Read Me/ User Guide: Monica Pillai
Hi & welcome to the guide to working with me.
What is this and why: This is your fast track to understanding how I work and how to get the best out of me. In new teams, we dance around each other and by the time we begin to get comfortable, something changes and its back to start with another person. Thank you for taking the next 15 minutes to go through this.
When I first read about the idea of a read me page or a user guide for people, I loved the simplicity of it. Writing this has been rewarding because I love trips within the mind and also because it made me assess my working systems and upgrade a few.
Caveats: Since I’m more prone to change than your average hair dryer, expect this document to change. It might sometimes look like I’m contradicting myself. That’s okay. Walt Whitman gave me permission. If any of these make you feel uncomfortable or confused, please bring them up and let me see if I can provide more clarity or context. If it’s just charming, then it’s all to the good 😊
So, shall we?
I love awful puns like…
I tend to laugh an inordinate lot and have trouble staying serious. You’ll find me admiring trees a lot.
And winter,
and the mountains
And clever jokes
And Venn diagrams
And music
And magic
And movement
And going on adventures
My work
Since it takes up most of my waking time and energy, my work deserves an important slot in life. However, my work or my role is not my identity. This is what I currently do (and have been for the past 25+ years). It is not, however, all that I am.
What this means:
I am boundaried. I came to this late in life but I guard it jealously. I hate working long hours / on random days / when I am on time-off. Emergencies are unavoidable. Anything else is not okay.
I bring in experiences and elements outside of work, such as, interests in psychology, meditation, reading etc., into my work. This helps me enrich my area of work to be more human. I was trained when I started work, to have a “work personality” and an “outside of work personality”. With intent and effort, I have merged the two, so I bring one authentic self to work. To self-regulate, I don’t talk about sensitive or personal topics (such as politics, life choices etc.) into conversations that doesn’t need it.
I make time for non-work pursuits, have airtight self-care compartments. I don’t look at emails or my phone, before 9am or beyond 7pm. This is learnt behaviour. It comes on the tail of many ignored burnouts leading to bad decisions. To care for myself isn’t a natural state of mind, but something I am normalising.
My work values:
These are life values as they apply at work. The idea behind sharing this is to let you know what drives my behaviour.
Learning: I like knowledge for its own sake. Learning is the path to that knowledge. I have cultivated a skill for learning, and it enriches me. In the last 10+ years, I’ve an equal love to pass on what I’ve learnt to others. This has led to my ongoing enjoyment of facilitation and coaching. In small groups, I find myself really enjoying the process of observing and nurturing growth. True growth comes from trustful conversations. A sub-value in this is what I call “quest”. I like going on mental adventures and finding things. Sometimes, that need extends to connecting people with things, learnings, experiences, places, other people and so on.
Consistency: I like steadfastness. I like making a plan and committing to it, seeing it through to the finish. To me, consistency is a stepping stone to progress. At work, this translates to a structured day, specific timelines, planning to meet those timelines, and an uncommon amount of undisclosed stress if that isn’t happening.
Fairness: This comes of reading all that Anglo-Saxon children’s literature in my formative years. But it’s deeply ingrained for me to be fair in my interactions. It drives my thoughts and actions when putting together guidelines and policies; and when making decisions around them as affects people. After nearly 50 years of living, I’m learning to be fair to me also, not just the rest of the world.
Stewardship: Leaving a place better than one found it – the core spirit of stewardship. The leave-no-trace life is a better outcome in my mind than one where I am on a quest for leaving a legacy. To quote my brother, “in the Lion King scheme of things, it’s giving more than you take” To that end, I take steps to environmental stewardship (city mobility is on a bike, recycling, eating local, etc.), organizational stewardship (once I align to a company, I will think of short and long term benefit of the organization and the people that it holds within. I am comfortable to demonstrate candour to the owners of the organization, and go where the consequences take me. Tolkien, in this case, via Gandalf, says it best, as he often does:
Resilience: Marcus Aurelius I am not, but being stoic is part of my wiring. Being overly stoic all the time isn’t healthy – and I have been (and often continue to be) that also. Nor is it healthy, as I have learnt from personal experience, to mistake a wall constructed around self, with boundaries. But the core behaviour – “When you are going through hell, keep going” is of value to me. It teaches me to see things through to the finish and find equanimity in doing so. One of the questions I ask myself early on in most situations is, “is it in my control?” It’s humbling and freeing, how rarely the answer is yes.
Some labels:
We like to slot people into recognizable labels to make sense of them. Given that thought, here are some to help you understand me:
Introverted: The accepted definition is someone who derives more energy and pleasure from solitary pursuits over social pursuits. That description fits me and close to 50% of the world. Read more.
