I took two days off from my current break to attend Gramener’s annual leadership summit. It’s an annual two-day event with day 1 for leadership training by Navgati, a leadership coaching organization followed by internal team ideation on day 2 (my third such training program in as many years). This year’s theme was Winning Together.

Day 1

We went through day-long improv theatre based sessions with a focus on interdependence. Broadly, the idea is to leverage the strengths of different teams together.

I found them refreshing, fun and thoughtful.

At the end of the day a small focus group identified their takeaways mine being: (a) help developers understand their roles better, (b) support team members who fell behind.

Three takeaways of others that stuck with me:

  • be open to others, listen better
  • be appreciative of others work, periodically if not frequently
  • be willing to help, ask for help and be seen asking for help

Day 2

I looked forward to this day with a renewed interest in understanding how different teams collaborate to make an efficient organization.

Impact

It was great to observe how our work contributed to clients’ success with participants pitching in with stories. Very often we’re caught in the daily grind and don’t necessarily see the impact of the work. Recollecting it was refreshing.

Another exercise that I loved was for us to identify technology trends that when adopted more will increase organizational impact. The standouts were AR/VR, dataops, storytelling, augmented analytics. Gramener is already operating in once-niche-now-mainstream areas: visualization, deep learning among others.

Goals

Last year, the leadership (L1) team ideated among themselves and came up with a set of goals that trickled down the organization. This year, the next layer of leadership (L2) went through that experience of creating goals, presenting them to the larger group, taking feedback, refining them and presenting them to L1.

I was part of the platform track along with seven others (check out Gramex) and helped identify few key results (includes listening to Gramex users better!) to target.

We moved from SMART goals (tested for 1.5 years) to OKRs to reorient towards industry standards. Within Gramener, in the last two quarters – after a laggard first two quarters – manager adoption of goals has increased to over 90%. With managers involvement in goal creation this time the idea is for quicker adoption for 2020-21.

Notes

  • SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound
  • OKRs - objectives, key results