Catalyst: The ultimate strategies on how to win at work and in life

by Chandramouli Venkatesan

good mentors can’t be found one fine day, but must be cultivated over time.

It requires an investment from your side to cultivate that relationship in a selfless way for long-term benefits.

Unleash the Catalyst External stakeholders like your bosses and mentors are tremendous catalysts for real individual growth and long-term career success. There are three things you can do, that are in your influence, to improve the chance that you get a good boss—being a good subordinate, working in companies which have a higher percentage

of good bosses and hanging on to good bosses when you find them. Mentors are critical to ensuring that you make the right career decisions in an increasingly VUCA-filled business and career world. Finding the right mentor is important, and when you find the right one, cultivating your relationship with them over time is critical.

In my own judgement, long stints in one company are highly beneficial to the experience algorithm.

when you are learning and building the experience algorithm from all that you have done in the past in that company, the algorithm-building becomes a non-linear, exponential curve.

the default mode is not to quit, it is to stay.

There must be credible reasons to quit, rather than the default being to quit and then finding reasons to stay.

believe there are only tw...

reasons that can allow you to take the ‘quit’ decision—learning and fit. If at some stage, you feel you are no longer learning and your algorithm is not building up, and you are sure that it is because of the organization and not because of you, then you can consider quitting your current organization. The second aspect is ‘fit’. When you feel your values and culture no longer match those of the...

It is important to examine these in detail and be sure that these factors are real, not a result of rationalization. Sometimes, people experience negative triggers—it could be a bad project, a new boss whom you don’t like at a personal level, a bad quarter of performance, etc. These triggers sometimes make you feel that there is not enough learning and that you don’t fit. It is important when you make the decision that you are able to isolate the current negative trigger you are experiencing from the more fundamental issues of learning and fit.

Career change decisions like quitting your current company are among the most important decisions you will make.

You must not fall into a trap of poor decision-making—making decisions first and then finding the reasons to justify them.

As you can see, it is a classic 2/2 matrix. On one axis is my current organization and my future organization and on the other is ‘what is good’ and ‘what is bad’.

When people first make the decision to quit and then find the reasons to justify and rationalize it, what tends to happen is that they actually see only two quadrants properly. Those two quadrants are ‘My current organization—What is bad’ and ‘My future organization—What can be good’.

In many ways, this is a symptom of a superficial, poorly made decision—when only two quadrants have been thou...

A good quit decision would be one where you are able to fill all the four boxes clearly and fairly, and the quit decision still holds.

Please make sure you evaluate the new opportunity based on how effective it will be in building the experience algorithm, how likely it is to provide you major learning cycles and how likely you are to get good bosses there who would build your foundation and drive your learning. These are more important aspects in evaluating the ‘join’ decision than pay, designation and career

Most people mistakenly assume that if you are successful in one environment, then you would

be equally successful in all environments. This is not the case. Most of us are wired to succeed more in some environments/cultures than others.

please make an effort to understand how good a fit you are in the new company and environment.

Unleash the Catalyst Career decisions, including the

decision to change companies, are among the most important decisions you will take and usually impact how successful you are in your career. The right decisions will maximize real individual growth and the wrong decisions will curtail it. In that context, I do believe long stints in the same company are highly beneficial to the experience algorithm-building because the experience curve moves from being a linear curve to an exponential curve in long stints. The decision to quit your current organization and the decision to join a new one are two different

decisions. They are best made independent of each other. Ideally, the decision to quit must be made even before you start to explore and consider outside opportunities. The decision to quit your current organization should be driven by the fundamental reasons of learning and fit. Learning is about saying your experience algorithm growth has slowed down and fit is about values and culture. Other reasons like pay, designation and negative trig...

good way of evaluating if you have made a sound decision or if you have made the decision first and then found reasons to justify it. For the join decision, evaluating prospective learning and fit in the new company is more important than pay and other prospects. Will the new place accelerate your real individual growth? Will the new pl...

Unleashing the Catalyst: Summarizing Parts I an...

Up Part III In Part I, we have covered the means to driving real individual growth. The three important concepts in this context are: Converting time into experience is the very bedrock of real individual growth. An effective TMRR model is the key to converting the time you are spending at work into an experience algorithm that will drive your success in the future. Applying the TMRR algorithm on major learning cycles is an exponential way to drive real individual growth. Just building the experience algorithm is not enough; you have ...

The key to growing productivity is to focus on the circle of influence and to make sure you allocate your time to the rocks. However, fantastic real individual growth has to be backed by good career management decisions and approach. The key to that is to make career decisions based on what drives real individual growth. In Part II, we covered what the key principles to this end are: In careers, win when it matters—which is the second half. It is pos...

To do foundation-building in the first half, make career choices that focus on depth over width, ensure completion of major learning cycles and get out there when you can. Getting good bosses is crucial to foundation-building, and mentors are crucial in making the right decisions in the VUCA world of careers and business. Long stints in one...

The decisions to quit your current company and join elsewhere are crucial and must be done right. To get them right, focus on separating the quit decision from the join decision. The quit decision must be based on the absence of learning and fit in your current workplace. The join decision must be based on opportunities for real individual growth and the potential fit, not title or pay or other trappings. If you mak...

growth, you will make good caree...

