges more quickly, we have equipped them with accurate 3D models of the real world and know-how to use them.  Providing students access to and training to 3D technology has never been more imperative.

In the Indian context, we find that while Industry has forged ahead and while as a nation we have advanced in the areas of Information and Technology, our academia and research facilities have fallen behind.  We continue to read and hear various reports which are published from time to time indicating how broad the gap around employability is. Out of 100 engineering graduates, not more than 25 are employable.  As of today, graduates from colleges have to undergo rigorous training programs, including shadow projects for 6 to 9 months, for them to be ready for the organization’s requirements.  Sometimes, by the time these young minds become productive, a company may have already invested on their development for over 12 months or so.  IT companies are becoming more of training schools than being innovation hubs.  Besides, the cost to training is very high not because of training but because of losing valuable time to create and provide Innovative solutions to the market especially in the environment where competition is intense and fierce. 

Key Gaps in Employability: Employability requires three key ingredients of competency – Knowledge, Skills and Attitude.  Knowledge is just one component and not the only factor.  While academia has been doing a good job on the knowledge front, it has failed to address the gap in technical skills development, including the enhancement of soft skills. A major reason for this is that the speed at which the curriculum is revised at Universities is not agile enough to keep pace with industry .

If Universities invested in creating full-fledged practical experiences for their students, their placement ratio and credibility will soar automatically in long run.  For the right results, academic institutions should partner closely with industry.   

Such partnership would mean investment from the industry both in terms of time and money, with uncertain ROI.  However, if this investment is channelized effectively, it could result in positive changes that work to the benefit of both the academia and industry.  

I am listing below some initiatives that can be taken up by Industries –

• Setting up Product Innovation Lab to enable the culture of Innovation in the colleges Provide ‘learn by doing’ opportunities to students who would then be able to think and learn beyond their conceptual and theoretical learning. In Dassault Systèmes, we truly believe that when we provide such opportunities to students, they can learn faster and also innovate.  Future innovations would come from such labs. 

• Mentorship interventions for Professors.  Unless Professors or Faculty members are not trained on new technologies and skills, they would not be able to teach their students. This can best be supported by Industry.  Conducting regular webinars, having mentorship programs for faculty members, inviting faculty members to visit company premises and share new trends with them including giving them demo on new emerging technologies can benefit Academia in a big way.  In Dassault Systèmes, we have been actively partnering with colleges in this space and have an outreach program for skill development of professors and faculty members. 

• Corporate world understands the importance of soft skills.  Organizations invest a lot towards enhancing the soft skills of their employees.  Often, Industries find the soft skills of hired candidates not meeting standards.  Having experiential sharing from the corporate sector including learning around ‘campus to corporate’ journey will be of great help.  Having connect programs and experiential sharing sessions from corporates to campuses would go a long way in addressing this gap.

• Encouraging Alumni-based mentorship program.  All students who have graduated must pay back their colleges by mentoring students. Their timely guidance will better prepare students to be effective in their first corporate job.

Attitude

Knowledge and Skills of an individual are driven by attitude. Based on my experiences in different organizations, these are my suggestions to address shortcomings on this front.

• Understand and focus on one’s strengths without being overly concerned about competition
• Understand the importance of soft skills competencies such as Communication, Problem Solving, Client Orientation etc. 
• Deciding between Compensation vs. Learning Opportunities 
• Missing alignment to company culture and value systems 
• Restricted domain or a skill set (companies prefer employees that are agile that can change their skill set to current demands) 

The requirement is two-fold: Accept these issues and start sensitizing and make students aware of these challenges. Secondly, partner with Industry or training partner to bridge this gap. This should help ensure more employable candidates.