Smart Goals and Pygmalion effect

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
Napoleon Hill

Goal is not only about an objective, it is also about having a well defined plan to achieve that goal that was the inspiration of Dr.  Locke, who studied goal setting for about thirty years. He  speculated that purpose can cause action; thus, He researched the impact goals have on individual activity and on its time performance.

In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success.
Victor Cousins

If goals are well defined, it results in more directed efforts to achieve it which also includes forming of a strategy to achieve the goals.

Consider the example of Mahabharata, When Dronacharya asked his disciples to mark the eye of bird with their arrow, he asked individual that what were they seeing; some said they were seeing a bird. Some elaborated it, saying that they were seeing a bird on a tree. It was only Arjun who said, I could see only the eye of the bird and he was the only one who qualified the test.
How to set a goal  

Goal setting should be SMART ,it should serve  the following tests.

Specific:. To set a specific goal you must answer the six “W” questions:

*Who:      Who is involved?

*What:     What do I want to accomplish?

*Where:    Identify a location.

*When:     Establish a time frame.

*Which:    Identify requirements and constraints.

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

EXAMPLE:  A general goal would be, “Get in shape.” But a specific goal would say, “Join a health club and workout 3 days a week.

you set.

When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued effort required to reach your goal.

To determine if your goal is measurable, ask questions such as……

How much? How many?

How will I know when it is accomplished?

Measurable - Establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal

Attainable – When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals.

You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them.

Realistic- To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents substantial progress.

A high goal is frequently easier to reach than a low one because a low goal exerts low motivational force. Some of the hardest jobs you ever accomplished actually seem easy simply because they were a labor of love.

Timely – A goal should be grounded within a time frame. With no time frame tied to it there’s no sense of urgency. If you want to lose 10 lbs, when do you want to lose it by? “Someday” won’t work. But if you anchor it within a time frame, “by May 1st”, then you’ve set your unconscious mind into motion to begin working on the goal.
Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal.

T can also stand for Tangible – A goal is tangible when you can experience it with one of the senses, that is, taste, touch, smell, sight or hearing.

When your goal is tangible you have a better chance of making it specific and measurable and thus attainable.

Pygmalion Effect or Golem effect-

The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. The effect is named after Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw.

Our goal setting should be done in such a way that one should rate ones potential as unlimited. One should benchmark a target below the potential target. His achievements should be lower than marked target while the historical target should be below the achieved one. If the following trend is not followed and achieved target is above the marked one than the aspirant will not find motivation to achieve a goal he will not strategize his plan which in turn affect the individual as well as group’s performance.

In sociology-Pygmalion effect creates a cyclic effect-Our beliefs about ourselves influence our action, our action toward others influences their beliefs about us. Their beliefs influence their action towards us which in turn enforces our belief about us.

Craftsmanship Vs Modern Management

Craftsmanship and modern management-

 “Rome was not built in a day”. The proverb seems true in a literal sense also. History will testify the fact that the great things are not built by an individual in a day; it is the collective effort of all the people that bear the fruit.

   A Craftsman is a person who is deft in his work. He has honed his skill to the extent that he has achieved an excellence in his work but his individual skill is of no use if you will look at it from business point of view. It is the collective efforts of all the craftsmen that make a strong and successful organization .If the craftsmen from various fields are brought under a single roof then only it is possible to run parallel processes and combine the efforts of every individual to get optimum output in time bound manner. Also, if we consider craftsmanship as the centre of any organization then it will create dependency which is very disastrous for any organization to move ahead.  The recent trend of ‘deskilling’ in businesses clearly speaks of the fact. In deskilling we divide the whole process into smaller processes and deploy each individual to do this processes, in this way no individual develop any skill completely and the dependency on that individual decreases. The welding process can be deskill into ‘edge preparation’ and ‘running a welding torch’ in this way dependency on individual welder decreases. It is  also easier to control any process by deskilling.

    The point of contrast in craftsmanship and modern management is that the employee satisfaction is higher in craftsmanship as compare to modern management.

3E’s of management.

The 3 E’s of management are ‘Excellence’, ‘Effectiveness’ and ‘Efficiency’ .and excellence can be given as product of efficiency and effectiveness.

                                   Excellence = Effectiveness x Efficiency

Efficiency can be given as doing things in a right manner while effectiveness means doing right things. Analogy goes like if velocity has to be defined it is defined by speed and direction, the direction part is given by effectiveness and the speed part is efficiency which focus on rate of doing things Efficiency can be measured as a ratio of output by input but effectiveness is about choosing best option from the available one.

Theory of X and Y

The theory of X and Y

Theory X and Theory Y

The thoughts and perception of the human is responsible for his attitude and his bearing, the same goes for an organization. To explain it in a better way Mr. Douglas McGregor proposed the theory X and theory Y of human motivation. Theory X and Theory Y have to do with the perceptions managers hold on their employees.

Manager Belonging to theory X is a authoritarian and has following characteristics

1)  He assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work.

2)  Workers needed to be supervised and controlled regularly.

3)  He believes employees lack ambition and if they are not given proper incentive, they will avoid responsibility,.

Manager belonging to theory Y is optimistic and hence can be indentify as

1)  An individual who believes employees are self motivated and they practice self control.

2)   He thinks employees enjoy their work and duties.

3)  They believe employees are creative and if they are given proper environment, their creativity will flourish which would be helpful in accomplishing the goals of an organization.

