Leader Learns - Lessons From the Floor

This is the second part in my Communication series. In my earlier post, I talked about how communication is not just talking. I also mentioned that the key to communication is making people see and understand your point of view. For a leader to succeed, he / she needs his team to understand his goals and vision. For this, the leader needs to communicate and ensure that his team understands what he / she is trying to say. I had a problem of talking a lot, and also, by default accepting that people understood what I said. It took me a few years, to admit to myself that the default is not so. In the initial days, I felt the problem was with my team, that they did not understand what I said. I had to repeat certain messages several times, work with smaller groups to drive home the point, sometimes even questioning people in meetings to see if they are on the same page. After working with my team for a few months , I was able to get them onto my wavelength. I felt happy and satis

Communication is very important aspect in our professional lives. More so for a leader. As a leader, you will need to communicate your plans, goals, vision etc to your teams. I always used to think highly of myself when it came to communication, the reason being that I was educated in English all along, reasonably well read, had interacted with clients who were non-indians both native english speakers and others, pretty early in my career with success. So when I became a lead, I thought it was but natural for me to be a good communicator with my team. As they say pride goes before a fall, I did fall but thankfully the fall was not from a good height to get hurt badly nor was visible to many people. As a lead, during my early days, I always thought that being a good communicator means that I need to talk well, fluently, convey my idea. That's it. During these days, I would talk a lot in my team meetings, talk about small and big things, talk about my ideas etc. I always

Every leader goes through a period when he / she is stretched for time, having to do too many things in a short time, being in the trenches etc. During this period it is important to get the hands dirtied, understand the ground issues. But more often than not, even after this period some leaders tend to forget the necessity to take a step back. It is important that the leader should not forget the long term goal, while being in day to day operations. The learning for me came during a mid-year review, in the form of a feedback. My supervisor told me that while I did a lot of things well, I could have achieved more if I concentrated on a few long term goals. While I had my long term goals in my mind, being in the trenches made me to forget them.  As a leader, one should never lose the focus on the long term goal. It is very important to know what you want to do, where you want your teams to be in the long term, and every step should be taken keeping this goal in mind. But th

A leader needs to be with the people. More often than not, without realising the leader gets onto the Ivory tower and rarely comes down.  During my initial months as a lead, I used to be with the team most of the time. To me, I was one among the team, and not someone who as a lead needed to maintain that posture. This was the only way for me, to lead the team. Over the next few months, as my responsibilities increased, my team size increased. But I still felt the need to be one among the team. I did this, even when it became a stretch on my time. I did this not because I had to, but because I loved it. I felt comfortable being with the team, rather than acting as a Manager, who came in only when required. I did not realise that it had its own pros and cons. On the positive side, my teams never felt the need to distance themselves from me, which meant I could really get the team behind me to support me in my endeavors. It also meant that I was too familiar to them, and some

Every leader worth his salt would have gone through a number of critical situations, each one seemingly bigger than the previous. To me, crisis presented a new opportunity to learn. It gave me an important lesson. I had talked about trusting people in one of my earlier posts. But as a leader, when crisis hits, the first thing they tend to forget is the trust in their teams. The lead tends to jump in to take control of things, starting from trying to understand the issue to communicating the updates to stakeholders. It does not stop there - the lead gets into the way of everything - the problem resolution, suggesting solutions, getting back to original state of affairs. In the whole process forgetting that there are / might be competent people in the team to do all this and more.  To top it all, the worst thing the leader can do is to add to the pressure that the team is already facing and showing in his / her behaviour the tendencies to put people in extreme pressure.

So far, I had written about lessons learnt on the floor, this week's post is all about an important lesson that I did not / have not learnt. Being tough with people. I was always considered to be soft on people - be it with my team, client or with my peers. In my initial years as a lead, it was important for me to understand my team and their problems and work with them to make the team a success. Once we reached a degree of success, which was accepted and recognized by my stakeholders, there came new challenges. My stakeholders started to expect more from my team. Deadlines became aggressive, workload increased, clients became tough - to handle all this, I had to be tough. Tough with my team to push them to close out delivery, with my client not to accept additional work, with my peers and supervisors to get the required resources I needed to deliver. But this was one lesson I never learnt. I could never be tough with my people. I could tell them to get things done, I cou

