Building towers and being ‘SMART’ about it!

Ask a 10 year old kid, what a goal is? Do you see him shaking his head? No? I am sure you hear him mention some generic words about mission, vision etcetera? In fact, I would wager 10 bucks that that would be the answer most of the grown-ups would give as well. I had an interesting class last week, where we were explained the concepts of these goals with a practical example. And how did we spice it up? We made it ‘IPL’ style where students were asked to bid on specific tower companies. Let us not get carried away by the fun part though. The important thing here is to understand how to set a goal. Clearly, that is the first thing a lot of people do. Without knowing how to do so, that is.

When the word SMART was used along with ‘goal’ I scratched my head in confusion. I did not have to be in an MBA class to know that a goal should be smart. But my confusion was short lived as I came to know that SMART actually was an acronym. Let us look at each of the individual letters and its corresponding expansion.

S – Specific:

                      ‘To generalize is to be an idiot’ - William Blake

This stresses the need for being specific while setting goals. A problem with a lot of goals is that they are extremely generic. Making a goal specific makes it more clear and unambiguous. The next question is how to make a goal specific.  A specific goal, would answer the 5 W questions:    What: What do I want to accomplish?

    Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

    Who: Who is involved?

    Where: Identify a location.

    Which: Identify requirements and constraints. 

In our tower building exercise, we were asked to give out a plan for our tower company and it was very obvious that our goals had to be specific. In such a case, a specific goal like 'I want to build a tower of 50 blocks in this particular location by a person named X with red bricks in order to impress people' is much more likely succeed than a generic goal like ‘I want to earn money’.

M- Measurable:

               "What gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done well, what gets rewarded gets repeated."

                    U.S Federal judge, John E Jones sure knew what he was talking about, when he said this, about the importance of measurement. A goal definitely has to be measurable because unless the destination is not measurable, the progress can never be measured and improved upon. Measuring progress is supposed to help a team stay on track, reach its target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs it on to continued effort required to reach the ultimate goal.

A measurable goal will usually answer questions such as:

·         How much?

·         How many?

·         How will I know when it is accomplished?

 In the tower building exercise, imagine how a goal like ‘I want to build tall towers’ would have sounded like! If, on the other hand, the goal is to build a tower 50 blocks high, the team would clearly be able to judge its progress and also judge how far it has to go.

A- Achievable:

                        The importance of a goal being achievable and attainable can’t be stressed enough. The policy of ‘Aim for the skies, you will atleast reach the clouds’ won’t work well with goal setting. This does not mean that the goal should be so easily achievable that the teams need not stretch them. An Achievable goal can be thought of as one which motivates the team and still doesn’t demotivate them by being daunting.

An attainable goal will usually answer the question:

•  How: How can the goal be accomplished?

In the exercise, the goal which was deemed achievable was one which was consistent with the previous achievements in the same exercise in spite of being challenging. 

R- Relevant:

                             There was a funny example that I came across while looking up the importance of relevance in goal setting. Consider this: “Make 50 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by 2:00pm”. This goal definitely satisfies all the previous criteria for goal setting. But relevance comes into the picture when we pause to look at who has set this goal. Would this be relevant for a sportsperson? Relevance is extremely important for determining where the goal attainment would take the organization. The goal should be relevant in the context of the organization’s goals. Only if that is the case would the employees be motivated for achieving it. It is relevance that makes a goal worthwhile.

In the exercise, a goal of ‘Having the floor clean’ would not have been relevant.

T- Time bound:

                               The fifth criterion stresses the importance of grounding goals within a time frame, giving them a target date. A commitment to a deadline helps a team focus their efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. This part of the SMART goal criteria is intended to prevent goals from being overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization. A time-bound goal is intended to establish a sense of urgency.

A time-bound goal will usually answer the question:

     When?

     What can I do six months from now?

     What can I do six weeks from now?

     What can I do today?

Even our goals in the tower building activity required that we complete the activity within 20 minutes. Removing the concept of time from goals makes them lose their value.  

Only ‘Three monks’ and yet so many lessons!

As part of a learning activity, I was asked to watch this animation movie, ‘Three monks’ the other day. I was taken aback by how something so simple, could convey so much meaning. A Chinese feature film shot in the aftermath of the fall of the notorious ‘Gang of four’ in 1976, it is a movie which has a subtle and yet strong message. The lack of dialogues makes it an ideal candidate for anyone regardless of their vernacular. It also has animations which children would appreciate making it an ideal lesson for children at a very young age.

To give a brief idea about the plot of the film, it 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”. A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candle-holder  leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.

Now that I have talked enough about the movie, let me dive right into what I could interpret from it. Each of the point mentioned here would first talk about the implication that I derived and also how I have faced it in my life.

From Craftsman to a team:

It was really refreshing to see the first monk worshiping the deity with so much vigor and zeal. But it is quite obvious that after a couple of days, he finds it monotonous and lacks the motivation to do anything. This is very much the case with a lot of craftsmen who are all alone in their battles against life and regardless of how good they are at their job, their perspective is minimized which results in the lack of a vision in what they’re doing. But it is quite clear that when the team is established, the monks get a common purpose and end up rejoicing what they are doing. While I have not really had any craftsmanship experience, I have often found that forming a team helps in enjoying the little things more and also gives a second perspective to what we do. This can come in handy, while facing any problem or while trying to scale up into a larger magnitude.

