To get better results, change your Approach!

“If you’re not getting results, change your approach.  The best way to get unstuck is to change your approach.  You learn the most from trying something different.  Sometimes this is uncomfotable, but that’s what growth feels like.” (MSDN Patterns & Practices Blog)

Above quote is from J.D. Meier’s blog and I totally agree with this. I have seen people with different approaches. Some people stick to their habits and don’t want to change the way they are working. Even I have seen people arguing against changing approach and even don’t want to listen that their approach is wrong or there is a need of change in their approach. This is the worst thing that I have seen people doing. People even have to pay off sooner or later but they don’t want change, even after failure. They find different reasons, blaming others or subordinates, or the situation. But they don’t realize that this situation is due to their approach.

Approach is the thing that can lead you to either success or failure. If by adopting one approach you get succeeded, it is not necessary that you will always be succeeded by that approach. With the passage of time and changing situation, you have to change your approach as well. One approach won’t always take you to the top. You have to take different routes, with different approaches, if you want to go up the ladder, otherwise your direction will be downwards.

Overqualified employee is an Asset, don’t lose them

There is a very nice article Overqualified Employee: A Liability Or An Asset? on Rozee. One point I totally agree with and thought I should post it on my blog. Here is its excerpt…

How To Deal With An Overqualified Employee?


Utilize His Expertise

If you have an overqualified employee on the team be sure to utilize his experience rather than feeling threatened by it. His expertise is a valuable asset for you and you can utilize it for the progress of your company.

If you don’t utilize his expertise then he will not be motivated. As author of the article has mentioned here…

Downside Of Hiring An Overqualified Employee:

Lack Of Motivation

… the work will not be challenging enough for him and he will get bored quickly, loosing focus and motivation. When an employee loses focus he instantly starts looking for another job and thus becomes a flight risk.

How change can bring motivation?

I always believed that bringing change is one of the key factors which develops people’s interest and keep them motivated. But I was surprised to see that how promoting another person in team can motivate others, specially where situation is worse and people are fed up. Bringing change can charge people up, but we have to see that what type of change is necessary. Sometimes a change can demoralize people, specially when people are already happy with something.

Another factor to keep your team motivated is to communicate with them and ask their problems, and try to solve it. Again, solving problem will bring change and your team will become more responsible, honest, and motivated.

How to kill your time by hardcoding?

My colleague asked me to help him solve an issue he was facing. I sat with him and after spending more than half an hour I realized that someone has hardcoded the server name :@ while we were assuming that we have already moved to another server.

The main thing to realize here is that if we have spent few more minutes in making the server name configurable at first place then we could have saved hours that we spent later just to find out that server name was hard-coded. Not doing this results in frustration, waste of time, de-motivation, brings down the moral of the team, and finally kills productivity and you lose credibility.