The combination of a powerful experience algorithm, high productivity and good career decisions can set you up for extraordinary career success. That brings us to the last, but very important, section of the book. We have all heard of the work–life equation. One of my firm beliefs is that the life part of work–life has a huge impact on the success people achieve in the work part. It is a highly erroneous notion that success at work is only because of what you do at work. P...

Life impacts work by shaping our personality, our values, our integrity, our characteristics, our friendliness, our behaviour with other colleagues and so on.

At senior levels, one of the critical drivers of success is leadership—how you engage, motivate and lead others is often the make-or-break for your success.

To be able to motivate and engage others, it is important to operate from the levels of mastery and purpose.

Successful senior leaders are those who manage to operate from mastery and purpose despite having an overdeveloped and hungry achievement need. One key way to resolve this paradox is to find alternate avenues to fulfil their achievement need, to find ways of feeding their hungry achievement beast outside work. That is where the striving sports come

in. In a way, these senior leaders were finding ways of meeting their achievement need outside their work through these striving sports.

These striving sports are liberating them from having to meet all their achievement needs at work. And this liberation allows them to catalyse and activate their mastery and purpose motivations at work, making them greater leaders of their teams and organizations and, most importantly, making them more successful.

develop a ‘passionate striving’ hobby in life, one that gives you a sense of achievement and broadens your source of achievement beyond work. It should be a hobby in which you strive for achievement and one that liberates you from feeding the achievement need at work, and hence lets you graduate to mastery and purpose.

However, if somebody is deeply passionate

Unleash the Catalyst Motivations at work is defined by the pyramid comprising achievement, mastery and purpose. The key to succeeding at leadership is to operate at mastery and purpose at work and not be driven only by your need for achievement. To operate at mastery and purpose you have to find a way of meeting your achievement need outside work. A ‘passionate striving’ hobby is the means to that. It is important to be passionate about your hobby as otherwise you would not be able to sustain the striving for a long time.

Leadership = (Position + Content) × Values It was clear to me that position and content were the raw materials for creating leadership impact.

If there is no content, even the highest values don’t create leadership. Such a person would be liked a lot, but would not have influence and would not be followed. Equally, position does play a role. A very junior person will find it difficult to create followership on a large scale, albeit junior folks with good content do generate significant influence. So position and content go hand-in-hand. But the explosive conversion of that raw material into the finished product of leadership is driven by values, and that is why I saw it as a multiplicative equation for values. For a given position and content, the extent of leadership difference that values can create is staggering.

‘You are not as good as your best success; you are not as bad as your worst failure.’

Humility allows you to enjoy the success without letting it affect you, without it creating arrogance in you. Equally, the grounded nature of a humble person is what also allows him or her to deal with failure when it happens.

Unleash the Catalyst The bulk of the corporate culture on values is to restrict the occurrence of a breach. I, however, believe there is an upside to superior values for long-term success. For that, it is essential to change the coding of your understanding on values, from one that says limit the downside to one that says leverage the upside. The upside of catalysing values comes from the higher leadership impact that superior values can create. Leadership impact is measured by the followership and influence that you have. Leadership impact as per the VML equation is driven by position and content and, most importantly, values, which have a multiplicative impact on leadership. The values I believed in were the twin Hs, honesty and humility. The key to honesty is to reach the level of pristine honesty, which means you focus on doing right even when others are doing wrong and getting away with it. Humility is about staying grounded through cycles of success and failure, knowing that you alone are not the reason for your success. Leadership impact based on superior values allows you to drive transformational change based on strong followership. It is transformational change that is the sign of a legacy-creating leader, and allows you to create long-term success for yourself. Superior values have to be catalysed through an improvement plan. Just living your life every day does not improve your values; you have to work towards improving them. Remember, great success requires

you to drive great change, great change requires you to have great leadership impact and to have great leadership impact, you need to have great values. In effect, great success requires the catalyst of great values.

Bringing It All Together We began by discussing that career success is a function of real individual growth. Hence, if you focus on driving real individual growth, career success will follow as a consequence. In Part I, we spoke about catalysing the experience algorithm using the TMRR process and leveraging learning cycles. We also spoke of the need to grow your

personal productivity as you climb up the corporate ladder. I think of experience algorithm and personal productivity as the necessary raw materials for success. These are the foundational blocks. Without the raw material of the experience algorithm and productivity, it is difficult to create career success even if you have good values. In my judgement, a large majority, say between 70–80 per cent of people, can catalyse the development of the necessary raw materials to have meaningful success in their careers. And if you truly embrace the catalysts of TMRR, learning cycles and productivity drivers, then you will build an algorithm that is going to set you up for exceptional success, not moderate success. However, the raw materials alone are not

enough. The catalyst of good career decisions is required to convert it into career success as covered in Part II. The key principle is to take decisions that catalyse real individual growth in the first half, which will help you succeed when it matters, in the second half of your career. Having good bosses in the foundational stage of your career and having mentors who help you with decision-making in a VUCA career world are crucial catalysts for good career choices. The most important career decisions to make are the decisions to quit and join, and segregatin...