Category: Leadership

Entrepreneurship, Leadership

A Simple Guide to Building an Engaged Team

Premise: We don’t need tons of research to tell us the importance of having employees who are engaged in their work. It shows up in a lot of different ways that we can see. The result of an engaged set of employees shows up when an employee goes beyond his call of duty to serve a customer or when a team gets formed organically to address some specific issue that has cropped up during the day. It is no surprise either when that having such an engaged workforce can and does become a true competitive advantage. This also means that […]

1000Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

The 12 Stages of Burnout

Premise: As leaders and entrepreneurs, we are people with a lot of drive and motivation to do stuff. In our hustle to make progress, we often don’t realise if we start suffering from burnout until it’s too late.  So, when I looked up for a reliable way for us to find out if we are suffering from burn out, I came across this white paper written by Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North. 12 Phases of Burn out They have divided burning out  into 12 phases. You can read their entire paper here.  The 12 phases are as below. The important thing […]

Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Leap When You’re “Almost Ready”

It was almost 9 years ago. We were at a team building outbound in an adventure camp. Among other adventure games, we also had the opportunity to try out Bungee jumping. It was not very high, maybe about 250 ft tall crane from which we were supposed to jump off of. Having participated in all the adventure games, we wanted to try bungee. Out of the 12 odd people in the team, only three people were willing to jump. I was one of the three. One of my friends who thought that this was a crazy act warned me and […]

1000Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

How can We Encourage Experimentation and Risk Taking Among Our Employees

This is one of those stories that we hope never happened with us. I was a fresh graduate with no experience and in my first job. I had decent success in my first job and had reached a point where I had built enough trust with my boss that he allowed me to run one of his branch office. As part of the role, I was supposed to handle sales and procurement both. And in my eagerness to do well for my company, I sold a specific product to a customer at a price that was deeply discounted (I quoted […]

Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Declaration of Independence – Here is to the Crazy One’s

  One of my favourite ads of all time is the Apple ad – “Here’s to the crazy one’s“. This advertisement is a call to action to all of us who have a creative spark, an idea, the yearning to do something good, the frustration that we are wasting our lives the way we are living them. A lot of us are making a living not living the life that we truly want to live. I am not calling all of us to leave our jobs or to start a company or to disrupt everything. No. That is not the […]