A true leader is measured by his Commitment to his stakeholders - his team, his supervisors (in the same order),  his peers and client (interchangeable). To me, as a leader, if I said something, it needs to be done. My biggest inspiration was the movie Devar Magan, where Sivaji Ganesan says "Devanukku vaaku than perusu.. ". One of the many things that I learned on the floor was I earned my respect due to my commitment and how well I kept my word with my team. The more such instances, the greater was respect for me. Thankfully, I learned this important lesson pretty early in my leadership journey. In my first few years, I was pretty convinced that I need to keep my word. I went to whatever extent to keep my word with my team, even at the expense of being lashed at by my supervisors. My people knew that when I said I would try my best, it definitely meant my best effort. This earned me respect, as well as made people to understand that commitment was now 2 way - t

This is the concluding post on my series On Mentoring. In my last post, I talked about growing wings for people to fly. But despite my attempts, some of them did not make an attempt to fly. That was when I realized that as mentor it is not enough to grow wings, but also be the safety net for the people. They need to see and understand that there was a safety net below, when they try to fly and in case they fail, the net would protect them from crash landing. I started talking to people to make them feel comfortable, to give them the required support to grow. Then came the next question - Am I doing the right things for people to grow? That was when I reflected back on the incident that my mentor told me about the need for me to grow, to help my team to grow. This changed my outlook of being a mentor from being a ladder (to what my tamil teacher said years back) to being an escalator. In the corporate world, the mentors need to be like escalators, taking people up and at the sa

Last week, I wrote about my mentors. This post is a continuation from that, talking about my experience as a mentor. I had seen two types of mentors - people who were willing to spend time with me when I went to them and people who would come to me when they saw or felt that I needed help. In my early days, I slipped myself into a mentor of the first type. I would help people if and when they came to me for help. This was more due to - my confidence in my ability to mentor (or rather lack of it :) ), my own inexperience since I was still reaching out to my mentors, my hesitation if people would accept me as their mentor. But even during this time, I spent a lot of time with people, whenever they came to me with a question, a doubt or a problem and asked for a suggestion. I never said no when it came to my time. But there were times, when I was not in a position to help, but went ahead to suggest the right person who can help. Over time, I got confidence in my ability to m

Mentoring is a favourite topic for me under the leadership umbrella. This is going to be a series wherein I will talk about the mentors that I had, from whom I learnt a lot and being a mentor myself and my experience. While I was in school, my tamil teacher often used to say that teachers are like ladders, they help you to go up but they remain where they are. This was etched in my mind. When I came into the corporate world, I found that a lot of people were there to help me to do my tasks, to help me understand things better, but there were very few people who understood me, who helped me to grow as a professional and more importantly as a person. My first mentor was one of my earliest project managers. It was from him that I learnt Leadership by walking around (refer to post - Showing a lack of bias). Everyday morning, he would check his mails, allocate work and then would come around to every individual's seat to have a chat for 5 to 10 minutes depending on workl

Being Aggressive is one of the most talked about trait in a leader. But unfortunately, it is also one of the  frequently misunderstood trait as well. To me aggression is not in the behaviour of the person, but how he is inside. Just because a person has a soft demeanor does not mean he is not aggressive. Nor being pushy and talking loudly means aggression. More often than not, people are quickly judged as being aggressive or not based on the way they talk, the way they move about on the floor or even by a handshake. I am not someone who can read into people's body language, but I am sure it cannot be read rightly always by the experts. Aggression is what you deliver at work, not how. It is the ability to take on tough situations, stand up to the situations, and deliver what is needed, without faltering. Sometimes, it might be a new project to be delivered, a client to be managed, a people situation to be handled, a new challenge thrown with difficult deadlines. All these

Humility as a trait in a leader, is like a double-edged sword. A leader needs to be humble, but at the same time this can be taken as not being aggressive. My journey on this path had its own problems. Before I became a lead, I was a pretty good functional consultant (in my own view). People used to respect me for my skills and my expertise made me feel proud as a consultant. I was pretty confident of delivering complex solutions under pretty tough deadlines. All this gave me an aura of "being in control". As a lead, the first thing that I felt was the lack of being in control. My team had to work together to deliver the results. There were times when we failed to deliver on time. From used to being in complete control of things, I was slowly moving towards being dependent on people to deliver, thereby losing my control. This made me transition  from I to We mode and the virtue of being humble. I realized that I cannot deliver the project on my own, but my te

Continuing from last week's post on " Not only being Unbiased... " The first thing I did to show that I was unbiased was to ensure that I spent a fair bit of time with everyone in the team. And this time, I did not go with the "   time tested   Coffee with Raghu " :-)(http://leaderlearns.blogspot.in/2013/03/trust.html). I started following the famed LBWA (Leadership By Walking Around, a slight twist from MBWA). I used to go around and talk to people at their desks. This helped me to a certain extent to remove the bias, since some people who felt bit uncomfortable to approach me, had no choice now (captive audience). It also helped me to understand what they were doing and people started feeling that their lead knows what they were doing. This helped them to believe that I was trying to give them a fair chance. The second thing was to ensure that everyone got an opportunity - to talk in meetings, to do something new, bring in new ideas, etc. This also he

