A blog a day (#4)

 SUCCESS

I had an interesting experience a few years ago when I was teaching Six Sigma course for MBA students in an institution near Bangalore. The course was for all students in the initial years, but later it was made a core course only for students specializing in Operations Management. This worked fine for me since it would be easier to explain the concepts of Six Sigma for a homogenous group which comprised almost entirely of engineers. So I attempted  a couple of things for the first time in my teaching career. I started by asking the students to write down their expectations (in terms of learning) from the course. Since almost all had a basic idea of Six Sigma, they could write what they expected to learn. I collected their sheets of paper and made an effort to redesign certain elements of the course and my presentation to satisfy most of the expectations that the students had mentioned. The result was satisfactory for me and at the end of the program, I returned the sheets to the individual students and asked them to fill up the course feedback form based on how effectively their individual expectations had been met. I was unanimously rated excellent by all students. Among my "successes"!

The same batch asked some interesting questions on professional life, career choices, corporate life, etc that they would ask me since I had established quite a rapport during the program. Towards the end of the program, there was a query on "Success" and what I thought were some attributes of someone being called "Successful". That was an interesting question and I hadn't been asked such a question earlier in my training career. I had to think on my feet and I came up with a small exercise that I thought could help me in collecting my thoughts and at the same time making the students participate in our "collective definition of success".

I asked the students themselves to write down 3-4 points on what they wanted to be after 10 years or so. I also told them there is no need to be exact here. Just write down what you want to achieve. They took about 15-20 minutes to write down. I asked each of them to read that aloud in class and keep that sheet as a guide for them for the future. I also told them that they are free to expand or edit their goals as they progress.

Having done that, the question of how to know if one is successful, still remained unanswered, though I suspect a few smart guys had already realized where I was going with all this!  I concluded by saying that each person assesses his/her own achievement with respect to the goals they set for themselves. If they find out that they have achieved their goal in the timeline they set for those goals, they can feel that they are "successful". The common meaning is generally what OTHERS THINK OF YOU, not how you assess yourself. My contention was that success should be a self assessment measure rather than a measure of others about us since each person with whom we interact would superimpose their definition of success on us and we would be confused.