'Principles of Leadership" by Mr. Rudolph W.Giuliani (former Mayor of New York City)

1. The first principle of Leadership:
Believe in yourself...First of all be true to yourself...Unless you know what you stand for, you will never become a good leader.

2. The second principle of Leadership:
Have a vision...Great people in the history had all great visions and they believed where they want to be or the things that they want to do....Cases in point are Ronald Reagan...who thought communism was bad and he was the sole force responsible for the down fall of USSR...and Martin Luther King Jr...who had a dream that all American people in future shall not be judged by their colour of skin but the content of their character...
So one has to have a vision as to where he/she wants to take himself ahead in future...to be a successful leader.

3. The third one: Courage ...Ability to take Risk:
You got to be bold enough to take risk and have the courage to take it too.

4. The fourth one: Relentless preparation:
Always be prepared for any anticipated scenario in order that nothing unanticipated happens. But even at times on the occurrence of the unanticipated event you may take a modified route out of your multiple preparation for similar events to overcome such events and take the control of situation.

5. And the fifth one....Team Work:
The essence of leadership is to have very good team work. One has to assess the areas of ones weakness and see how best he or she can balance the weaknesses with the strength of his/her team members. A good leader has to be both a teacher as well as a motivator too.

6. Finally the last one... Communicate with others...
Finally a good leader must necessarily be a good communicator. One has to be able to communicate his/her ideals properly to his team members in his/her effort to achieve the goals.

Go Kiss the World - Subroto Bagchi

Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, "Mind Tree Consulting" to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on defining success. July 2nd 2004

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government - he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your Subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement Of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.
Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my >mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair".

I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate
even once.

Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees >darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even With my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a
third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst.

One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was >empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned.

His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post- independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event.

My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.

Success is not about the ability to create a definitive Dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

SECRET OF LEADERSHIP

THE SOUND OF THE FOREST
Back in the third century A.D., the King Ts'ao sent his son, Prince T'ai, to the temple to study under the great master Pan Ku. Because Prince T'ai was to succeed his father as king, Pan Ku was to teach the boy the basics of being a good ruler.

When the prince arrived at the temple, the master sent him alone to the Ming-Li Forest. After one year, the prince was to return to the temple to describe the sound of the forest.
When Prince T'ai returned, Pam Ku asked the boy to describe all that he could hear. "Master," replied the prince, "I could hear the cuckoos sing, the leaves rustle, the hummingbirds hum, the cricket chirp, the grass blow, the bees buzz, and the wind whisper and holler."

When the prince had finished, the master told him to go back to the forest to listen to what more he could hear. The prince was puzzled by the master's request. Had he not discerned every sound already?

For days and nights on end, the young prince sat alone in the forest listening. But he heard no sounds other then those he had already heard. Then one morning, as the prince sat silently beneath the trees, he started to discern faint sounds unlike those he had overheard before. The more acutely he listened, the clearer the sounds became. The feeling of enlightenment enveloped the boy, "These must be the sounds the master wished me to discern," he reflected.

When Prince T'ai returned to the temple, the master asked him what more he had heard. "Master," responded the prince reverently, "when I listened most closely, I could hear the unheard... the sound of flowers opening, the sound of the sun warming the earth, and
the sound of the grass drinking the morning dew."

The master nodded approvingly. "To hear the unheard," remarked Pan Ku, "is a necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people's hearts, hearing their feelings not communicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not
spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in his people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.

The demise of states comes when leaders listen only to superficial words and do not penetrate deeply into the souls of the people to hear their true opinions, feeling, and desires.

Customer Service in the Post-Care Bear Era:A Whimsical Epitaph with Clues for a Better Tomorrowby Ronald A. Gunn

Customer Service in thePost-Care Bear Era:A Whimsical Epitaph with Clues for a Better Tomorrowby Ronald A. Gunn

To be successful, customer service training needs to focus on the head, heart, and hands of the employee. It needs to be a comprehensive approach. We wouldn't want to be forced to choose one component over the others. However, if forced, all right put your weapon down you intellectual bully or I'm peeling the saran wrap off this Compton's Worldwide Encyclopedia volume purchased as a grocery store checkout impulse buy, we'd bet our chips on "heart" as the factor that is too often neglected in customer service improvement strategy and training efforts. If you can't insulate your team from the burn-out, melt-down, I-don't-care culture for the hours of the day that they serve your customers, you probably shouldn't get lost in the masquerade of customer service training. Turn back now if you must. Not only will the masquerade waste your time and money, but you'll shellack on a few new layers of quiet cynicism in the bad bargain that can't be removed successfully unless you do a full and complete staff transfusion and you have the stomach to do that, do you?

