What a week its been for me.
Its been a very hectic week , most of my time has been consumed by meetings . On some days i was in meetings back to back and the situation was so bad that i had no time for lunch , there were days when i had just two slices of bread for lunch or have lunch at 16:00, it was pure madness.
I started thinking if i were just in meetings all day , when would i ever get time to do my work , on Wednesday & Thursday i had to stay back for three hours more than normal just to ensure that i catch-up with emails and complete my work.
One of the key learning for this week has been the art of " Delegation" . I have had the misconception of this word , i have always thought that if you delegate , you show incompetence, on the contrary i found out that delegation works more positively both for oneself and subordinates.
For the self, it helps in freeing up time to concentrate on critical things and delegate important things to the subordinate and for the subordinate it is a matter of proving his/her capability upwards and they feel empowered, its a win-win situation made better by delegating rather than making it worse by not delegating and non been able to deliver on key things.
It has been a very key learning point for me this week. Delegate, i have seen it work for my superiors , however for reasons unknown or unexplainable , i haven't been able to use that effectively, lesson learnt, hopefully i put that to practice.
The second learning this week has been about " internal accounting" . I have never been dragged into the accounting madness prior to last few weeks but as a manager , it is one of the key strengths to posses.
It was chaos in my mind as i tried to fathom the numbers . Cutting the long story short, i was involved i understanding costs which were paid out and which was allocated internally and to try and reconcile them , just an exercise to keep the house in order.
It was mayhem , i just could not get head or tail around the numbers presented it to me and words like true up, 9+3 , run-rate etc etc.
I used to mock at people when they give big analysis post budget seasons but not anymore , its not the easiest of things to do.
Compounding the problem was to reconcile postings which originated in one currency but was accounted for in a different currency e.g. invoices in $ but posted on GBP , where in different rules come into play e.g. postings in GBP need to include VAT for the services etc , exchange rate fluctuations.
Another complex dimension to this problem was the services provided by one side of the organization to another could be complicated by the fact that the service provider and the receiver might be different legal entities under the same parent.
Prima facia it looked as though it was play with numbers and made convoluted by the manner in which it was executed but when i got down to the nitty-gritty of things it did make sense to me and was no longer a walk in the park which i expected it to be.
It was a significant learning experience to get my hand dirty on the numbers .
Another key learning was "Strategy " and how people at the top of the organization think. I was involved in some strategy discussions last week , it was just hard for me to pull my mind to a step above and think on certain tasks without going into hands on details.
It was extremely hard . Its not over yet , i am going to be involved in few key global strategy, whole of next week, its going to be fun and am sure to learn lots more. Of course strategy without political dimension and discussion isn't complete but that is for a different blog.
What a week!
