The Element of Believing in Someone and Its Hope for Helping Them Move Mountains

Silhouette Hands Thumbs Up by George Hodan

In The Element of Affirmation and Its Hope for Believing in Ourselves, I told you how Laura H believed in me even when I did not believe in myself.

Thanks to her faith in me, I was able to take on the role of being a one-person commissions team at one of the hottest Silicon Valley companies.

Palm Inc - the company that launched the much desired and much loved Palm Pilot.

Laura H had an uncanny instinct for understanding this:  if you believe in someone, they will do great things.

Laura’s belief in my capabilities changed my life.

I was able to break into a new career that really fit my lifestyle.

I learned to handle commissions.

And then I stuck with it because the job helped me command things which were important to me.

Things like autonomy and flexibility.

In my job, no one told me what to do.

And though I had to fight for it, I got to where I could set my own schedule; and work from home a lot.

Working from home cost me visibility in an already invisible job.

While handling commissions made me visible to the salespeople whose commissions I calculated, I was invisible to the Finance team - except when the accrual did not match the payout, when they would jump on my neck.

But since it allowed me to be more efficient and balance my work and personal life better, I chose to work from home over getting recognition and getting ahead.

I loved the extra time created from not having to dress up for work, or pack lunch, from not having to commute to the office, or spend time on office chit chat.

If my boss rarely recognized me for my contribution (having grudgingly given in to the telecommuting), the sales team made up for it.

They were genuinely appreciative of my hard work and would let me know at every turn.

Whether I was working at the office, or working at home, I would spend a good part of each day quite isolated.

So when a sales person would call with a question –it would be the social highlight of my day.

I have a story to tell you in connection with this.

Tara, one of the Palm salespeople who had been with the company for several years, rose to become the VP of Sales.

One day after she had taken up her new position, she called me.

“GODDESS”, she said, when I answered the phone, “how are you doing?”

My job was invisible, so hearing the VP of Sales say “GODDESS” to me was music to my ears.

I felt terribly important and valued.

And it wasn’t just a one-time thing.

Thereafter, every time we spoke, Tara would start the call by saying “GODDESS” to me.

One day – maybe six months to a year after Tara had first said “GODDESS” to me, I was conversing with one of the other Palm folks who were in a sales support role like me, and dealt with Palm sales people frequently.

Tara came up during our conversation.

The sales support person said: “You know Tara absolutely loves me.  Every time we talk on the phone, she calls me GODDESS.”

Pop. My bubble burst.

I realized I had not been singled out for the “GODDESS” honor.

Tara was bestowing “GODDESSES” left, right and center.

But I resisted bursting the bubble of the sales support person by telling her Tara had been calling me GODDESS as well.

And I liked Tara so much, I didn’t grudge her this revelation.

If Tara called all of us GODDESSES, so be it.

We all needed to be encouraged.   

We all needed to feel special and important.

I continued to appreciate it when Tara called me GODDESS.

When you know someone likes and appreciates your work, it goes a long way

Praise and recognition, if given on a solid foundation of trust in someone’s capabilities, can be a powerful influence on their performance, motivation, and desire to excel.

When someone has earned their chops, it never hurts to acknowledge it.

In fact, if you need them to pull more rabbits out of the hat, this is what you should do.

In one of my advertising jobs in India, there were these two account servicing guys who worked as a team.

Okay– I will tell you one of their names – it was Uday.

Whenever Uday and Kalyan (yes I think his name was Kalyan) had a new creative assignment for us (by us, I mean Ravi D, the Art Director and myself), they would come to us and say “How’s our favorite creative team?  Ready for a new challenge?”

This would work like magic on us.

Ravi D and I would be inspired to do our best. It didn’t matter that the client was TVS Electronics, and the product was a printer.

We did some of our best work at Contract Bangalore for Uday and Kalyan. 

I remember one of the other account servicing teams coming to me, and saying, “Is it because we don’t flatter you like those guys, you always try to blow us off and avoid working on our assignments?”

It was partially true. 

This other team rarely showed excitement for anything we produced. They never ever went “wow” or “great job”.

How could we want to pull out all the stops and do great work when we didn’t feel the work mattered to them at all?