What's in it for me? That's the real question in the employee's mind that has to be answered before you can get to Go. The envelope please. And the answer is not eligibility for some bonus at the end of the year, at the end of time, or at the end of the rainbow. That may be nice but now that employers and employees can't care about one another as they once did, and as we even cease to wax nostalgically about the End of Loyalty, many employees work from the homo economicus assumption that they may not be in the company at bonus distribution time and not because the employer fired them but because they fired the employer first! So, Bogus Bonus Buffoonery is not an option. Except for time-challenged towns and cities in the Midwest where you have no right to interfere with their happiness: Don't tell them what's happened on either coast, OK?

What's in it for me? The envelope please. And the answer is not a Career Promotion. In today's flattened organization, with high-performance work systems and teams, teams, and more teams, we've stripped most of the rungs off the ladder so that it resembles something out of an old-time cartoon. Snuffy Smith-style big shoe stripping out ladder rungs while falling to the ground, accompanied by high-to-low xylophone sound, OK?

What's in it for me? The envelope please. And the answer is not the respect and admiration of management and peers because even though that may be nice, the employee wants to know what does this all mean? Does it mean a positive future reference from the employer? No. After all, to avoid litigation the company policy now is merely to confirm or deny that someone ever worked here and to say no more about it. We thank you.

What's in it for me? The envelope please. At this point, you should insert answers that have not worked drawn from your own company's experience. You should also be developing a faint aggravation about hearing about what won't work rather than what will. On the other hand, if you work in a large old-fashioned bureaucracy that practices Cybernetic Management where your job is to play a guessing game with your superiors this may not bother you yet. The Cybernetic Management game is where you focus on What It Is Not, rather than What It Is. Like with a thermostat for a furnace, the absence of something, e.g., heat, causes the machine to turn on. If you have not read Sartre's Being and Nothingness in its entirety, please skip this paragraph. Basically, it goes like this in the Big Bureaucracy: You attempt to guess the correct answer and the boss's job is to tell you that you have not yet guessed successfully. Despite your limitations, you should keep trying or you will leave the Road to Nowhere sooner than you should. Naturally, you understand that the boss cannot give you any clues as to the correct answer for reasons that cannot be revealed here.

OK, what can work? How about a promise that the customer service training offers the employee refreshed interpersonal skills that are useful in personal life and skills that are portable to the next employer, the next career, or an entrepreneurial business that s/he may start in the future?

The Ten Personal Power Skills
Research teaches that there are ten Personal Power Skills that relate to form, substance, personality, and action. These skills are a gift from your Firm to each employee. Even if they currently possess the Personal Power Skills, they will get better and stronger with the training.

They will improve their ability to:

Manage first impressions.
Display depth of knowledge to build customer confidence.
Display breadth of knowledge to build customer relationships.
Show uncommon versatility in dealing with different personality types.
Call up enthusiasm with a snap of the fingers.
Step up to big-picture thinking.
Show an appropriate sense of humor at the right time. (Don't say to your customers: You should laugh at your problems, everybody else does!)
Turbo charge your self-esteem.
Take risks.
Call up creativity and apply it to give what the customer wants.

There is the need to equip employees to communicate more effectively with active listening and the use of open as well as closed questions when the time is right. What about ways in which personal power can be used to influence people positively? Tension management is key. Does your employee know how to use the Ring of Fire to insulate against the upset, possibly rageoholic customer? Does your employee know what all complaining customers really want? Or do you think that having this knowledge would take the "sport" out of winning and retaining customers both for the employee and your organization? The ability to manage tension is the Master Skill. Have you given this gift to your employees? This is all part of the correct curriculum - from Strategic Futures®.

So think about times that you have received exemplary service. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that these skills are the grist of the best customer service you have ever seen anywhere. If there's rocket science here, it's to be found in helping your people figure this out and apply these skills in your company!

