You are a leader in your domain and you are embarking on your first or repeat onsite trip. Your proven communication skills, your success in your domain, your high “like-factor” with the customer during the many phone/email communication, and your team coordination abilities… these are the skills that undoubtedly makes you the ideal candidate to perform the very crucial role of the onsite Lead. You tell yourself, “I am ready!”.

I have been in an Onsite Lead/Manager role for nearly 8 years now, intially on rotational stints before becoming a permanent face for the customer. I have worked in the Middle East and the USA; with the Qataris, Palestenians, Jordanians, Germans, Brits, Koreans, Americans and ofcourse the NRIs. Cultural etiquettes to cuisines to movies – my understanding and most importantly my adaptability to these cultural differences became a key factor to help me build key relationships.

Do you understand your customers culture? Are your confident of changing your customer mindsets to accepting your own culture? Can you bridge that cultural gap? Now ask yourself “Am I ready?”.

To be successful at your onsite mission, you need to develop this underlying, yet not often talked about, skill that will prove to be critical. You need to be able to bridge the cultural gap between the onsite and the offshore teams because in our line of work, it is important to understand and respect cultures.

To build that bridge, a simple thought process might help:

At the beginning, you have “Your Way” of doing things and your customer has “Their Way” of doing things. As an oniste Lead, your job is to work your way towards forming a mutual understanding and acceptance of the two different ways of doing things. This takes time and this is where you will struggle but if you have the right attitude, focus and some patience, you will get through this stage. In the end, when “Your Way” and “Their Way” becomes “Our Way”, you know you have succeeded. Until then, keep trying.

Rankings are largely subjective and don’t take into account the health of the team. They also don’t take into account informal relationships between groups, executives, customers or the inherent value of the knowledge the employee has. And people certainly aren’t ranked according to their real value to the company. How would you even calculate that?

He’s right. How do we  as leaders rank performance? How can we find the right balance between the measurable and the unmeasurable achievements, between the subjective and the objective?

We are all playing the game one way or another and I think that’s fine but how do we make it a fair game for all? Can we? Or is there too much at stake?

To a great extent, I think it starts with trust and as Rob points out:

Trust is so hard to build and shouldn’t be sacrificed so easily.

But can it all be left to trust? Doesn’t trust make it subjective?

My take: We must trust the system but the system itself cannot be built on trust. Goals needs to be specific and measurable. Ranking needs to be justifiable without prejudice, without emotions, purely on results.

The question I will leave you with is: How do we build such a system?

When I saw Robert’s tweets popping on my TweetDeck inviting one and all for a virtual front row seat to his webinar on SCRUM for Managers, I was quick to accept. So did many others and it was worth every minute spent.

Robert Dempsey is a Certified Scrum Practitioner, Agile Trainer, MBA, and the CEO & Founder of the Atlantic Dominion Solutions. He introduces SCRUM to the new age Managers who are faced with a unique challenge these days - agile management. In order to manage a team in an agile environment, it is important to understand the basics of SCRUM. Robert does that wonderfully in his online presentation.

He was more than willing to share his deck with me for the 13apples readers, one which I think is one of the best SCRUM primers I have seen in recent times. So, sit back and enjoy the slideshow. Then post your questions as comments and Robert will be here to answer our questions.

The power of micro blogging applications such as Twitter lies in the fact that it is less intrusive yet very collaborative. I am able to shrink my messages to 140 characters or less, thus making it a concise and to-the-point communication tool. I am able to share reviews about a book I am reading or an article that I stumbled upon.  The objective is to share with the belief that someone somewhere read it and it helped.

I have seen that it has always been a struggle for the leaders in any organization to create a culture of collaborative teams; for employees to openly share best practices, lessons learnt, queries, ideas, and thoughts; amongst fellow team members, across project teams and departments; in a common, efficient and non-intrusive way. But If micro blogging works globally to bring people together from the corners of the world to collaborate on a common topic, in an efficient non-intrusive communication channel, while building a knowledge-base on the fly, and easy to maintain… then

WHY NOT use micro blogging as a tool within the firewalls of an organization to achieve the exact same results?

Stay tuned for “The Microblogging Workplace – Pros and Cons” - Coming Soon!

This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get. 

If you, like me, are wondering about resolutions for the new year… wait! Take a time out and click on the link below to read Seth’s new eBook “What Matters Now” where he and his blogger/author friends share what they think matters most in 2010. And if you think you know what to expect, you will be pleasantly surprised. I was.

What Matters Now

Creating ways for people to solve their own problems isn’t just an opportunity in 2010. It is an obligation. 

Until Fear is gone, (and realize he may never completely leave) make the decision to be courageous.