Now consider the following cases

Manager X works with good employee (motivated)-

In this case workers like their work, enjoy it and self-motivated to accomplish the goal effectively under the given deadline but manager still don't have confidence on workers and keep an eagle eye to monitor each and every activity of the workers. Manager supervises them according to his/her perception not by the observation which in turn vitiates the environment all around the workers and affects their emotions also. This will create lack of trust and pacify the self-motivation. This kind of culture hampers the growth of an organization.

Manager X works with bad employee (unmotivated)-

In this case as workers dislike their work and management push them to let the work done. Without goal clarity and lack of proper strategy which leads dissatisfaction amongst workers and borne havoc between management and workers. Workers are coerced by the management to accomplish the objective. That's the story in most of the organizations.

Manager Y works with good employee (motivated) –

In this case, employees will enjoy their work. The manager feels employees are motivated and they will dedicatedly complete the assigned work. The relationship between worker and management grow stronger period by period. As the workers understand their responsibility, his work doesn’t hamper the growth of an organization and organization flourishes.

 Manager Y works with bad employee (unmotivated)-

In this case, workers are lazy and Manager think workers are good. Even though workers dislike the work, manager motivate them,   they build trust on each other and try every possible alternative which satisfy the workers. Manager provides incentives, appreciation and rewards them for the work being done. The management which follow theory Y gives more satisfaction to the workers in the organization in contrast to theory X. This attitude of management shapes the organization and expedites its growth.

the kind of scenario that i have seen in my organization belongs to category four where manager are motivated and workers are not. In this case, the organization has to come up with the various incentives like providing vehicle and car loan to them at subsidized rate, organizing the training of the workers and empowering them. Workers are given due saying in a management through union. The policies are worker friendly. The result of this can be seen as the company has lower attrition rate in an industry and growing faster as compare to its competitors.

Team Building

Dr. Prasad’s attempt to teach management lessons using games is unique in itself. This time it was cubes. He asked us to make a tower using small cubes. To make it more interesting he asked us to bid for the opportunity. The deal was finalized at Rs 500. The winner was asked to make the tower using single cube as base. He did it and made the tower of 16 cubes. Professor then asked what u learnt from this exercise. Someone said, to maximise the output one has to make sure that the centre of gravity of each cube should lie in a single line and hence company’s strategy should inline with  optimum use of resource and the output. Contradicting to everyone’s belief, he said you didn’t learn anything from this exercise because this exercise is equivalent to ‘Craftsmanship’.   

Craftsmanship-According to dictionary, a craftsman is “a person who practices a craft with great skill”. He might be expert in his own skill but his earning, scaling and scope of expansion is limited. The analogy goes like this, a cobbler might be expert in stitching the shoes but from beginning of his career to its end his scope of growth is limited. In order to scale up his business to the height of BATA, he has to bring several such cobblers together then by managing the operations, sales, human resource of the organization optimally, he can multiply and can scale his business to newer heights.

Now to give the new dimension, Dr.Prasad asked us to volunteer for tower building exercise. This time 8 people came. The person who was building the tower  had to be blindfolded, there was one person who was guiding him and others 6 had to make strategy to build the tower. This time the group was able to make the tower of 7 blocks only.

                         

Using this, he explained the current situation existing in the organizations. The shop floor worker is similar to blindfolded person. The person guiding him is similar to supervisor and the other six are like middle managers. The managers are directing the worker but chaos is so high that worker is unable to understand anything, this in turn affecting the growth of the organization. In an organization there should be top managers, workers and only small number of middle managers, only those who could justify their work and positions.

054 Chandresh Lachuriya IM 20 NITIE POM Course

            

                 From the interview to first day at College, the journey to NITIE was mesmerizing one .Resuming college life after 2 years of job experience was a big task in itself.  From 9 to 6 working to 9 to 6 class, my mind was preoccupied with the thought of boring power point presentations and lectures and i was trying to prepare myself for that but Prof.Prasad took me by surprise .

               As soon as he entered the class, he opened up his bag of toys which include a balancing butterfly and softballs. He engaged students in playing with this stuff. I thought it was his way to awake people but later he told us to sell that butterfly at Rs 500 and elaborated that if road-side vendor could sell this butterfly at Rs.70, a manager should be able to sell that butterfly at Rs.500 by finding out its USP .Suddenly a thought struck in my mind about why he is called “Prof Mandi”.

                Later, he explained the importance of blog writing. He made us to realize the fact that if every person of class would write a blog about the subject there will be 80 blogs and if every person of a batch will write a blog then there will be 300 blogs, which will become 4500 blogs if we multiply it by total number of lectures in the course. The   number in itself was big enough and if every person could influence a follower then we would be able to create knowledge revolution in India.

                He also talked about the role of teachers in education institutes. Referring to a song “another brick in the wall” by pink Floyd, he explained that teachers nowadays creating bricks, a well carved brick which would fit in a big wall. He wanted each student to be a like a wall that is stronger in its fundamentals and could withstand the unfavourable conditions.

“Socho Becho,Becho Sikho, Sikho Socho”

                 In his typical “Mandi” style, he influenced us to earn for self. He told us to find out the opportunity cost for doing an MBA.I wondered when I realized that my MBA education was costing me 2500+ rather than the academic fee of Nitie. Putting this perspective forward, he gave examples of the alumni of Nitie who created wonders in their field. He also encouraged students to come up with their ideas of establishing a company and he expressed his interest to help them.

Looking forward to more such lectures from Dr.Prasad in his “Mandi” style.