Do you want to be Successful? Here’s how!

As a keen observer of people from different walks of life and their behaviour, I have come to the conclusion that success is not only the life-force of an Identity, but that it is also subjective. While each of us may dance to a different music, beat our own course on virgin path, look at possibilities with our unique pair of eyes and give distinct shapes to our professional destiny moulding the clay of nous and effort in our separate ways; the bottom line for measuring success remains universally the same. You ought to be the best in what you do, deliver to the best of your ability and strive for greater excellence at all times; it is then that you are truly successful.

Defining Success

While to the world, in its most generic manifestation, the rich entrepreneurs and businessmen, the heads of organizations, famous people in sports, media and entertainment are all supremely successful, I have a skewed view on that. To my mind the cobbler-by-the-street corner who has been practicing his craft over all these years and has become the block / colony favourite is a successful man. The deft nurse who gets asked for by most of the patients, the one who does her work with utmost sincerity to the Hippocratic Oath and ably assists the doctor in saving many lives yet many a times remains nameless, is a successful health provider. The teacher who has earned a reputation of churning out students who go on to become stars in their chosen profession, who however stays on at the same school year after year content with practicing her job to the best of her knowledge and with a rare sense of commitment, is a highly successful Guru.

In the hotel scenario, would a hotel be able to justify its luxury, five-star tag if it were not for that immaculate bottle washer,  the finicky, squeaky clean housekeeper, the superlatively creative chef brigade, the committed and competitive sales force, the safety conscious and energy saving engineering team, the finest florist whose handiwork leaves such an impression on the guests that they may return to the place just for the fantastic arrangements that stay on the conversations long after the guest has gone back to his native place.

Many years back we had a lady who used to work for us at home, tending to our domestic needs. Like other members of her profession, she worked in several other houses besides ours. But what stood her apart was that she was never short of work. People asked for her to come and join their households, she was bestowed with a lot of gifts both on occasions and otherwise. We took turns in giving her money if she ran out of cash or needed the extra buck for getting herself or her husband treated. When she decided to leave this line and join a school as an administrative support, we all gave her glowing references – all true, mind you. Even now she visits us and is welcome anytime. And I think she is one of the most successful people I know. She is not rich, mighty or famous, but she IS successful.

If Sunita Williams is a successful astronaut and Neil Armstrong the first successful man on Moon, so are the set of skilled workers who work hard to ensure that every cog in the wheel of their spaceship works smoothly. If the flamboyant striker in a football league team is successful then so is the goalie who does not drop even a single ball.

If we must take names of the very famous from the world of hospitality, then Cesar Ritz, Conrad Hilton, Bill Marriott Jr., Barry Sternlicht, Jay Pritzker, PRS Biki Oberoi, Ian Schrager, Isadore Sharp, Horst Shulze are such legendary stalwarts who have shaped the way we will ever view hotels. These geniuses have changed the rules of the game uplifting simple inn-keeping to the art of selling desire and dreams, luxurious living and hedonistic lifestyles. But would these greats be such impresarios and game changers if it were not for the army of successful valets, hops, attendants, Chauffeurs, chefs, bakers, bed makers, sentries and sales people – all led to business victories by star General Managers who remain the chief custodian of the brand image and ethos!  

As said before, way to success is individualistic with personal preferences defining the modus operandi to get to the final destination. Perhaps, one hotelier is a populist, has a lot of yearning and ambitious desire, is hungry for recognition and for being the best in whatever he does and plays unabashedly to the gallery. He has a deep need to be the number one in whatever he chooses to dabble in – casinos, cruises, adventure resorts, even awards and the recognized lists of the rich and famous. The second could be more niche, like to do only what he really likes to do; runs wonderfully innovative and creative hotels yet shuns the arc lights and turns down millions of bucks offered by Corporates wishing to partner with him. He may have a maverick inclination in his business sense, follow his heart and break several moulds in the process. The third hotelier may cash in on his personal strengths – flamboyance in personality, ability to attract media attention, developing creatively out-of-this-world sub-models within his brand and is a trailblazer in his thoughts and product development. All three hotelier types have been seen to be superbly successful in the world of hotels, yet each has a different approach or strategy. Three distinctive personalities, three strategies and three success stories!

It is an established fact that caste, creed, colour and social standing have no bearing on success. However, there are several common threads that run through successful people in their respective ilk and genré.