Highly sensitive: About 70% of these characters are introverted.
A highly sensitive person is easily stimulated by some things (In my case, violence – even imaginary, like on a show I’m watching, sounds of distress, getting rattled by time pressure, need to obsessively plan and organize to avoid overwhelm), are sensitive towards self (tendency to beat oneself up for failures, for instance), towards others (can “read” others emotions), sensitive to environment (startle easily, get upset about someone else’s social media posts).
Curious? Read more.
Transactional Analysis drivers: In my work as facilitator & coach, I got introduced to Transactional Analysis. It brings up deep psychological truths in simple to understand ways. One of them is the idea of “drivers”. Responses created in childhood, to cope with lack of autonomy as a young social being, which are fundamentally strengths but may not serve us well if overused. These need both checking and acknowledging. More reading here. My dominant drivers:
Be strong: ““I am ok only when I’m strong” Keep calm and carry on, at all times. Be Strong’s may, dangerously, refuse to recognise their own emotional wants and needs; leave what needed to be said unsaid. They struggle to ask for help when they need it.”
Please others: “”I’m only OK if I please people”. Individuals with a strong please people driver will get on with others. The reliable volunteer. Those with a Please Others driver feel a need to comply with requests from others and can feel unable to say “no.” By helping others out, personal responsibilities and priorities are often compromised or sacrificed. Great difficulty in taking tough decisions, knowing that someone will be disappointed.”
Okay, enough about me the person. Let’s talk about work
Communication
Preferred hierarchy of communication:
- Slack/ Email
- Call (that’s already scheduled, or someone asks if they can talk for x minutes, before calling)
- Message (Whatsapp/ Telegram/ Signal/ sms)
I am almost always working with 5-6 organisations. A lot of conversations and a lot of processing is ongoing. I can’t do all that if my email is on all the time. Ditto, notifications from messaging platforms. So, they’re all switched off by default. So, if anything is time sensitive, the best thing to do is to call.
Situations & responses:
BAU: Email/ Slack, give me time to respond. I am a gradual processor of information. I like to be given time to think and respond.
Urgent: Email/ slack bare bones of the situation and call me to say check email and respond. Even if urgent, I prefer to take a couple of minutes, read through, process, and then talk.
Emergency: Call. Doesn’t matter what time or circumstances.
Difference between urgent and emergency:
Urgent: Time sensitive tasks. Ex. An applicant is taking a timed test, and has internet outage, misses the test link and wants to be reissued it to them. Or, government/ compliance related transactions. Last minute changes to compensation before salaries are credited into accounts. Basically, things hitting flash point.
Emergency: Physical/ emotional safety are examples of what I’d consider in this category. A colleague in need of help, of any other sort, seeking counsel, or being seriously upset. Ex. In my area of work, instances are, a team deployed in another city realized when they reached their hotel at 9pm, that its far away from civilization, has sparking plug points that are frying their laptops and the door latches don’t work. This was a mixed gender team. They called me at 9.15pm, which was fine, given the circumstances. I asked them to take an Uber to a café in the centre of town with all their luggage. While they were en route, I called a hotel I’d stayed at in that town, checked for the number of rooms needed (at 3x the company mandated budgets – so I took responsibility for the cost being non-regulation and got it cleared with the powers that be, later. I’m also good in choosing sensitive, kind “powers that be”, in the first place) and booked the rooms for the duration of their stay.
By the time the team got to the café, their hotel, which happened to be a few metres away, was ready for them.
Follow up: Please do. I appreciate follow ups if I said I’d do something and I’ve missed it. I won’t feel offended unless the tone of the email intends to offend, in which case…
If you say that you want to follow-up on something, and don’t follow it up with a scheduled meeting or placeholder for future conversation, don’t be surprised if I don’t bring it up either.
In the early days (let’s say the first couple of months of our work together), while I’m getting used to your communication style, work nuances, patterns etc., it really helps if you not only tell me what you think but also why you think what you think. Sharing your underlying logic helps me understand you better and therefore, help you better.
I tend to get terse in my email/ message responses, as time goes on, and I have a sense that people are comfortable with me. That does not indicate displeasure, distance or any unsaid issues… in fact, quite the opposite. If you’d like for this not to happen, let me know, and I’ll “do the needful”
Face-to-face conversations: When talking with my own team, I like these to be scheduled in, as opposed to impromptu. My mind tends to run in a couple of parallel tracks. So, for anyone depending on me for information, I like to be prepared for them – emotionally, as well as, with being in the right frame of mind, to give them as much value out of the conversation as possible.
