Ravi Bhuthapuri

As a manager, I was occasionally asked by my organization to help in its recruitment efforts. The HR Team made arrangements for me and my peers to interview the shortlisted candidates and we were given their CVs a short time before the interviews started. I often found that the CVs were not very reliable records […]

Before India went into a total lock-down, I wrote about how we can build resilience in our team. I understood resilience to be a speedy recovery from difficult experiences. I thought of these events as discrete shocks to the system that we would have to absorb and quickly bounce back. But after several weeks of

In my last two posts, I wrote about how we, as leaders, when dealing with a crisis, can focus on ourselves and our team. In a crisis, leaders have a larger role to play in the context of their organization, their clients and their industry. Leaders will attend to the present, first and foremost; when

In my previous post, I wrote about how we, as leaders dealing with a crisis, can start with focusing on ourselves. When we have started to take care of ourselves, we can and should turn our attention towards our team. The expectations placed on our team will not change, but what will change are their

The COVID-19 pandemic is here and it is not expected to go away soon. As leaders managing a crisis, we have a critical role to play – our team members will have anxieties and look to us for direction and assurances and what we do and say will have a huge effect on them. But

Through the ages, the succinct exhortation, “know thyself” has been a mainstay of several cultures. From the Upanishads to Socrates to Sufism, the seeking of self-knowledge has been recognized as a crucial first step in a person’s journey towards wisdom and peace. In the context of leadership and learning, “know thyself” has a slightly different

In the 90s, in New Jersey, I was confident that my résumé effectively reflected my meagre experience and skills in technology. Until it landed on the desk of a senior Chinese-American manager, my colleague in a large staffing company. She called me to her desk and without wasting any time, told me, “Ravi, no one

Metaphors, a figure of speech, are a powerful way of communicating our thoughts and ideas. We denounce an unfair comment as “a low blow” and a flimsy plan or weak organization as “a house of cards”. We are in the doldrums if depressed and in Siberia if sitting at the worst table in a restaurant.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that all leaders want capable and dedicated team members. We are delighted when some of our team members turn out to be star performers. These are the men and women who need very little motivation from us and almost no hand-holding to get things done. We laud