Four Attributes of Success –

Hard / Smart Work

The first thread or quality definitely is hard work or smart work. If you need to get somewhere you will have to burn the midnight oil to get there. There are no short cuts or quick fixes. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uttered the following famous words, definitely my favourite quote –

Lives of great men reached and kept
Were not obtained by sudden flight;
They while their companions slept
Were toiling upwards in the night.

That was then, but even now look at the success stories of the geek-entrepreneurs dotting the Silicon Valley skyline and you will discover that many of these young guns end up sleeping for only a few hours putting in 18 working hours to realize their dreams. I am not advocating less sleep. What is being said is that one must be able to deliver more and surpass expectation.

If you want to be promoted, if you want to move up the corporate ladder then you need to be a fast, smart worker who packs in quite a punch in terms of his deliverables, quality and quantum of work.

Perseverance

The second quality would be persistence, perseverance and a consistent internal push. We would not have had light bulbs or telephones or planes or the revolutionizing concepts of relativity and Archimedes principle, to cite a few examples, had it not been for the never-say-die spirit of these zealous, determined folk. How many times have we been told by our seniors – If you try and fail once then try again. Would any of us have learnt any of the stuff we did while growing up, be it academics, sport, dramatics, elocution or hobbies had we just tried them once and not gone back, again and again? Ask the innovators, writers, scientists, manufacturers and entrepreneurs and they will reel off some mind boggling numbers for the times they tried, failed, tried again, failed once again, re-attempted ………………till they finally succeeded.

With persistence I would link in grit and tenacity that keeps you in the groove of your chosen activity.

So go for it and keep going till you get there.

Passion

 

The third most important quality is, undoubtedly, passion. That definitely is the main driver in your path to success. If you don’t let that little light within you extinguish or quell the inner voice that eggs you on and if you keep the fire in your belly alive and stoked then it is passion that does it for you. It is passion that keeps you motivated in the face of flak, failure or fear.

Fervour, ardour, enthusiasm, zeal, craze, drive - call it by any name but it is passion that is your undying spirit which keeps your dreams alive and brings you a step closer to your coveted calling.

Vincent van Gogh, Christopher Columbus, Johann Sebastian Bach, King “Tut” Tutankhamun, John Keats are some of the world’s super famous and successful who either died poor or unknown and gained fame only posthumously. But it was their unstinting passion that kept them at it as they went about churning masterpieces after masterpieces.

Serendipity

If I could get to vote a fourth quality then it would be serendipity. The streak that sees the need, that truly believes that necessity is the mother of invention, that takes risks and craves for finding the extraordinary among the ordinary.  The DNA that stays dynamic and active in the subconscious yet yields happy, useful, accidental discoveries by chance. It is the curious, insatiable spirit and the un-accepting diehard mind that urges you to pave a new road, YOUR course in a direction uncharted before.

The ‘W’ Factor

 

To sum up, lets coin the ‘W’ factor – Winning attitude with a high winsome quotient; Want as in desire or ambition; Way as in methodology, strategy, action plan; Wisdom as in assimilation of knowledge with practicality; Why – the curiosity, the thirst to know more and do more; Where to – the vision, the far sightedness; Will as in determination and fanaticism and finally Worship – by that I mean faith, veneration of the one above (whatever shape and form he or she takes for you) and a belief in yourself as an integral part of HIS universe.

Therefore, success is an attitude and a way of life. And yes, nothing succeeds like success!

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Note - Picture courtesy - Google Images

Acclimatizing for Above target Achievement!

Organisations are really microcosms of the larger universe we live in. Hence they can be hot, cold, tropical or temperate. They can also be dry, balmy, Mediterranean or equatorial. The combined energy stemming from the top and flowing through all its elements makes them so.

Organisations are also carbon copies of the people who inhabit these institutions. While a lot of emphasis is given to well-designed buildings, defining looks in terms of the exterior and ergonomic layouts within, what forms the core is the characteristics the organisations imbibe from the organisational denizens. And by this analogy, organizations can be ethical, temperamental, dictatorial, friendly & warm, manipulating & politically charged and so on.

Finally, what really shape the organisational climate are the dominant traits of the top leader at its helm. So whether the top dog is fair, biased, aggressive, assimilative, open-minded and inclusive or clique and coterie centered, insecure or confident, the organisation tends to take on similar features and harbour the climate that screams of the same defining set of behavioural facets.

What Shapes Employee Behaviour?

