A New Chapter- Leadership skills with Furman

5/22/2019 I was interested in learning more about how to effectively allocate resources for a project at company level, team level and at personal level. I've experience doing it at personal level but I was interested in learning about resource allocation for multi-million projects. Resource allocation is the thoughtful deployment of resources for a  project. Resources are people, equipment, place, money, or anything else required to successfully finish a project. I asked Furman what has worked for him in the past and how does he allocate resources. He gave me some real life examples and elaborated the steps. Main take aways from this session- Project prioritization- It helps strategically align resource allocation decisions  All-round visibility of the projects  Evaluation and assessing roadblocks/barriers in advance Working backwards - Answering how does the end look like and how do we get there Team commitment to reach the goal

5/10/2019 Motivation is one of the important factor that affects human behavior both professionally and personally. So, I thought that it would be good to know what derives people to achieve their best at work. There are several ways to motivate employees using extrinsic motivation but what drives them internally? I wanted to learn from Furman’s experience what has worked for him for all those years. So, I asked him what are the internal motivating factors those help employees to bring positive desired outcome at work. He talked about motivation at three levels- Company, team and individual and got into the factors those affect individual motivation. He believes that internal motivation for each person varies. He said, “ there are a lot of nuances and each individual has different drivers.”  All of us have a unique  trigger that motivate him/her  to achieve the best.  He proved his point by giving several examples. He believes that a leader should...

4/11/2019 Today’s session was a  discussion based on the book that Good to Great by Jim Collins. I took some notes while reading the book- The discussion revolved around some of the questions I had regarding the point made by Collin. The first one I asked Furman was, “do you believe in First who and then what idea?” Furman totally believes in this idea and he gave several examples to support this fact. He says that getting right people on the ship is important because that helps drive the future. During this session, Furman helped me clarify what is different between Self-doubt and Self-confidence. He asked me several questions which led me believe that sometimes  it is just self-doubt because I think that I am under-prepared or may not have answers to the questions asked by others. But he helped me understand that there is nothing wrong in saying that- you don’t know the answer. He helped me see that sometimes over thinking about you for being wrong or not ...

1/4/2019 Delegating work This session started on a very high note with Furman asking me a question that I never thought about- What drives Savneet? What are you passionate about? What makes you get up and ready to show up at work every morning? This was a very good question. Not that I never thought about this before   but the way he asked me think more about this. I came to a realization that I’m motivated by Purpose, Rising a challenge, connecting with others and autonomy. We also talked about how to providing effective feedback.   Furman elaborated the fact that it is important to provide feedback on what matters in a given situation   and is specific to person for that task/situation. Important take aways from this session- ·        Provide specific feedback that reinforces the behavior ·        Use feedback as a OREO COOKIE- the feedback sandwich approach which means starts with a p...