Simple charisma test: what makes you a leader

If  you have assigned a leadership role where you are responsible for the performance of couple of people, this simple checklist may help you.

If the following checklist returns positive results, it seems you are going to enjoy your leadership role otherwise you may gonna lose your respect.

Checklist

1.   You consider yourself responsible for the performance of your team members
2.   You are eager to know what they think about you
3.   You are eager to know and ask frequently if they are comfortable with the task or role
4.   You are eager to listen their suggestions and opinions
5.   You are able to avoid favoritism based on personal likeness
6.   You support instead of compete with your team members
7.   You insure that they have enough knowledge of the task before expecting any outcome
8.   You are well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of every single member
9.   You are well aware of the need hierarchy of every single member
10. You are not scared of their capabilities and/or performance
11.  You don’t want them to consider you as always-right
12.  You are eager to learn from your team members
13.  You always appreciate their efforts regardless if failure occurs
14.  You share the credit with the team
15.  You are able to see if any team member exploiting others or spoiling the team environments
16.  You take your team’s opinion before taking any decision
17.  You show your trust on them, avoiding unnecessary questions & letting them taking initiatives
18.  You keep your eye upon them but avoid annoying micro-management

strengths

Parasitic Culture: another Catch-22

 

Parasitic workplaces are kind of Catch-22, at least for the hosts of parasites. Here host–according to the biological definition–is one who harmed by a prolonged, close association with the parasite, who is benefitted. As per Wiktionary, a parasite is “A useless person who always relies on other people’s work and gives nothing back”. Host, one who actually works for her employer, adding value but shares the credit with the parasite and unfortunately sometimes handovers the lion’s share.

 

Here I refer it a Catch-22 because at these workplaces, usually the hosts cannot get rid of the parasites unless they withdraws from their jobs. Increment in hosts’ efforts also strengthen their parasites. Their efforts are viewed as average performance of the team; a team comprise of hosts and parasites. Even sometimes the parasites get more than their hosts as the hosts struggle to increase the productivity while the parasites struggle to get the credit.

 

Usually in starting few months the host tries to perform more in hope of getting appreciation but it doesn’t help, instead it increases the average productivity and she finds her parasite being appreciated for it.

 

Having good ethical behavior, it doesn’t instantly bother hosts to share their credit with others. But when it becomes the norm, it sucks. The host which are the actual producers, start demotivating. Then they become divided in two different groups: the optimists and the pessimists.

 

 

The Optimists

Only few of them become optimist who still believe in performance, they try to bypass the glass ceilings to show the actual picture to senior management, who are too busy in their out-of-the-box matters. Again most of them fail to adapt such kind of behaviour that is, to put efforts to present what you have done instead of doing more, which doesn’t comply with their job description. Again Catch-22, they cannot rid of their sense of duty.

 

The Pessimists

Pessimists realize that they have been caught by Catch-22. This realization and the awareness that the lack in their performance will also weaken their parasites kill their enthusiasm, ruin their motivation and decrease their productivity. This situation helps in very rare cases when this decline in team performance could disturb the management and convince them to look into the matter.

 

 

 

This post is pending, author is still working on this post …

Why Patterns Suck?

Surprised when I heard some people saying “Patterns suck”, I was eager to know why some people hate these precious guidelines which save us from reinventing the wheel, letting us using it.

Fortunately after just few days I had to work with some confident people, known as pattern-lovers. Having a lot of technical knowledge, they were used to remember the names of patterns–and there authors as well–on finger tips. People, you can speak technobabble with, for not just hours but for days. In the first place, I admired them and found myself among knowledgeable people.

Then I found something strange, besides all their knowledge they had very few success stories and their management was not satisfied with their problem solving skills.

I had started observing the causes of their failure. Mean while I had to design an architecture for a coming enterprise project. I started scaffolding by enhancing and optimizing my legacy libraries and framework with my team. I asked these people to review my approach to let my approach become foolproof.

Geeks love technicalities so I got a prompt response and they started highlighting the weaknesses, I was very glad as I got a chance to improve. But unexpectedly most of the issues identified are as follows:

Geeks: Aren’t you using NHibernate?

Me: Nope, I personally admire NHibernate for it’s pure orientation and database independence but I think that this application do not have complex business logic, instead it comprises of complex reports which is not a specialty of NHibernate. While our framework provides Report Factory and configuration as well as tiered approach for reporting. Another reason is that our expertise on NHibernate do not allow us to use it in a time-critical project at this stage.

Geek: What? Do you know where NHibernate came from, it’s a port of Hibernate, being used in the most powerful language Java. It has nothing to compete with MS’ ADO objects.

Me: Yes, I agree that Jave and it’s platforms are a lot more mature but every language or technology has some of its own specifications and advantages. Our framework and libraries are optimized with the objects provided with .Net. Our wrapper classes exploiting some new features provide in the laster version of .Net.

Geek: Hey don’t use ADO.Net objects, they do nothing but violates layering These objects are mess. You should use pure objects that’s why I recommended you to use NHibernate.

Me: I think it depends that how are you using them, in our scenario they are completely database independent because they are boxed in generic objects and are created by Abstract Factory so we can enjoy Inversion of Control, Polymorphisms, and Database Independence.

Geeks: These libraries are not open source, you don’t know what they have written in it.

Me: I admire the benefits of open source but these object are rich, free, built-in, tested and performing well in enterprise applications. I do not very often use them but I found them very useful in such kind of applications.

Geeks: You incorrectly applied this pattern; let me show you the documentation.

Me: This pattern like other patterns have different applications, I am following this approach because it performs well in this scenario. This flexibility is also allowed by experts.

Geek: No, patterns should be followed as is. They are not to be changed for performance or whatever. And remember enterprise applications, built on great technologies like EJB, looks graceful even if they are not enough performant.

Geek: Increase your number of layers like we have did in that application. You have not decoupled enough.

Me: Yes previously I do have the same number of layers but I found it as an overkill in this project, so I modified this version for medium-sized performance-hungry applications.

Geek: And why did you coupled these two major tiers, this is an unacceptable violation of N-Tier Architecture

Me: No, these are still two different layers, but I am keeping them in a single project during development as most of the developers are working on both layers. They still can be deployed on different servers.

Geek: I’m still not satisfied, a lot patterns have not been used, recommended by our gurus and we follow them because we know they are the best.

Me: They might have recommended it for some different type of project and this approach may be suitable in that particular scenario.

Geek: We found their practices the best in all type and size of projects, whatever, it’s not that simple you think it is, you have to add a lot more omplexity.

Me: May be you are true as I found you a lot more knowledgeable but I learned and beleive that a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

… that’s how I got my answer that “why people hate patterns”