Wikipedia defines organisational climate thus – “Organisational climate (sometimes known as Corporate Climate) is the process of quantifying the “culture” of an organisation. It is a set of properties of the work environment, perceived directly or indirectly by the employees, that is assumed to be a major force in influencing employee behaviour.” What must be added is that, the Climate is actually a derivative of the employee bearing and actions intertwined with the Company brand philosophy. On the other hand, well set organisational climate shapes up employee deportment and impacts their efforts. It is, indeed, a complexly circular relationship with one being the causing agent of another and vice versa.

Nationalities do play an important role in defining organisational climate. So, there would be different organisational cultures in America or Europe that would differ from what exists in Africa or Asia. We have heard enough about how Americans or French or Japanese or Chinese or Indians work in their own milieu. And several hand books have been written on how to understand, perform and survive in these varying cultures. But then with decreased geographical distances by virtue of shorter time spans required to travel around and increased virtual and technology thrusts, organisations have fast become multicultural and multinational bodies that should and have allowed thriving of people from different cultures, have respected the cultural sensibilities while all the time ensuring that it all dovetails back into the common vision and mission of the organisation at large.

Organisational Culture as a Product of the Nature of Business

Secondly, nature of business plays a key role in defining the organisational culture. Therefore, government bodies function and feel differently from private companies. Old world professions like hospitals, hotels, banks etc. tend to be more formal than the relatively new businesses such as software firms, advertising agencies, media organisations or FMCG enterprises, where the culture is more informal, less starchy and more yuppy. So, while all-week Friday dressing or addressing the boss by his first name or grabbing a sandwich lunch while at one’s work station or engaging in informal and impromptu discussions in the corridors are all part and parcel of working in such organisations, all this would be simply sacrilege in the formal establishments.

But what is single-handedly most important in defining an organisation is the set of soft qualities that the employees and chiefly the top leadership bring into the organisation. This, in fact, becomes one of the major rationales for the reputation oscillating between - does the organisation manage to attract and retain good talent or is hiring, firing and frequent resigning more the norm at this place. These parameters essentially define whether the organisation is known for its best practices and often comes out on top of the most respected organisations’ surveys year after year or is it a place where people may come for short gains and quick trials, where they end up making as swift an exit as their entry.

A few years back, my young para-legal expert and social activist niece came back one evening broken and shattered from her work place that had not only formed the foundation but also helped define her professional identity for the last three years. Her main set of grouses were – there was a huge amount of incongruence between what she was expected to do and was being asked to do; with no clear definition of her roles and no proper direction from a supervising authority she was being made to run around like a headless chicken, that the top boss was whimsical, highly temperamental and given to loud & severe emotional outbursts that would end up sapping a lot of positive energy and enthusiasm, that a lot of colleagues contributed to and festered on malefic grapevine which ended up becoming fodder for the daily news and basis for the existing, rotting climate within the organisation. So much so that double promotions in a year and increase in salary structure were not proving to be strong retaining factors as against the severely damaging and driving out forces that lurked within.

Leadership Key to Healthy Organisation

In one’s career history, while growth and better opportunity are often the crucial reasons for moving out from one and into another organisation, the other main reason that seldom gets talked about openly is a huge sense of disenchantment or dissatisfaction or unhappiness stemming from a sour equation with an immediate boss or the super boss or the politically charged peer group that makes it difficult for one to perform optimally. Difficult and unreasonable bosses or a set of ogre-like colleagues is in fact a bigger, often unspoken reason for people to move and seek greener pastures elsewhere. Several HR studies, globally, have proved this fact time and again. 

In the early 1990s, as a young, sprightly fresher with rose-tinted glasses I joined the Public Affairs Section of a Diplomatic Mission in Delhi. This was my second job and I had often heard that it was Asians who were more clique-y, gossipy, with inherent biases and prone to apple-polishing. So, imagine my astonishment when I found some of my Western colleagues as guilty as their Asian counterparts. My first reaction was, “Hell! Here too!” And the second more thought after, “We all are the same beneath the veneer.”