A quality customer service training curriculum is a necessary but not sufficient condition for training success. And this is where the Heart comes in. It's about motivation. It's all about motivation. Bob Dole, we hardly knew ye. By itself, the curriculum delivered by a roll-the-mental-tape trainer is akin to the sound of one hand clapping. The real key is in the delivery. It must reach the audience and this requires that it be entertaining and that it be personal so that it really reaches right into the life of the employee. No, not like illegal nor with untoward behaviors, but with spirited delivery that shows that you care - about each individual. Remember? This is the way that good teaching once was before the meltdown of education, including the methods and manners that had shown themselves to work effectively over the years. What is good workmanlike quality in training? No, good "workpersonship" quality will not be written here because I insist that my daughters have every possible advantage. (Danger Danger return to main highway immediately and accelerate, brain police sirens approaching. It's official: I can't conform adequately). The instructor must bond with each training participant. A pre-training one-on-one confidential conversation between the instructor and each training participant to discover obstacles to participant learning, whether motivational or substantive is key. What's it going to take? Where do you want to go and how can this training help you? If you don't know where you want to go, what would it take to make this training sufficiently engaging so that you will stay conscious and work on these skills?

This is the advance work that needs to be done for each session delivery so that the instructor can really connect with each participant because effective customer service training is about behavioral change and you cannot influence the behavior of anyone if you do not understand their motivation and their mindset. Even if you do have this connection, you know that your odds are less than perfect. You know that this is true, so why would you permit any other approach to be purchased for use in your organization? Some of you remember going through a break-up or a divorce and some of you don't. You're not just going through the motions on customer service training, are you?

Then, there is the Head Work. Employees need to be able to identify the customers and what they value. Believe it or not, there are plenty of organizations where the employees cannot for the life of them identify who is the customer. If you doubt this, you should visit a government agency sometime. This is true in large corporate bureaucracies and you know that. What matters to the customer? Let's break the package of what the customer values into its component smithereens: Not just the somewhat obvious interpersonal dimensions, but sensory and environmental dimensions, along with other ways in which we make it easy or hard to assume the role of customer. What's more, let's equip employees with conceptual tools that help them communicate effectively with management about changing customer preferences and needs for product/service revamping and improvement. Managers and owners need to understand that customers change. Customers may think and behave differently than they did when you were delivering service directly. Things may have changed just a little. Maybe those customers don't care any more?!

Last but not least is the Hand Work. At Strategic Futures®, we believe that The 80-20 Rule works 80% of the time! High-quality customer service training should identify the 20% of all interactions with customers that are responsible for 80% of the satisfaction or alternately, irritation. This way you are "majoring in the majors" rather than "majoring in the minors." You are investing attention and effort where the payoffs in customer satisfaction are the greatest rather than focusing a lot of effort on what we call small 'taters or, perhaps pejoratively, 'tater tots. The training should take these transactions apart and put them back together again, x-raying the process thoroughly from womb to tomb. Behavior modeling using a tell-show-practice approach should provide each employee with the ability to perform flawless mechanics effortlessly so that s/he can work on the higher order interpersonal skills that upsell customers and build their loyalty to the extent that anyone cares about that anymore.

(No we're not trying to build the Stepford Employee but practice makes perfect, almost... If we promised complete perfection, we would, ipso facto, be imperfect so we won't do that. For more information, watch this space or better yet, care enough to message us using one or more of several media...)

Too Much Can be Too Bad!Smart workers are more productive than workaholics

Key learnings

Workaholism is a deadly addiction that can impede organisational wellness

The key is working smarter not longer

Timely time-offs prevent burnout and rejuvenate employee creativity and performance
Very often we observe friends who constantly check official mail when they are home on weekends. Very often we see people on a vacation constantly on their phones enquiring about the office? For most of them are so passionately attached to their work, they do not wish to see beyond. Hard workers start off to prove themselves, but unreasonably long hours of work eventually leads them to the 'me and my work' syndrome. Dr. Harvette Grey, a Psychologist, believes that "If you are doing a good job on the job, that's good, but to really do a good job, you have to have something other than work. We all want to make money, but not at the expense of relationships." Take the case of Maria, a biotechnology graduate working for one of the most reputed firms. She is a topper in her graduation and a top performer at work. However, she takes time off to indulge in her favourite sport or visit old age homes with gifts. Maria believes "I could not maintain focus and energy if I worked nonstop. I would completely lose perspective." The Busy Business Working hard is not all that counts. Working smarter is the key to success. "Just 'staying busy' is not what your boss wants" says Steve Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com. Most often one comes across individuals who are occupied with some work or the other. Whether the work performed is productive, or useful is immaterial to these workers. Quite often unproductive activities exhaust the organisations savings and increase expenses. In the past employees who worked overtime were always looked upon by others. The reasons for the overtime could have varied from pending work, need for extra pay or even rework towards rectification. Seldom has the authentic desire to excel in the job been a motivator for the overtime. Thankfully, this phenomenon is almost extinct in most workplaces. Employers and employees alike have understood the value of being smart workers by taking time off and tackling exhaustion. The concern is 'Are the most hardworking employees the most successful ones?' Today, the unbearably hard working employees are typically seen as 'self-centric', 'fiercely aggressive', 'self-doubting' and 'unorganised.' Dreadfully hard working employees offer dwindling returns to the organisation. Time Off Employees who put in longer hours of work lose focus and eventually disorder and inefficiency creeps in. The most common ill-effects of working too hard are:

