10.05.06

A380 delays

Posted in Design, Product Architecture, Leadership, Corporate Life, Politics at 8:15 am by ngkaboon

There is this lead engineer and business champion somewhere in the team, who stood up and said that the project is going to be delayed. Sure, there may have been bad design to begin with, but kudos to those who stood up.

On an engineering note, a project that is delayed is likely to get further delayed or reach a state where it is not launched at all. Something must be inherent wrong with the design and for a project of such huge undertaking, it is understandable because it is impossible to predict all possible outcomes.

05.15.06

Fairness again

Posted in Leadership, Behavior at 8:11 am by ngkaboon

The world is unfair but a lot of times it is not because of the inherent unfairness of it all. It is unfair because people have different models of fairness. Fairness is defined by the individual.

Personally, I myself have been the one making “unfair” decisions and not knowing about their impacts until a fallout incident occurs.

04.27.06

Attitudes towards work

Posted in Leadership, Corporate Life at 1:52 pm by ngkaboon

Now that I started my corporate career, I thought I share some of my strange work attitudes.

1. This week would be your last week at work. You should try to contribute the most value as much as possible (Triage and Efficiency).

2. You must make your work become simplistic enough so that they can either hire a dummy to do your work or eliminate your position (Process).

3. Seek feedback early and continuously (Communicate).

02.12.06

Motivation and incentive

Posted in Leadership at 9:55 pm by ngkaboon

I tend to believe for a person to do something, there must be either a motivation or an incentive. Of course, motivation is basically a long term incentive.

I do not know who told me this one (or I derived subconsciously through reading and observing). I always believe there is no such thing as no time. Only no motivation.

So how in general do we motivate? As a facilitator leader, we can motivate by honesty and fairness. By being honest and fair, people feel the leadership as being responsive. By responsive, I mean that people have a good feel of what they are going to get at the end of the day based on the effort they put in. The more effort they put in, the more reward they get. We are usually not fair because we do not treat everyone as equal. Obviously, a management opinion may be more influential than an operator’s opinion.

As a coaching leader, we can motivate by creating a sense of achievement. We do not put people to do impossible tasks. Neither do we put people to do over simplistic tasks. We put people to challenges that are surmountable. We provide the support both physical and mental for the people to pass the threshold and overcome the obstacle. Each time, you want the people to feel a sense of achievement. You want people to gone down wrong paths and experience mistakes. You want people to self-discover the right solution.
On a separate note, we cannot motivate if we cannot empathise. Everyone has their model of what’s rewarding and what’s not. They are not going to tell the leader what is that model and maybe, sometimes, it is not clear even to themselves. But as leaders, we must constantly strive to understand their model. Only by understanding the model could we motivate them. We cannot change everyone to follow our model of rewards. We can only hope to fulfill as close as possible to their model of reward.