However, with my client teams, these rules go out of the window. I am aware that people approach the “Human Resources” folks with either a query, or a concern and usually with some trepidation, because they are prepared for their needs to not get met. In such a situation where the role gives undue power to one person (the People function person), I find it best to acknowledge the reach out, and talk to the person immediately. If I’m heading into another scheduled conversation and this impromptu one is eating into the other, I might tell them that I’ll find them later, but other than such scenarios, it’s fine for clients to be impromptu.
This means that there is a fundamental unfairness to working in my team within the People function. Such is life. The long-term reward is that I try and champion careers of my team members and really stand between client teams and my team members, protecting my team wherever needed.
Reporting:
This is only relevant to people who have a reporting relationship with me. If you don’t, please skip the section and move on.
Alignment: I’d like for you to envisage, own and execute how your work vis-à-vis how that impacts the organisation goals. We will get here eventually, especially if you’re new to the organization. To this end, I’d like you to, in the first fortnight of your tenure, get a deep understanding of the organization’s goals. Find out why those specific goals are relevant and what role our team plays in achieving this.
Get multiple opinions from different levels of leadership involved in making this happen. Get solid clarity on team structures, client names etc. If you don’t understand the business, you cannot be an effective people function person. Come back to me with your understanding, so we can sharpen it.
From here on, there will be some tasks I will give you and some that you can craft for yourself. We’ll work together to figure out what falls where. At this point, its important to realize that not all the work you do will be exciting – some will be routine, others will be positively boring. That’s true of everyone’s work, mine included. So, a brave front on that is a good idea.
Planning: I would like for us to spend a short time every week going over:
- What got done the previous week
- What you enjoyed. Why.
- What you didn’t. Why.
- What will come your way the coming week
- What you want to do in the coming week
I’d like for this to be a running email, where you document learnings as you move forward, as well.
If you’d like, I can share this about myself too.
Progress: Once a month, we can catch up to assess your progress, alignment to the team’s goals, and the org goals and see what it means for your career in the short, medium and long terms. I’d like for you to look up how others do it, how we do it in the organization, and how can we create demonstrated good practices over time that we can recommend to the org at large.
Working style: I am big on informality. So, first names, for sure and it does not matter to me that I am closer to your parents age than yours.
In all the organisations I’ve worked at, in my role as the person watching out for people, I try to steer clear of politics. To that end, I am watchful of where I think politics might be inadvertently playing out. It is usually never intentional – nobody sets out to be a hero or villain in someone else’s story – it just plays out that way. Within the team, as well, I watch out for politics/ game playing and call it out if it happens. This will get called out one-on-one, where my hope is that I get people to understand their behaviour, its impact on others/ themselves/ the company; and invite them into an alternative work style. Then, we meet in relevant groups if necessary and get consensus.
Bosses are lampooned: You will find inconsistencies in what I’m saying or doing, and my intentions. You’re likely to make fun of that with others/ give nicknames/ lampoon me. That’s okay by me – it’s almost a rite of passage. But if it comes to a stage where it makes you unhappy or uncomfortable… think of this as the litmus test: if on more than one occasion, you felt like not coming to work, even though you were well otherwise, and the reason had to do with coming to office and working with me, please meet me and talk about it. I can promise, that I won’t
- Dismiss or shut you down
- Use what power I have in the org context, to harm you or your career
- Create rumours about you in the office
- Make it uncomfortable for you to continue to talk to me
- Any other mean thing
Feedback:
I’d like to create a level of trust with you where you feel like you can buy in to the feedback on your performance, that I am sharing with you. To do this, I will bring to feedback conversations:
- Data on your performance
- Patterns in that data
- Insights about your work
- What you’ve done well
- What you could do differently
If you’d like me to add or change something, after we’ve run this a couple of times, I’m happy to hear more.
If there are situations where you’ve done something exceptionally well, expect to hear about it immediately. Expect also frequent appreciation on things you might not think you’ve done well. I like the idea of appreciation of the smaller bits of work also.
If there are situations where you’ve made mistakes/ have failed, expect feedback on time, while the situation is still recent, and expect that I treat you with respect, and dignity. I will try and not equate the person with the problem – and solve the situation in both axes. If you don’t see any of this happening, that’s an example of me failing and I’d be happy if you point it out, to I can correct myself.
Micromanaging: My tendency is to go in the other direction – of getting too hands-off and assuming that things are done. So, maybe what you want to do is, if you feel more abandoned than you ought to, tell me, so I can meet you more frequently.
Taking advantage of my role:
I’d like you to actively benefit from working with me in two ways:
- As a resource who could connect you to people I might know; to give you opportunities to do work I currently do, and you might want to take on; to recommend you for external workshops etc.
- As an anchor for your professional development – to be the in-organisation go-to for your conversations on learning, growth, career, changes in professional development direction, and so on.
Monica Pillai 