The ancient Greeks handed down a fable about a tortoise and a hare. In the tale, a slow and steady tortoise challenges a quick-footed hare to a race. Although most observers place their bets on the hare, the tortoise eventually wins the race when the all-too-hasty hare burns out before the finish line.
The industrious Greeks may have invented a marathon, but they’d be hopeless laggards in today’s corporate rat race. Modern corporate life is a mad dash, its terrain ever shifting and unpredictable. Those who can’t sprint like the hare - or refuse to do so - get quickly left in the dust.
We spoke to managers in the most fast-paced, turbocharged field of all - information technology - about their chief concerns at work. All the managers felt constantly overwhelmed by a mountainous, urgent workload. All thought at least some of their employees had “lead in their feet.” The managers moaned in unison about their workers’ general lack of a sense of urgency; in the high-stakes relay race they were running, none of the managers wanted a team of plodding tortoises slowing them down.
This should come as no surprise, given many organizations today are inundated in a state of constant crisis, often trying to do more with fewer resources. Managers feel the pinch. Fair or not, they are short on patience for employees whom they feel are not up to the job.
Offshore workers may be particularly vulnerable to the corporate chopping block in these hard economic times. They have to work harder to prove their hustle on a daily basis, since managers are not around to see it. They also carry an extra burden when it comes to quick turnaround, because of the time difference between the U.S. and India. (see: MeltingSpot: Offshorers - How to Keep U.S. Clients Happy)
Take Brian, an IT support manager for an Austin, TX networking services company. Brian claims an employee overseas in India may have cost his company a multi-million dollar sales deal by being too slow to communicate with the home office about a website outage. The employee brought down an internal website for routine maintenance, but failed to warn his teammates overseas who were planning to demo the site for a client in “their” morning. All the employee needed to do from his home base in India was flip the switch, but he couldn’t be reached for days - partly due to the time difference with the U.S., and partly due to his failure to respond promptly to urgent calls and emails from the home front. “The impact of the small delay on the team here in the U.S. was magnified by the time difference with India,” says Brian. (see: MeltingSpot: The Jag “Dish”: When Long Offshoring Hours are a Drag)
Brian offers a tip to help offshore workers keep their jobs: respond quickly to any and all needs of the home office. Answer every email and voicemail as though a critical time-sensitive outcome depended upon it, because you never know when “even a trivial mistake can cause serious setbacks if too much time passes,” he warns.
Readers may think: “these concerns don’t apply to me.” Don’t bet on it. Several managers we interviewed had let people go whom they perceived as lazy. Most often, the employees didn’t see it coming. Sluggishness was universally seen as a chronic problem - in an industry that prizes nimbleness above all.
So don’t dawdle: ask your manager today whether you need to pick up the pace. A motivated attitude is the best way to preserve your spot on the winning team.