The need for a standard:

There is a single incident in the movie where when the first two monks are measuring the stick with their hands, the find differences in the resultant measurement. It was then that the first monk got the idea of using a scale. While the importance of this in the movie was not emphasized much, I’d like to say this: Our lives have become so much simpler because of the existence of standard units of measurement. Imagine weighing vegetables and computers through nothing but our hands!

Every team has a problem, and there is a definite solution.

“People who are winning at working don't ignore the problems they encounter.” 

While this was said by some intelligent gentleman who knew what he was talking about, I think all of us can relate to this. In the movie, even though we see that none of the monks are evil (there are actually instances of each of them showing kindness to a living thing), they end up having problems and misunderstandings when they start working together. And what next? They find the solutions which make their life much easier. Differences in personalities of people always results in the initial friction but this is the place where the manager needs to utilize his expertise in order to make them work together on a problem and give the team a chance to click. In fact, this is a direct application of the Pygmalion effect that we saw in the previous post. I,  personally, have been in a lot of situations where there were initial frictions in the teams that I worked for, but eventually the chemistry kicked in and everything becomes normal and in fact, better.

Three is greater than one.

In fact any positive integer other than one itself, is. We see this depicted in the movie through the final scene where each of the three monks’ life is made easier through the arrangement of the pulley and bucket setup. It is this principle which drives organizations to scale up and it is this very principle which makes companies better than a craftsman.

While there can be many more interpretations of this movie, I would like my readers to throw in their perspectives as comments.

After all what are we, if not a TEAM?

From Craftsmanship to Company

             Our day at class today, began with Dr. Mandi walking in his usual manner, with his sandal-colored bag by his side. While we were intrigued by what could be inside this time(he had brought  simple toys to explain us the concept of marketing the previous day), he casually opened his bag and took out two wooden boxes. Small wooden cubes containing various symbols, which had been inside the boxes, were thrown at different students in the class, who accepted them with feelings of glee and curiosity.

             While we were looking at those cubes, Dr. Mandi explained to us that we would be going ahead with a Tower building exercise with them and called out for volunteers. Being an instant volunteer, I was taken aback when he asked me how much I would pay for making these budding managers watch me build a petty tower. One's loss was someone else's gain as a bidder finally put an end to the auction by agreeing to sponsor his friends with chocolates. Minutes of concentration passed as he was kept busy by trying to stack the cubes into a single tower and he eventually stopped at 16 blocks, which was quite an achievement in my opinion.

                                        

                    Now Dr. Mandi wanted to test us on our basics. He questioned us if this activity had had any organizational principles. We all wanted to identify every single organizational and management paradigm that we could associate with this activity and decided to tell it out loud. This was when he explained us about the concept of 'Craftsmanship'. We were explained how a craftsmanship activity like the 'Tower building exercise' had 'zero management and no organization'. Even though high satisfaction can be associated with craftsmanship activities, traits like delegation, decentralization, hierarchy and norms can not be associated with a craftsmanship, we were explained. 

                     This was followed by a similar activity but with multiple participants. About 8 of us volunteered, but we were told that only one would be allowed to build the tower. On top of this, he had to be blindfolded and could only be guided by the other 7 of us. This demonstrated to us, how a substantial amount of mid-level management lacked purpose. It is mandatory in any organization that there is the identification and clear cut specification of the roles. 

 More in the coming posts!

Embarking upon a new journey

 Ever since watching this video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuELGdxwBCg), I have been really excited about the prospect of joining a beautiful and reputed institute like NITIE. One of the USPs of this particular video by MTV is the way Professor T. Prasad, more popularly known as Dr. Mandi, entertains while promising to teach his students the art of management. But it was not until 9: 05 am yesterday did I come to know that my very first class will be his.

      It was extremely interesting to listen to how he went about explaining us the opportunity cost that we were incurring in order to be part of the course. It was really refreshing for the whole class to listen to Doctor Mandi's practical yet effective way of teaching. In a subtle yet strong message, he explained to us, the importance of self-sustenance and with a hint of derision, rightly called the attitude of spending hard-earned parents' money the equivalent of begging. He put his point across using the phrase 'Aaj khi roooti Aaj hi khamana hai', which in Hindi means one has to earn his every meal on the same day. It was pretty apparent from his manners that he was a technology enthusiast and we have all been asked to join his ride of educating the masses through the social media. Starting with this post, I will try to do justice to the magnitude of this objective.
       My posts here will concentrate more on ' The Principles of Organisation and Management' and in our first class yesterday, we were told about the importance of this course. In a nutshell, we were asked to 'stop being nuts & bolts in a car and start imagining and appreciating and understanding the car itself'.  For those of you who do not understand, the car here is analogous to the organization and the employees being the small parts of the organization which make it run. This beginning has really made the lot of us want to learn more and more about the fundamentals of an 'Organization' and more importantly, teach the millions out there, what we are going to learn!