People live in constant fear their fires may be spent, they are past their prime, and they will not be able to pull another  rabbit out of the hat.

So they need to be reassured as often as necessary, and reminded they have a successful track record and can do it again.

They will especially need to be reminded of this when they are at a low point.

I feel strongly about this, which is why I wrote How To Feel Good About Your Accomplishments When the Chips Are Down.

The positive benefits of praise are tremendous. It may be the only bright spot in someone’s day. 

When we have had a good day at work, we go home with positive energy and we are able to deal with whatever is waiting for us at home. I have talked about this in my post Element of Affirmation and Its Hope for Believing in Ourselves.

We should praise more, because the impact of praise does not stop with the recipient, but rolls over to all the people they come in contact with the rest of the day.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that when someone is praised, they are likely to be more cheerful, more cooperative, more inspired, more understanding, more tolerant, more generous and more patient the rest of the day.

As I said, I continued to enjoy Tara’s GODDESS praise.

This is because I trusted the intention behind the compliment.

Tara never used it as a tool to get me to do something special for her. 

Every call was a GODDESS call.

Beyond praise

Frequent recognition rewards can also be a powerful motivator and keep our creative fires burning.

On my first stint in HTA, I was the beneficiary of some pretty cool practices to recognize and encourage creative spark. 

One of them was the practice of bestowing a Creative Person of the Month award.

If you won that award, you got to see a caricature portrait of you (like the artists do on Fisherman’s Wharf) go up on the wall of the Creative Aisle, alongside caricatures of previous recipients of the Creative Person of the Month award.

Whenever you did a good job, or went above and beyond the call of duty, HTA would also privately recognize you with a gift card to the Taj Coromandel bookshop next door

Praise – useless when phony, gold when genuine

Praise is tricky. 

It is a clichéd scene in almost every family movie, or sitcom which has parent and teenager characters: A teenager will try to toady the parent with a compliment. The parent then will ask “So what do you want now?”.

Right enough, the son or daughter will have a hidden agenda – such as wanting a chunk of money to buy an expensive pair of sneakers, or seeking permission to go on a trip with friends. 

This is manipulative praise and should be reserved for family sitcoms.

If you praise someone only to get something specific out of them, they will cotton on to it sooner or later.

And they will never trust your praise again.

Praise must be delivered on a foundation of trust. 

Trust is built up over time

Trust takes time to build. Only when people have seen your performance and work ethic over a period of time, will they trust you to deliver the goods.

From this trust, can come not only greater autonomy and flexibility, but greater responsibility and opportunity.

I am grateful to all the people who have believed in me; people like Laura, who believed in me before I proved myself, and people who once they believed in me,  trusted in me, and based on that trust, gave me autonomy, flexibility, greater responsibility and new opportunities.

My friend and one time client Mariam is an example of one of them.

Let me tell you about her.

From trust can come greater autonomy and flexibility and opportunity

Shortly after I gave up full-time employment to start Purple Patch, which was after my second stint at HTA, I ran into Mariam.

She was an account servicing manager whom I had worked with in my first stint at HTA.

She now had her own subsidiary business within the ad agency Sistas, and she specialized in financial advertising.

 “Minoo, “, she said, “I heard you have gone independent.  Come work for Sistas.  I will get you a retainer.”

Mariam introduced me to Chari who was the manager at Sistas.

Chari, like Mariam, proved to be a steady supporter of my dreams to successfully go independent.

I enjoyed working for both of them.

But the rest of this story is about Mariam.

Like Laura, Mariam wanted anyone who worked for her to succeed and thrive, and cared deeply about them.

One of the first things she said to me after I started working for Sistas on a retainer basis was, “Minoo, since I am traveling so much, feel free to use Debbie in my absence for typing or other secretarial assistance.”  This was a boon to me.

(Debbie was Mariam’s secretary. She turned out to be a person with a heart of gold. I will tell you a story about Debbie and me some other time)

Soon Mariam had built up enough of a clientele, she could leave Sistas and go independent with a full-fledged financial communications agency, TnQ Communications.

At this time, Mariam began to pay me for each assignment I did for her new agency.

