I am in IIMA, on a 2 week "Small and Medium Enterprise" program. This is my first week and today is my day 5 here. The learning in the last 5 days has been amazing. When I was applying, I did not what to expect. Just because I had some time, I enrolled. I want to capture some takeaways of every class in this blog.

Day 5:
First two sessions were on 'End User computing: Modelling with Spreadsheets'. Though, I have been using MSExcel for such a long time, I was surpised to see many basic powerful features I did not know. Useful session, will be with me lifelong. Professor T.P. Rama Rao's teaching was good, carefully covering basics..

Operations Management was interesting again. Prof. Ravichandran spoke on 'Product-Process Matrix', as usual at his funniest best (if only I could attend a complete course of his... may be I should come here for 1 year PGPX). Now I understood that many of the problems faced by my earlier company were not specific to my company but are already well documented (how did I run the company without knowing all this?.. on Hindsight, if had known all this, I could have organized it in much better and may be more more money:).
'Organisational Behaviour' by Neharika Vohra was good. In the 'Leader Analysis', had points distributed in both 'Selling' (high people focus and task focus) and 'Telling' (high task focus and low people focus) manager. The analysis also says, I understand that I need to move towards 'Delegating manager' and am not too rigid on my current style.
Its important to Delegate, so you are freed to do bigger tasks. Day to Day operations should not be taking your time. While delegated be careful about
- select able/competent candidate
- anticipate resistance to change from the others in organisation and prepare to handle it
- set clear goals
- have a regular feedback and review mechanism
- Exhibit trust in whoever you delegated. Dont hover around (i.e. keep checking the status with anxeity). There are possibilities of failures, try to minimise them by planning the feedback process. If there is a failure, coach and correct the situation
- Give both Authority and Responsibility. Responsibility without authority shows that you dont trust the person, which is a recipe for failure. The person cannot motivate himself in a negative environment.
- Motivate and be present (but do not hover)
- Reward/Acheivement
- Dont dump your work. You should have fairly good understanding when you are delegating and when you are dumping (simple rule: if you dont understand the task you are delegating, you know that you want to skip the task).
- Ultimately you are responsible and owner of the task. Whoever is taking up the task should know that there will be repercussions for both of you, if there is a screwup.
- Provide right tools and resources