A large company selects my leadership tips book as ‘Recommended Reading’

“From Team Player to Team Leader” is my book on leadership tips for new managers. It offers simple, practical tips to a newbie manager on being a better people manager.

In my career of 25 years, I have observed that the organizations decide to promote someone from being an ‘individual contributor’ to a ‘people manager’, they typically use two criteria: (a) superior technical performance and (b) the length of service in the organization.  There’s nothing wrong in using these two yardsticks but generally the most important factor is ignored: people skills. If a team leader/manager does not posses a high level of people skills, then most of the times what we see is ‘a deer in headlights’.

When I was studying personal and business coaching at CoachU, we learned some basic coaching principles that could be used in this situation. Listening, questioning, acknowledging, challenging and feedback skills are the pillars of foundations of coaching. Blending them with my workplace experience in India and in US, I wanted to share some useful tips with new managers. FTP2TL was born out of this desire.

In 2012, a large, innovative organization in US has identified my book as a ‘Recommended Reading’ for their team leaders’ training program. Today, I will speak to the first group of leaders in this program, followed by two more session in this month. I am curious about the feedback from these participants and looking for some healthy discussion on this topic.

If you are leading teams or managing people at your work, this book will prove to be a great resource even if you are a seasoned manager. It is available on Amazon.com and an eBook is on its way.

Millennium Mantra starts new year with free webinars

Wish you all a very happy new year 2012!

At Millennium Mantra, we are starting a few new initiatives in this year and one of them is free webinars. You can learn about our webinars in many ways: sign up for our mailing list, click ‘Like’ on Millennium Mantra’s Facebook page or follow @MilMantra on Twitter.

A topic of the first webinar is ‘PMI Certifications Overview’. As a director of certifications at PMI’s Silicon Valley chapter, I have been running a monthly meeting on this topic since 2004.  When I started this event, I was skeptical and unsure whether people really want to attend an in-person meeting when all this information is available on PMI’s and many other websites. Now, after running this meeting for several years, I am convinced about its necessity and feel good that in a small way, I can contribute to the project management community. I am grateful to Silvana Wasitova, the then-president of PMI SV who gave me this opportunity for the first time.

Every month, around 10-odd persons pre-register and attend this meeting. Even if all the information is available ‘somewhere in the ether’, they want to hear it from a live human being. Perhaps when that information comes from ‘an officer of an organization’, the level of credibility goes up. May be people want everything consolidated in one presentation.  And yes, everyone has his or her ‘special case situations’ that they want to find answers about.

I have been tremendously enjoying this simple activity month after month. When people leave with a big grin and a genuine ‘thank you’ after each meeting, I feel that my evening was well spent!

Every now and then, some people register but can’t attend. A couple of times, I could not run the meeting due to other engagements. With that, I started thinking about this webinar. In this format, I can take this information to many more people than who can attend the monthly event. And the best part is it will be recorded and made available for replaying again and again. What’s the big deal, you may ask. I agree there’s no big deal in running a webinar and recording it. In fact it has become a standard practice in today’s business world.  But if this webinar or its recording reaches even one person who can’t attend PMI SV meeting or even can’t join this live event tomorrow and finds it useful, I will be happy.

This first webinar is scheduled on Friday, January 6^th at 12 PM PST.

Here are other webinar topics that are coming soon:

• All about PDUs: How to maintain a PMI certification by earning PDUs without spending a dime?
• After PMP, what’s next?: A comprehensive overview of other certifications relevant to project management community

To attend any of the webinars offered by Millennium Mantra, send an email to webinars@MillenniumMantra.com.