My first boss here was a grouchy, somewhat mean, cranky man given to favouritism and unpleasant disposition.  He was tendentious towards one single person – obviously his favourite – instead of treating the entire team fairly so much so that this person embodied the same attributes as the boss, adding extra doses of her viciousness to it. At one time when I was working along with her, she would rejoice in giving me some of the most menial tasks – “just do the filing,” “get me connected to so and so on the phone,” – and had the audacity to keep the official files hidden away and stashed under lock and key lest I lay my hands on them even when I had to file. Mind you, this was no confidential data but the ludicrous behavior continued, fanned by the boss’ strong inclination towards this person that allowed for many such unprofessional acts to flourish in the department. Then one day this boss was transferred out and in came a breath of fresh air in the form of a youthful, dynamic lady who brought in a sea change in the department in terms of how we viewed PR work, how we regarded each other as colleagues, how our work was perceived by other departments and the parent Government we had to report back to. What came across bright and clear were two different modes of leadership, two distinct personalities who contributed in their own way to the manner the department looked, breathed, felt and delivered. While one was a negative influence, the other used her high standard of skills, fine leadership style, fair & equal opportunity approach to make every work day a fun and productive day and ended up turning the Public Affairs Department into a highly respected and sought after department in the High Commission.

Leaders can Make or Break an Organisation

  


My next stint for a period of more than a decade and a half has been with hotels. Now, hotels are completely multicultural organisations where the work force is truly international, hailing from different countries, of course the largest base is of the countrymen from the place where the hotel is located. Yet, in hotels it becomes extremely pertinent to know how to work together with people from as far and wide as France and Germany to Sri Lanka and China. Despite the cultural differences, this ends up adding a lot of fun elements to one’s day in the life of the organisation as you end up learning about these cultures and understanding what makes the ‘other’ people tick. This, however, is subject matter of another discourse.

In hotels, while the owner or the CEO of the hotel chain is the defining personality, the GM of the unit hotel where you may work is the lord of his own fiefdom and the team and staff pick out from this leader’s personality aspects and way of running his hotel as much as the top boss’ style percolates down.

On hindsight, having worked with six different GMs across three hotel chains, I have been fortunate to sometimes thrive and at times strive & struggle in as many organisational climates. And where there has been striving, it really has been a battlefront that has made one as hard as a rock, yet more understanding of the complexities and dynamics of a fire-pit organisation.

It has also brought home the point that leaders can really make or break an organisation. Not just what corporate literature may tell you, from personal experience, too, I can list out that –

1. The organisation can be a happy and fun place to which you look forward to returning every morning and to which you willingly want to give extra hours at the end of the day. Such organisations create an overriding sense of job engagement and satisfaction.

2. It can be such that each day, nay, moment is difficult to pass with an impossible boss breathing menacingly down your neck and wicked set of colleagues rubbing their hands in malicious glee every time they pull you down like the proverbial Indian crab.

3. The organisation can be healthy, conducive to work with unsurpassed functionality and highly ethical work practices. Responsibilities and recognition, exemplary output and rewards go hand in hand in such places.

4. It can be sick, divisive, undermining and demoralizing. What might get you ahead is hoodwinking and proximity to the influential people like the bosses or the boss’ right hand man; even if such easily ill-gotten prizes are short-lived and pen to scrutiny.

5. The organisation can be a place that allows you to blossom as a star worker with positive strokes that help germinate your skills and talent into wonderful fruits of productivity.

6. It can also be a place where there is so much of negative energy that all that can flower there is more bad blood splattered about by parasitic employees who eat into the climate.
  
7. The organisation can be a place where workers breathe in fresh air, enjoy positive influences, are allowed space to make mistakes and grow, have access to information, become a two way process in clear communication and are given learning opportunities.

8. Then there are organisations that live in the dark zone of fear, punishment, connivance and control. They operate like secret missions where unnecessary stuff is hidden and kept out of reach of the employees thereby acting as major impediment in the processes and execution of duty.

9. There are healthy and buzzing organisations that promote good work practices, innovation and creativity and encourage workers to take ownership of their actions.

10. And there are organisations where flattery, manipulation, bad performances, terrible attitudes and overall downward slope in almost all areas rule the roost. 

It has been a grave Human Resource issue when bad organisational climate leads to absenteeism, increased number of sick leaves, wastage of a multitude of man hours, loss in yield, both individual and collective, and a sharp blow to the bottom line. 

On the other hand, a good and healthy organisational climate is promoting, nurturing, encouraging and leads to brilliance in work and success in business.  

Organisations need to realize and take into account the huge amounts of time, energy and money they lose not only when good, well-trained and high performing employees leave but also when they continue to house under-performing, negative and poorly trained workforce that is more of a drain on the company’s resources as against the miniscule nothings that it ends up bringing to the table.

Organisational climate should feed off Organisational culture which in turn should be laid on the foundation of trust, respect, honesty, pleasantness, growth and excellence.

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Note - Picture courtesy - Google Images