Ravi Bhuthapuri

A few years back, Sam, a manager in a tech company in India, learned that he was not getting a much-awaited promotion. He felt let down and his first thoughts were, “I should quit my job. I worked so hard and yet I am not being recognized.” He knew that his highly emotional state was […]

Decades ago, thanks to delays in getting a US workers’ visa in Montreal and later in Madras, I showed up at the office of my employer in Pennsylvania two weeks after a Delaware client had planned to start a project. The client was not pleased and took the extreme step of cancelling the entire SOW

Not long ago, when I was delivering a session on ‘Personal Effectiveness’ as a part of a Leadership Skills program, we discussed the importance of defining our “personal brand”. As we explored this topic, a participant asked me why I had not included ‘Authenticity’ as one of the ways we define who we are and

In my last post, I described coaching and what it entails. I also wrote that coaching is not easy, that because of a habit of helping others with advice, we can quite easily fall into the trap of telling our team members what to do, in a directive way. There are many other things too

There are many ways you can support your team members’ growth and development. You can give them constructive feedback, challenge them with stretch goals, delegate new tasks to them so they learn new skills, provide them relevant training programs, enroll them in a job rotation program and mentor them when they lack the know-how to

Many years ago, when a client expressed his displeasure at how an issue was being resolved, our support team experienced a raft of emotions. Anxiety about the amount of time it was taking to fix the problem was accompanied by a fear of losing the client soon after. There was frustration too that the software

(This post by Sridhar Krishnan was originally published in 2013 on the Transcend Talent Transformation Blog.) Google ‘Rajnikanth Bacon Number’ and here’s what you get: Rajnikanth’s Bacon number is 3 Rajnikanth and Anupam Kher appeared in Uttar Dakshin. Anupam Kher and Jennifer Lawrence appeared in Silver Linings Playbook. Jennifer Lawrence and Kevin Bacon appeared in

If you are a manager, it is inevitable that you will have tough conversations with your employees. The reasons can be manifold. You may have inherited a team from a manager who did not deal with its personnel problems. You may have an employee whose performance shows no sign of improvement despite several rounds of

The last two years have thrown up in sharp relief for managers everywhere the need to understand mental health, how it affects our employees and what we can do to help. We have learned how fragile mental health is. We have also learned that we did not perhaps have the most effective ways of talking

Dear reader, I am starting this post with a simple question to you. What are your blind spots? As leaders, we are constantly told to enhance our self-awareness, to know ourselves. Surely, nothing can be more central to our self-awareness than knowing our own blind spots. Correct? The metaphor, ‘blind spots’, comes to us from