CEO or manager,
assistant or executive... Every corporate player attends seminars,
workshops, listen to motivational speakers to learn management skills
to stay successful and emerge as a leader.
But have you ever
thought, in spite of attending great seminars, life's more
significant management lessons are often learned from the ordinary
layman's? The layman's who may lesser than your six digit earnings,
the layman who is illiterate, the layman who do not know how to be
presentable and blah blah blah. These laymen can vary from your
“kaamwali bai” to “dudhwala”, or even paperwala...
The fact is that
when you minutely observes their timings, work style, patience level,
humbleness, even the way they make excuses for taking leaves, you
will find that you need not go somewhere else to learn those
management skills. Rather you can learn valuable management lessons
sitting, observing and imaging how to implement those learned lessons
from layman's in your personal as well as professional lives.
Let's have a look at the management experience earned from the layman:
Stick To Timings:
I worked in Mumbai
for almost three years. Usually, I leave home for work at 10.30 in
the morning. I hired a maid (kaamwali bai) and asked her to strictly
come to my home for households deeds at sharp 8.30, so as I can leave
my office on time. I found kaamwali bai's in Mumbai are very punctual
about timings. They do not come few minutes earlier nor go few minute
later by saying, “memsaab! Mein late houngi to dusre kaam pe dair
se pahuchngi aur wo log ko dair ho jayegi”.
Many times it
happens that by the time she arrived, I used to sleep and she is the
one who makes me awake.
Moral: Time is
everything. The moment you are late for anything, directly or
indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, you are making other late. You
value your time and time will value you.
Continuous Consistency
Next example is the
milkman, coming to our home. Our “dhudhwale bhaiya” is so
peculiar about his time and delivery. Summers, winters or rains, he
never fell short of his duty. Many times, in prior I asked him not to
come next day (as remaining milk is enough for us for coming day).
But he still comes and asks just to assure that we will not have the
scarcity of milk due to any circumstances (guest arrived etc.) and
our kids will not get affected by the shortage (as we take cow's milk
for our children on a regular basis).
Moral: Consistency
is important in anything you do. It is not only about dedication and
sincerity. It is all about building the trust. Winning the trust
means you already won the half race, and your other skillsets will
achieve rest half.
Make Your Absence Felt
I and my husband's
day start with a cup of tea, bread, and toast on table and newspaper
in our hands. I am so addicted to picking the newspaper from the main
channel gate with half eyes closed (because more often morning tea is
made by my husband) and open my favorite page of city events, trends,
entertainment, and movies). Any which day, mistakenly, if my
newspaper wala keeps the wrong paper at my doorstep, my whole mood
got spoiled, and I immediately makes a call to him showing his
mistake. He does not bring the paper on the same day, but I remind
him to bring the old paper with him next day and the whole day I kept
wondering, “I missed which news from my favorite newspaper.”
Moral: Try to be
salt whose absence in food makes it tasteless. Develop a persona,
develop your skill set, increase your work parameter, that nobody can
match the expectation you serve or meet.
