Vidhi Kumar
Director, People Capability at Samriddhi Consulting
Enabling Sustainable Growth - for people, organisations, and communities | Growing businesses through Learning & Organisational Development interventions My work centers around designing...
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- Building High-Performing Teams: Strategies to enhance team collaboration
- Creating Bias-Free Workplaces: Techniques to foster inclusivity and diversity
- Authentic Leadership Development: Cultivating genuine leadership skills and qualities
- Conflict Resolution Techniques: Effective ways to manage workplace disputes
- Enhancing Distributed Team Performance: Best practices for remote team management
Meet the mentor
Tricky Workplace Situation Handled
- Leadership that allows Freedom to choose what type of styles we need to follow for different team members. Every team member is different and adapting for their individual work styles is important.
- I have in fact had a leader who gave everyone freedom. In the beginning, it gave a feeling of empowerment and opportunity to shape my work the way I wanted to. However, as a team, we lacked coherence, because individual priorities started drifting away. It also can be a challenge if the team is not very mature or experienced, and needs guidance.
- Pros: Identification of who is suitable for this style and who is not. Comfortable with sharing control with team Cons: Slow to identify inter-team conflicts
- It will not work for a young team that is still learning. I am not very confident about this style working in all situations and for all types of team members.
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- I would first apply this principle to a non-leadership situation. For eg. if my mentee has to lead a team of people and teach them how to swim, would they follow a freedom leadership approach? However, if they were teaching someone to write better, maybe we could try freedom leadership. By relating them to real-life situations, I would like for them to appreciate the benefits of this approach as well as the watch-outs, along with their personal style towards it.
- Culture of trust, openness & transparency. Anyone can share ideas and question existing practices without hierarchical barriers.
- - Work from home/ anywhere; - Supporting her in breaking her day into synchronous & asynchronous activities - those she can do at home and those she has to attend meetings etc for
- The definite positive is providing room for a lot of innovation and brainstorming because everyone is together and problem solving the moment situations arise, while maintaining their own creativity. The down side is micromanagement may disengage some employees. A diverse workforce may have a variety of managerial styles and this can create greater conflicts.
- cross pollination of ideas, talking to someone from a different industry to identify solutions.
- I'd follow the kolb's learning cycle by starting with reflecting on existing experiences, what the learner feels about the topic, uncovering motivations to learn and moving to experience sharing through personal stories/ videos/ case studies. I would then scaffold this learning application by encouraging her to apply the learning in a safe environment - perhaps innovate in a small project and provide feedback to self, before seeking larger feedback.
- A poor communication strategy - for internal and external stakeholders - is harmful during crisis. In fact it prevents the organisation from creating brand ambassadors during good times too but we don't see the upsides! Providing different levels of employees with graded response sheets helps them tactfully handle such situations.
- Prevention of course is the best but crisis can occur due to various reasons. Providing succinct response guides for employees at all levels is critical. Crisis management training workshops for employees should be help pre-emptively, not when the company is going through one. Refresher training and situations reinforce concepts. Crisis management should be treated as a mandatory compliance training rather than a nice-to-do workshop.
- Taking your team members into confidence is critical so they don't feel threatened or are caught unaware when the news reaches them. I have, in the past, had two approaches - one, pre-emptively prepare them for questions and how to handle them after taking legal & PR advise. Second, keeping an open mindset because if our team members trust us, they even work towards finding solutions to the present and future crisis.
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- I would bring a development approach when mentoring someone in this skill. There is immense learning in a crisis. To go through one, using a safety net, is the best way to learn how to handle one and learn how to avoid future ones. I would also share my previous experiences of handling PR disasters, legal cases etc. which will provide them with insights into how events can turn during a crisis management journey.
- - Unclear JDs - Offer declines - Scheduling time with hiring managers
- - Anger or losing temper quickly - Mistakes in work
- Planning is a very important step that can manage stress. I also talk and communicate emotions to manage stress
- The most stressful part of a recruiter's job is dependencies on other people. Adapt to situations and take care of your health.
- I'd focus on planning and also on asking the right questions to the stakeholders. For example, when I was heading talent acquisition at a large organisation, my team often came under pressure from business for not presenting suitable candidates. I would always coach them to ask them the right questions about what they mean by suitable candidates and define a common language (like organisational competencies) to clarify it.
- - Not asking open questions - Not practicing active listening - Reinforcing the same sets of beliefs, for eg. by meeting a limited set of people
- I would certainly share my experiences as a corporate representative to campus placements at leading engineering and management schools. Just by looking at the CV, it is so human to make assumptions about the candidate, especially when one is pressed on time to make a hire. It is so important to be open and design inclusive hiring processes, like skill tests or GDs that give every candidate a chance to showcase their potential.
- The feeling of having achieved one's full potential
- Esteem. It may take another 5 years to reach self actualisation
- I'll suggest Dan Pink's book - Drive - which cements the idea that Mastery, purpose and autonomy lead to a fulfilling life
