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Sustaining the Fire is the “Crux” than just Taking Initiatives


"Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."

― Nelson Mandela

When I started my career in the software engineering field 2 decades back, the only way to achieve success in my mind was – to do “hard-work”. From initial experience, I started believing, that it was not “hard-work”, but “smart-work”. I have been blessed, as I got opportunities to work with some of the best project managers and leadership teams. I was told, that “smart-work” combined with being flexible and taking new initiatives can take you to greater heights.

I have been successful in following these mantras in corporate career, but then I faced a new dilemma. It took me many years to realize, that in-spite of my good programming experience, my daily-work (mostly managerial) was taking me away from understanding the core issues of my team members. My understanding of team-member real problems was no where near to what they were truly facing! I saw my leadership faltering during such a period.

Later, with more blessings, I got a new opportunity to work with a small team, where I was “forced” to work on the “core” development tasks.

This opened-up my eyes to a new reality that I had missed for such a long time!

The importance & power of “Implementation” compared to sharing of “Innovative Ideas” or initiating a new way / approach!

“Sustaining the fire” is the crux than just taking initiatives.

I am happy to see many leaders today promoting innovative and creative ideas within their organizations. What grossly misses out is the involvement of the leader to “sustain the fire” or be with the team to take the amazing idea forward with an exceptional level of implementation. This also applies to procedures and protocols, that are sometimes “blindly initiated”, but never “implemented” in their true sense.

The need of the hour is “involved leaders till the end” to ensure the success of initiatives taken by team members or the leadership themselves.

“Sustaining the Fire of Initiatives” (or “True Implementation”) has the below basic needs:

  1. The will and full involvement of the leadership to ensure, that the initiative succeeds.
  2. The leadership has the cognizance of having the required patience and gives enough time for the initiative to succeed (or learn from failures).
  3. The perseverance of team members to push forward, keep learning and provide quality feedback to the leadership team.
  4. Continuously improve and refine the idea implementation to extract its true power for the benefit of the organization.

Once, the above is understood and applied in its true sense, nobody can stop an organization from becoming the best in the industry!

The best organizations in the industry innovate and implement diligently till the end!

Following are the immediate benefits to an organization:
  • Confident and motivated team members with renewed will to take up challenging tasks in future.
  • Improved productivity as the leadership and teams gain more insights from innovative ideas (and / or procedures).
  • Amazing insights on team-spirit and team collaboration due to the implementation endeavor.
  • Better organizational efficiency and outcomes in working with complex projects or programs.
Nowadays, as more and more organizations are moving towards welcoming innovative ideas to deal with complex problems, the above takes center-stage to build a strong work culture and help move the organization towards bigger goals.

- Written by Anand Nanavati (SupraDigit Solutions)


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Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

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