TnQ quickly became one of the bread and butter clients of Purple Patch.

Though pre-ipo corporate advertising by its nature, had to be stodgy and staid, I liked working for Mariam.

She valued my work and made me feel good.

And she cared about me.

Let me tell you the story about my mother’s poetry book.

My mother was a person who lived to write.

In her lifetime, she wrote one published book “The Incredible Mrs. Martin”, one unpublished book, “Temple Bells”, several stories for the newspaper, and a large number of poems.

Mummy kept up with her poetry literally till the last year of her life.

One day, when Mummy and I were both still in India, but in 2 different cities, a cousin of mine who was a regular visitor to Mummy said to her, “Aunty, I have a friend who can compile your poetry into a book and print it for you, if you like.  If you give us a small advance, we can start the typesetting right away.”

My mother was very excited.  She forked over the advance and eagerly waited.

But though my cousin might have had the best intentions, the project got waylaid, and my mother had to forget about the money and about seeing her poems in print.

Until an idea came to me. I was in advertising. So didn't I have the resources and connections to get this book printed?

I secretly decided to print the book of poems for Mummy and surprise her with it.

First I had to select the poems which would go into the book. 

Mummy had written a lot of poems, and I could not fit them all into the book.

I did not know which ones to select.

So I sent the poems to my friend Anita and asked her to make the selection.

I also asked Anita to identify the best poem in the book.

On one of my trips to see Mummy, I then had Mummy write this poem in her own handwriting. 

I didn’t tell her what it was for, but I was going to use this poem written in her own handwriting on the cover of the book.

An art director at Sistas designed the cover for free; and the print manager of Sistas assisted me with getting the book printed economically; I knew hard cover would cost me more than soft cover; but I was set on it.  And so, two hundred hard cover copies of a Twig in A Torrent got secretly printed.

At the time, I was doing a lot of work for Mariam.

When she learned of the birthday present I was getting ready for Mummy, you’ll never guess what she did.

She knew she would be in Bangalore, the city where my Mum lived, during mummy’s birthday week. 

She said “Minoo, I’ll tell you what, ask Debbie to book you a ticket to Bangalore on my account, so you can be there on your Mum’s birthday and give her the book.  I will meet you in Bangalore, and we can discuss the campaign you are working on at lunch at the hotel where I am staying during the week.” 

So I flew to Bangalore on Mariam’s account on Mummy’s birthday and I surprised her with the first 4 copies of her poetry book.

This was Mariam. 

In my working relationship with her, she continued to surprise me with gestures big and small  - which showed me she cared for me beyond our professional relationship.

Not everything has be negotiated

Telecommuting and being able to set my own schedule have been a big deal to me, ever since I became a Mom, and tools like vpn, web conferencing, email, instant messaging, skype and voip have made it possible for people to work from home. 

At every full time job and on every assignment in America, I have worked hard to build my credibility, so I could then ask to telecommute.

But telecommuting is a privilege that is hard to keep and is forever threatened. 

In down times, particularly, telecommuters become targets for dumping new work on – it is assumed they are handling less than a 100% workload.  I have experienced this again and again, and have often had to fight tooth and nail to stave off the dumping. 

So I am very grateful to the managers who didn’t put me through this. 

Judy and Garyn were two of them.

I was a contract Commissions Analyst at a company reporting to Garyn, when he requested me to become a permanent employee.  

I said “Sure Garyn, but I was wondering if I could work from home two days a week during the summer when my daughter is out of school.”

“Sure thing,” he said.

When summer was ending, I went back to him and said, “Garyn, summer’s coming to an end, so I will be back to working all 5 days at the office”

I was surprised when he said,” I have no problem with you continuing to work 2 days from home, Minoo, if it’s okay with Judy.”

Judy was the new commissions manager who had just been hired. I now reported to Judy and Judy reported to Garyn.

When I told Judy what Garyn had said, she said “If you want to continue to work two days from home, Minoo, I have no problem with it either.”

I said, “Judy, if it’s okay with you, I’ll come to office all 5 days of the week, but I would like to leave office every day in time to pick up my daughter from school and work from home the rest of the day. 