Losing focus
Long-term stress and fatigue
Ill-health
Diminishing creativity levels
Workaholism
Unbalanced personal life

"If you work all the time, you lose your edge" cautions Diane Fassel, author of the book 'Working Ourselves to Death'. In practical terms, an employee immersed in trivial jobs and issues will be most unlikely to get imaginative. Creativity cannot come to an employee engrossed completely in mundane activities. Most often, such employees are petrified of being branded as losers. They constantly work that gives them a fallacy of being confident. In reality, confidence comes from belief in oneself and the work well done with integrity and awareness. Yerkes-Dodson Law and Workaholism According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law "too little or too much stimulation is bad." Similarly, a happy employee is the one whose work function is neither very heavy nor very light. Workaholism is yet another obsession associated with people 'who can't stop working.' Experts define workaholism as 'exclusion of everything else in one's life.' Workaholism is a serious condition that results in lowered self-confidence, workplace morale and poor performance. Ironically, most employees flaunt the term proudly. World over and particularly in the U.S workaholics are on the rise. Workaholism is the most misconstrued addiction. People interpret work addiction as 'working hard'. However, there is a distinct difference between hard workers and workaholics. Hard workers work hard on their jobs and relax once a task or project is completed. Workaholics typically work long hours even when not required. Most often they are wedded to their jobs. Checking, rechecking and constantly thinking about the job even on the beach are the characteristics of a workaholic. Laptops and the e-mail have simplified things for workaholics. A study by the Families and Work Institute reveals

That one in three Americans bring work home at least once a week
Americans take short vacations, 19 days per year compared to 42 days in Germany
Tell-tale signs of a workaholic
The employee works for longer hours than required
Neglects personal life; talks about work all the time, even at home
A conspicuous absence of any hobbies or social life
Calls office even on a vacation
Or probably never goes on a vacation

Stress Free Organisations Occasionally organisations prefer workaholics anticipating greater productivity. The truth is far from this expectation. Workaholics are bad team players as they are self-focused. The desire for fame prevents effective delegation as they want absolute credit for work performed. Excess workload often results in fatigue and stress that eventually leads to burnout. Another feature that's characteristic of a workaholic is restlessness, flared tempers and negative vibes. These thwart positive workplace culture. According to Psychologists "There's a loss of physical and psychological health and eventually they [may] die of a stroke or heart attack." Helpline Organisations inadvertently create workaholics by over-stressing on performance, targets and rewards. Workaholics need careful handling. Managers though can insist on /suggest Setting realistic goals within flexible time frames: Allotting extra time for genuine reasons assists rational project management and avoids burnout. Monitoring employee work: Mentoring aids in identifying employees overloaded with unnecessary work. Peer mentoring or coaching enhances team spirit, confidence and ensures people are not pushed beyond their limitations. Respecting time-off: Managers can encourage time-offs with weekly sport sessions, hobbies or 'use-it-or-lose it vacation programmes.' Employees who do not avail their yearly vacation leave lose it and are not eligible for cash reimbursement. Positive work ethics: At Ernst and Young employees are denied access to official mails when on a vacation. Team calendars that specify the deadlines are common feature at E&Y. The calendars also include personal commitments. The benefits are dual. For one, a person who needs to leave early for a family reunion gets the support from his team mates. Secondly, a person who doesn't list personal commitments is invariably invited for lunch or chances for a team gathering are high. Wellness Programmes: Qualified specialists can discuss with employees about their health concerns, stress management techniques regarding work overload. The CEO too can address teams and talk about stress-free workplaces and their impact on performance. Counseling by psychiatrists can help deal with workaholics better. Workaholism can be dealt with patiently at all levels. Employees prone to overworking must develop hobbies, social life and nuture relationships. Most importantly, turn off the cell phone when its your time off!