Ankur Kansal_BLP008__Consulting_03Jan'12

In the chapter ‘Dealing with Resistance’, Peter Block explain how crucial it is for the consultant to deal with resistance in a consulting assignment. Resistance is an emotional reaction and is a natural and predictable response while dealing with a complex problem. There are ways to deal with resistance and solve a problem. The motive is not to fight head on with it but to get the resistance blow out itself. Picking up the cues is a very important task in a consulting assignment and the consultant has to trust what he see more than what he hear. He has to pay attention to the nonverbal message from the client like

a.       If the client is constantly moving away from you?

b.      Shaking his head each time you speak?

So, as a consultant your duty is to identify these cues and handle the resistance by the following ways

1.       Identify in your mind the form of resistance.

2.       Name the resistance and use neutral language.

3.       Be quiet and let the line manager respond to the statement about the resistance.

The effort of the client in all these steps is to be authentic and that will result in more authentic responses from the client and the consultant should not take the client responses personally.

Chapter 10 deals with moving from diagnosis to discovery. After the contract is clear and you are ready to deal with resistance, the attention of the consultant turns to the discovery phase. There are two primary objective of this phase.

1.       To develop an independent and fresh way of looking at what is going on.

2.       To create a process that leads to client commitment, ownership and action.

The main objective is not to be right but to be effective and powerful. When the line manger feels that there is something wrong in the organization, they want someone else to come in and look afresh at the problem and provide a cheap, easy to implement solution. The solution should be told to client in such a way that will help in solving the problem in a best possible way and also building best relationship with the client because it is the relationship that matters.

So the steps in this process are

1.       Redefine the problem or the cause of the problem.

2.       To develop a clear and simple picture of the situation.

3.       Include the description of the technical or business problem the client has asked for help on.

4.       Also include How the problem is being managed and possibilties that surround the technical or business issue

5.       Finally, it leads to recommendations on handling the business situation and how group manage itself.

AnkurKansal_BLP008_Self Leadership_Sep'11

It was a wonderful journey in the SOIL so far. The journey started with some beautiful thoughts on Self Leadership by Anil Sir. We were told about the 6 layers of self, starting from the outermost layer- Diversity, Instinct/Reaction, Compassion, Ethics, Sustainability to the inner most layer Mindfulness. We were involved in various activities and one of them is speaking to fire in which we offered our guilt or negative energy to the fire by speaking in a group of people. If one is not comfortable in sharing that guilt among the group, he/she can silently offer that to fire. By this activity we learnt to trust each other, giving respect to others and ability to speak the truth and to get rid of our negative energy. He told that Self-leadership begins with self-observation, which means noticing our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. We should have the capacity to think, analyse and look for creative and doable solutions and come up with the right decision. We were also taught that Self leadership also requires courage during testing times and to take tough decisions.

We were also introduced to a very beautiful concept of appreciative enquiry which is about not just look for problems and spending time to fix them. Instead we should look for what works well and doing more of that. For that, we were divided in pairs and were asked to share a real story in which we were at our best . We appreciated each other after listening to each other’s stories and felt emotionally connected.  Also I learnt that Empathy is the heart of Emotional Intelligence.

Anil Sir made us to focus and introspect ourselves so that we can make adjustments accordingly to be more purposeful and effective in our life.

On 8^th Sep 2011, we had our second session on self leadership where first we revisited our key learning’s in the previous session. Anil Sir asked various questions like Are we using our capacity?, Are we taking responsibility for my ability, capacity and accessing my source? He illustrated the meaning of habit by taking the example of Smoking which is a very difficult to quit but if we have firm determination and a will to do something nothing is impossible to achieve. We just have to be committed to learn the truth about ourselves and try to overcome our fears no matter what the outcome will be. We should not judge our thoughts and lost by the feedback we get from the world around us.

Anil Sir asked us to introspect in our lives and try to find out the answers of the below mentioned questions:

1.      What is the purpose of my life?

2.      What all happened so far?

3.      Who all are involved?

4.      What am I unaware of?

5.      Who all are the people that matters to me in my life?

6.      What is the negative energy that I wanted to overcome?

In the end of the session, we came to know about the Immunity X-Ray which is about evolving self. It talks about the things one wants to change, what is the outcome after one decided to change that thing. Most of the times, we don’t get the desired result and Anil Sir asked us to look why it happened. After giving a deep introspection, we came to know that this is all because we have some assumptions made in our mind that prevents us from changing. But if we want immunity to change, we have to discover ourselves and explore our own strengths to overcome those assumptions. I know this is not an easy task to achieve but if we have the right attitude and courage, we can achieve whatever we want in our life.

Ankur Kansal_BLP008_DomesteQ

Domesteq is a social enterprise that was established in 2007 to provide employment, training to domestic workers who will serve the expatriates, NRI to establish them in Delhi and Gurgaon.

We, team of four people went to the Domesteq office in Gurgaon in the morning where we were introduced to Shawn, MD of Domesteq and she asked about us and explained about Domesteq. After 2 hours of briefing, 2 of us asked to visit the Delhi office. It was a big office where whole of the action takes place.

There we had a talk with the staff people of Domesteq about their process in terms of how they work, how many client they have, how many people they have placed so far and other information about Domesteq.

After taking all that information, we came to know that they are involved in interviewing, training, curriculum designing, etc for the domestic workers and all the information are maintained both in hard copy as well as soft copy. So, we asked them why they are maintaining their data in 2 places because as the organisation grows, their size of records becomes large and it becomes very difficult to maintain. So we asked them if they are facing any problem in their process or they want to improve something, they simply said no and refused to talk on that and that was something we were not expecting.

Overall, the experience was good and looking forward for a more exciting journey.