Be a SMART Pyg

Success “The Sweetest thing is this world”. We all aspire to be successful in life. We all try to achieve the success, but the sad yet the true part is not all of us are able to scale the heights that we dream of. It is not that we don’t try, we do try but still the desired result seems to be at another level, just like it used to happen in Mario game, the princess is always in some other castle.

So what goes wrong with majority of people? If we consider the case of majority of people, they do posses knowledge, have a desire to succeed, also they do perform the hard work to full fill their dreams, but yet fall short of them and end up making compromises.

I am not here to give some philosophical lecture, I want to tell the simple yet powerful and practical formula to achieve success. SMART goal and the Pygmalion effect.

“Smart” here is an acronym and each letter defines the traits that should be kept in mind while setting up goals.

S – Specific, Simple, Strategic, Sustainable.

M – Measurable.

A – Achievable, Ambitious.

R – Realistic, Rational.

T – Time based/bound, Tangible.

Pygmalion was a sculptor who lived in Cyprus. Women who lived on Cyprus didn't stay virtuous, so Pygmalion decided to live alone and made a perfect sculpture, Galatea. During the Aphrodite feast, thanks to Pygmalion`s prayers, the sculpture turned into a real person. This was called The Pygmalion effect.

The Pygmalion effect shows that if we want something enough, we'll get it. In management terms it can be stated as : Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. But i feel that the definition has missed an important part, motivation. While it is good to put great expectations on people, it is equally important to keep them motivated to achieve their goals and also one has to be realistic while planning the expected results from a person.

So, how to use these in practice? While setting up targets or goals for an individual or organization goals should be set in a way that they are more than what has been achieved earlier but less than the potential. Goals achieved by you should be below what you have set as the target. In this way you will strive to give your best the next time and improve your productivity in the process. Ultimately the goals will be achieved but this method will always make you believe that there is still room for improvement and hence one strives even harder to overcome the gap, this eventually leads to increase in the potential, which in turn increases the target. Also it is equally important that we keep on performing a periodic review of our goals and make necessary arrangements, if required. So the circle keeps on going, and the individual or organization never feels burdened.

At the advent of my work career I was asked to work for a project as a buffer resource, I had no clue of the work that was expected of me. At that time my manager reduced the target expected of me, this allowed me to have time to get acclimatized with the process and work. Gradually he increased the target for me, so in the entire process I never felt overburdened and my productivity didn't take a hit. Also, that was my first project, had I been not nurtured in a proper way, I might have developed a dislike for work. So being practical also has an effect on mindset of workers.

Well, give it a shot and see the results............keep me posted, how effective you find these steps.

Manage it Monk’s way

Monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of other monks. Normally we won’t think of learning management mantras from them instead we would prefer to learn religious scriptures from them. Well shall I say it’s time to change one more notion of your's.

In order to make sense to you, I request the readers of this blog to go through the video below, don’t worry it wont take much of you precious time. It has a running time of under 20 minutes. Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1980.

The link of the video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rolBiHfWokY

This film was recommended by visionary Prof. Mandi. The beauty of the film is that it not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture, and a different music instrument was used to signify each monk. The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb -

"One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."

In Hindi speaking region there is similar saying “teen tigada kaam biagada” meaning 3 people can’t work together to achieve a goal.

This films shows us the same thing in different and lighthearted manner.

I assume that you have watched the movie. Let me begin with the analysis of each character:

  

The first monk was visibly the youngest of the three monks. He is depicted to be having a kind heart, offering his prayers and conducting his chores with due consistence and adherence. However, he is still boyish and is immature at times.

Initially, being the only monk in the monastery on the top of the hill, he brings water daily  walking down and up the hill to the lake at the bottom of the hill.

When the second monk arrives, he feels happy at the idea of the second monk bringing water and laughs at his own luck. But soon when he needs to share work with the second monk, he starts feeling bitterness.

He comes up with the idea of a common scale of measurement for distribution of work with the second monk while bringing water uphill.

This conveys, on a managerial note that, in an organization, there is a need for the uniform distribution of work or the ones who work hard will be victimized.

When the fire starts in the monastery, he is the first person to realize and react. Towards the end of the story, he reconciles with other monks understanding that unity is strength. This applies for organizations also. He appears to come live in harmony with others in the monastery.

The second monk is visibly oldest of the three monks and appears comparatively mature. Though initially he volunteers to bring water for the monastery, he finds it a burden the second time, and calls the first monk to share it. He prefers two people carrying a single bucket of water to one person carrying two buckets, effectively reducing the productivity by half.

A similar attitude is most commonly found in corporate sectors. Bureaucratic prolongation of tasks that can be easily completed with little effort is something I had observed during my work experience.

The task of a good manager is to avoid such negative bureaucracy and encourage effective sharing and effort minimization.

However curiously, when the monastery catches fire, he stops the first monk and hurries himself to bring water to stop the fire. He plays an effective role in putting off the fire and plays a key role in promoting harmony in the end.

The arrival of the third monk disturbs the hard reached balance of task sharing where in all the three monks refuse to take over the burden of bringing water.

The third monk, though of good nature and always thirsty, refuses to bring water and prefers to be thirsty. This is also a very curious and common mindset of people in corporate industry wherein they would rather lose something instead of working for the common good. However, towards the end, he too plays a crucial role in putting off the fire. He is later seen working harmoniously with the team.

  

The learning:

In the movie there fire shows the disaster that the monks face and in order to save the monastery they have to give up their differences and start working as a team to douse the fire.

In my corporate life I have learnt similar thing, people will be pulling each other’s leg and would also indulge in finger pointing but the moment the task becomes mammoth and unachievable also endangering them in some or other way, they unite and start working towards a common goal.

While I was working for a client, in the initial stage of the project we were under tremendous pressure to achieve targets. The team was routinely reprimanded by the management for the shortcomings, this lead to a rift in the team because everyone started to blame each other. But then came a moment when we were pushed against the wall, the client has given us a deadline to prove ourselves or to lose the project. It was that time when all of a sudden everyone transformed and started to work as a team, covering for each other’s shortcomings. I still remember we started to fill in for our colleagues and ensured that productivity never takes a hit even if some of our colleagues are on break or ill or not present because of any reason. The result was incredibly frabjous within one month we produced a historic result. We over achieved the targets set by the client.

Also, the movie shows us about the division on labor. As you must have noticed in the movie the monks make use of variety of methods to fetch water from reservoir (pond/Lake/River) but all of the methods had some short comings. In the end in their desperation they devise an ingenious method wherein each monk does his share of important work in way that none of them feels overburdened. I am referring to the part where the monks install a pulley to fetch water. To me this is an analogy of Assembly Line omnipresent in every manufacturing industry.

The beauty of assembly line is that every one does his share of work and so with time becomes an expert in that job and this leads to increased efficiency  The same was evident in the movie, the monks were able to douse the ravaging fire with much ease once they employed this technique.

On a whole, the movie conveys the human behavior in an organisation, some key managerial insights, importance of task sharing and effective planning, use of technology to reduce effort and need for increasing efficiency as well as effectiveness.