A person who contributes to an organization or team is always more effective. Generally, managers focus on efforts and also on displaying their authority downwards. This is the age of specialists. Each executive first needs to think of the one quality he/she has at which he/she is extremely good at and which nobody can do better to produce exceptional results?

Vijay, VP-Operations of budget Hotel chain was at the no. 2 position, next to the CEO for around 20 years. The CEO a much younger person than Vijay was quite an aggressive person, a taskmaster. The sudden demise of the CEO made the board promote the VP Operations to the top slot. Vijay, now the new CEO was quite unprepared for the job as it came on too suddenly.

While he was taking the charge of the situation he asked himself the question, “What is it that I can do exceptionally well? How can I contribute? The answer that he received after careful introspection was that his tenure as a CEO was not to be more than 3 years as he was 55 years old. The only way he could make the difference was by developing people under him.

From then on every afternoon for one hour, he would take out personal files of his subordinates and individually discuss their strengths and opportunities for improvement and the action-plan they should make for themselves so as to rise within the organization. He would spend time counseling and guiding them, using all his many years of experience in the industry.Within three years he showed phenomenal growth and also developed a team of highly effective managers.

Instead of focusing on efforts can we focus on results? Rather than keeping a close eye on how our subordinates function, can we look further where results need to be obtained? That is the true yardstick of success!