Is our Iceberg melting??

Today Rohit wanted to see some thriller movie. I am not comfortable watching movies in that genre, and so I skipped. While thinking what to do during those 3 hours, I saw “Our Iceberg is melting” book which Rohit bought for me as Mother’s day gift (he also bought a dress and “Emotional Intelligence” book, how lucky I am!!)

“Our Iceberg is melting” is an awesome book on change management is what I heard in one of the training program, in fact Navjot also suggested this book. Thank you Navjot, good suggestion, I really loved this book. J

I found the book is not only good in Change management; one can find the following areas also covered in a good deal: Art of Influencing, Convincing, and Team work, importance of Storytelling, Impact of Social pressure and above a very subtle sense of Humor is there throughout the book, which helps in keeping a constant smile in the readers’ face.

The author has chosen extremely powerful way of teaching a management lesson through a very simple story, which can be easily understood by anybody. In fact Rohit only read this book first, I am sure he wouldn’t have understood the depth of the lesson, but he has surely understood the purpose of the book.

The author talks about 8 step process of successful change:

1.       Create a sense of urgency

2.       Pull together the guiding team

3.       Develop the change vision and strategy

4.       Communicate for understanding and buy in

5.       Empower others to act

6.       Produce short-term wins

7.       Don’t Let-up

8.       Create a New Culture

Though there are lot of key learning from this book, for me the key message is: not to become complacent, which we all tend to do once we reach certain level in our life or organization. I too felt that I have reached the level what I can manage in my career, but two months back I had an external force to shake me up and made me realize that I can run further. I have just started my next race.  

Coming back to the topic, I feel our iceberg is always melting, so continuous improvement and change will always keep us alive.

 

Categories of people...

I watched a video of “Gretchen Rubin“ who is a famous writer on habits and happiness. Looks like she has written many books on these topics. The video which I saw was about the 4 category of people, these categorization is done based on how they react to a rule imposed on them. Every day we meet many people - in office, at home, on the way, etc. Knowing which category each one of them fall, might help us in handling them better.:

 

1.       The Upholder - Responds readily to outer rules and inner rules

 

Motivating factor - Motivated by Fulfillment (by achieving something)

 

Characteristics:

- Very much want to know the rules and what's expected of them

- Want to avoid making mistakes or letting people down (including themselves)

 

2.       The questioner - Questions all rules, but will follow rules if they make sense

 

Motivating factor –Motivated by Sound reason (They should get convinced)

 

Characteristics:

- Must decide for themselves that a course of action makes sense

- Won't follow rules with which they disagree, or which seem arbitrary

 

3.       The Rebel - Resists all rules, outer rules and inner rules alike

 

Motivating factor - Motivated by Present desire  (They do, what they want to do)

 

Characteristics:

- Resist control, even self-control

- Choose to act from a sense of freedom (plus they do love to flout)

- Can sometimes be goaded into action by the though

 

4.       The Obliger - Responds readily to outer rules, but struggles to keep inner rules

 

Motivating factor - Motivated by external accountability

 

Characteristics:

-          Find it difficult to fulfill obligations they impose on themselves

-          Dislike letting other people down

-          Respond well to – Deadlines, Coaches, partners, trainers, late fees, Responsibility as role model, Being monitored

 

Know that we know how different category people react to a rule imposed on them, their characteristics and their motivating factor, I think we can now find out the category of the person we are going to interact with and handle them based on the details provided above. Ok, now let me first of all find out which category I belong to J Feel free to drop a reply, if you know which category I belong to….