Pradeep Hoskote

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The Making of a Manager

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to you (Julie Zhuo) – Book Summary & Highlights

Book Summaries / /

The crux of Management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going at it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together. It’s from this simple definition that everything else flows.
THE ONE THING YOU SHOULDN’T TOLERATE ON YOUR TEAM: Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton described this phenomenon in his now-famous book The No Asshole Rule. He defines an asshole as someone who makes other people feel worse about themselves or who specifically targets people less powerful than him or her.
GIVING PEOPLE BIG PROBLEMS IS A SIGN OF TRUST –  It’s an error in assuming that nobody wants to take on hard problems. In fact, the most talented employees aren’t looking for special treatment or “easy” projects. They want to be challenged. There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if you’re not sure how.

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The Playbook - Coach rules for life

The Playbook – Coach’s Rule for Life – Summary + Learnings

Notes / /

Last week I watched a very interesting series on Netflix. This show interviews legendary coaches of our generation where they share some of the rules they live by, which have helped them succeed in their lives and careers.
I found it very interesting, and I could relate to some of my experiences with my career. In some way, a project manager is also like a coach who is responsible for the project’s / team’s success and is dependent on his players (resources) to deliver their best.

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Communication Foundations for Professionals

Notes / /

A few weeks back I took a training on Communication Foundations by Tatiana Kolovou, Brenda Bailey (from Kelley School of Business), and below are my notes. A recent survey suggested that “Communication competency” being the single most decisive factor while choosing a manager in most companies! As a project manager, this is one of the key skills one should master to deliver successful projects.

Top 3 Learnings:

  1. Listening takes up ~55% of our daily time and unfortunately across the globe, there is very little training on Listening. Always listen with Ears, eyes, and Heart!
  2. Determine process or product – How you do it vs what is needed? – When I try to explain what is required from the team , I should focus more on the product rather than the process. This is because as a PM I should not expect the team to do things the way I would have done rather be comfortable with their process and deliver the expected product.
  3. When criticized, check your listening bias. De-personalize it, the intent might be that person is venting out and not blaming you for the problem!

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Feedback

5 Tips For Delivering Employee Feedback

Project Manager Lessons / /

As a Project/Program Manager – One of the most common things to do is deliver Team/ individual feedback based on the assessment of the schedule vs the current execution status.
Delivering feedback should be an effective process. Feedback delivered in an unclear fashion can do more harm than good. I have listed 5 tips on delivering effective feedback.

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Project Manger performance management

Managing poor performance as a Project Manager

Project Manager Lessons / /

As a Project/ Program Manager, Your world would be great if everyone would perform the best! but in reality, it’s not true and there is plenty of performance issues that we as project managers need to address. I have also noticed that most leaders don’t enjoy sharing feedback on poor performance with their team, but TRUE leaders never back off from such a difficult conversation.

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critical Thinking

Critical Thinking for Better Judgment and Decision-Making

Notes / /

As a project manager, on average, I take at least 5 decisions in a day..🙂 It could be a decision to onboard a resource or Add/ remove tasks from my WBS and a decision to change the schedule, various risks based decisions, project budget-based decisions, and so on.. That means it’s naturally important for me to learn and improve my critical thinking and decision-making ability. While I was looking for some pointers around this, I came across this training in LinkedIn Learning.

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How to say No

Simple Rules for When and How to say No – At work

Project Manager Lessons / /

I always struggled, in fact even now I find it very difficult to say No to random requests and favors that come my way. It’s important to be helpful, positive, and civil but you have to carve out time for yourself every day in order to get your work done and meet your deadlines. Here I talk about when and how to say No and also do that without hurting anybody’s feelings.

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Scrum 101

Scrum 101 – Things you should know !!

Project Manager Lessons / /

This week I took a refresher training on Scrum basics (from Kelley O’Connell, highly recommend you to take her course if it’s feasible ) so that I could reflect and appreciate the scrum practices I do on regular basis and also start things that I have either stopped doing or never considered worthy! So here is my summary/takeaways. Hope you like it!

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