“That’s fine too, Minoo. Go ahead”, she said.

This was just the beginning.

A year later, when gas prices blew through the roof, Judy said, “Minoo, with gas prices being so high, if you want to work 1 or 2 days from home to save on gas, I will be okay with it.”

Imagine – she offered telecommuting to me, over and above the great schedule I already had.  I was so grateful.

Judy would also keep track of when the school breaks were coming up – whether Christmas break, Winter Break or Spring Break.  She would come to me a week before the break and say, “Minoo, do you want to work from home during Spring Break. I know Tanita is going to be out of school.”

She would spare me the embarrassment of asking for extra flexibility.

Judy’s kindness would inspire me to give my very best to my job.

Unfortunately, the downturn in the economy starting 2008 impacted us, and my telecommuting became a big issue for the managers above Judy.

Once again, the threat of being dumped with unrelated work came up; as I said in my post The Element of a Beginner’s Mindset, employees become powerless during downturns. I wanted to reclaim the power I had lost.  So I quit my job in 2010, and have been a contract Commissions and SPM consultant ever since. 

But I will always be grateful to Judy and Garyn for the autonomy and flexibility they bestowed on me. 

Since becoming a contract SPM person, I have worked remotely more than gone into offices.  I try and feel out a manager’s comfort with working remotely and having a flexible schedule.  I am pleased to say that every manager, including the ones who are not used to it at all, have come round and given me leeway.

The Inner Drive

We must remember that every human being has an inner drive.

They want to succeed.

They want to meet a challenge and beat a challenge.

They want to beat expectations.

They want to hitch their wagon to a star.

But they can’t do any of this if you don’t have faith in them.

The challenge of every manager is to communicate your faith and gratitude to every person working for you in both word and deed.

If you do that, you will get the best work out of them.

They will follow you to the end of the world.

And put many of the normal considerations aside.

Understanding what makes people tick

This is what I know from my own experience.

I will take a small flat fee to get a break in a new field

I might work on an assignment which appeals to me for very little money.

If I like an environment, I would be willing to earn less money just to continue working in that environment, even eating up extra hours worked.

I will be tempted to work an assignment with an easy commute, or one in which I can telecommute and set my own schedule.

I enjoy working on assignments for people who believe in me and are good for my self-esteem.

I will end this post with one of Mummy’s poems, remembering the manager who made it possible for me to fly to Mummy on her birthday with her poetry book A Twig In a Torrent in my hand.

A big thank you to the manager who made that possible… and to every manager, who, by being sensitive to my needs, has made me want to give them my very best.

On to Mummy’s poem……

The Sage’s Words

And they approached the sage’s robe.

And touched the saffron coloured hem.

O master! Cast they eye upon our woe

The utter desolation of our souls!

They trod on stormy waves and stretched

Begrimed and earthly care-worn hands

For soul-uplifting “darshan”.

And the sage looked upon their helplessness

And the sick panic of their inner state.

His eyes were filled with pity for their pain

And casting searching gaze on them, he spoke.

Look’d you for happiness from pleasure’s lure,

Yea from the glitter false of riches’ galaxy.

From passion’s short-lived ecstasies,

And sensuous caverns of delight;

From foods and wines and pleasure’s phantasies,

And grisly grin of grabbing avarice –

Thus plunged you into denser, deeper night.

Bound in the fetters of your earthly might,

Wrapped in possessions, now you stand;

Souls stifling, bound at feet and hand –

My friends you are indeed, a sorry sight!

Go then! He raised his arm aloft –

Shake off these fetters from your hearts

And clad in simple nothingness,

Naked of all these earthly glorying –

Thy only jewels, the precious timeless pearls

Of faith and truth and boundless love.

Adorn thyself with these.

And having turned thy back upon the gaudy world.

Having washed off its clinging, tarnished dust,

In un-encumbered, pristine, nakedness –

Return to me.

As always thanks for reading and have a great day and week….M …..a Pearl-Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay and Majella for their comments on my last post on Facebook, and thanks to all the rest of you for your votes.  P.S. This post is for all the great managers out there. P.S.2: My post No Need for 23andme features another of mummy's poems. You can link to the post here.