As a person, all of us have our own bias. The bias about people generally tends to be based on social status, education, upbringing etc.  But as a leader, you cannot be biased. The   leader as a person, is expected to treat all his / her people at par , without any bias. I learnt the importance of this in my very first year of being a lead. When I started my journey as a lead, I was very clear that I should not be biased towards people. This journey, according to my conscience was also on similar lines. But over a period of time, the time I spent with some people in my team both on official count and personal was skewed when compared with others. Unknowingly, I spent more time with people whom I felt comfortable. While this helped me in getting along with the team, there was a feeling that I was biased within the team. People felt that I spent more time with certain team members because I liked them, and hence treated them differently. There were several reasons attributed

Empathize is an oft repeated word when it comes to conversation, especially on leadership traits. It is also misused / abused a lot. I used to hear this word thrown a lot, during several conversations. After a time I got so irritated, that I went to dictionary to find out what it meant. A simple meaning I found was - "to understand and share the feelings of another." My first doubt was why was this used as a leadership quality, isn't it necessary for being human, leave alone a leader?? ( I will leave the larger question for a later day discussion). So, to become a good leader, I understood that I needed to understand the feelings / emotions of my people. This lesson that I learnt, made me a better person more than a better leader. I used to be hard taskmaster when it comes to delivery, miserly on praising people for good work. It was always in the back of my mind, that whatever the team delivered, was something that I had done when I was at that level. Be

All of us who are blessed, can hear. It is something involuntary. We wake up to birds chirping or to the persistent alarm and end the day with either ilayaraja melodies or the breaking news. But do we listen. As a leader, it took me sometime to go through this journey of listening. The reason I call it a journey is because, it took me through several stages. At each stage, I learnt something new, and the need to leave behind a few other things. The first stage is obviously hearing and not much to write about it. The second stage is selective listening . During the initial stage, as I had said earlier, it was a learning process for me to lead a team. So I kept my ears open, and listened to everyone and everything said. But unfortunately, it was in the interest to learn things. So, what I listened and processed was the information that I needed in my journey as a lead. I was very particular in listening to feedback about me from everyone. While this helped in the

This is in a continuation from last week's post on " Treating people as adults " My leadership journey was one full of hits and misses. Sometimes, I got it right and sometimes terribly wrong. Last week I had mentioned that people need to be treated as responsible adults, but there is a catch. I learnt this in the hard way, through a couple of missteps. My problem began when I started to treat people as adults, blindly and without realising two things - - one: the situation - sometimes it was tough, probably a complex delivery, tough timelines, tough client, new technology etc. - two: sometimes, adults do behave as kids :) By not taking into consideration the above 2 scenarios, my blind trust ensured that there were a few times, that I fell on my backside and pretty hard too. So, the next learning was not to come to a conclusion blindly, "that people can handle things" , but look into the situation, be aware of the person's ability to perform a com

Following up on trust, it took me a while to realize the next step on the trust ladder. I was given more responsibilities, I pushed myself and my teams to deliver them. While I trusted them to deliver, I always had this habit to keep checking up with people if they were going in the right direction and kept providing suggestions on how to go about. While as a manager this was possibly the right behaviour with respect to Project control, as a leader was it? I did not realize it was not until several months later. There were a couple of times when people would assign a task to me and kept checking on the progress. During one such time, when work was a bit stressful, I felt why someone was doing this. Here I was a responsible adult who knew what to do and how to do, and if at all I had a doubt would approach them to get it clarified. Why did people not trust me??? Around the same time, since some of my teams' deliverables were getting delayed I was exhibiting the same behavi

Building Trust Several years ago, when I became a project lead for the first time, I had a group of young people reporting to me. I was new to this world of leading decent sized team, having been an individual consultant for a long time and then leading a small team of 4 to 6 people for a short duration. Suddenly I felt I was all alone in this vast ocean... all by myself... I read a few articles on leadership, but I was not clear where to start. So I went to my boss with several questions. Post a long discussion, I learnt that one of the important factors is to build trust. I quickly learnt that to gain trust from my people, I had to trust them first. Not only should I trust them but also make it loud and clear that I trust them. That was the difficult part, making people know and understand that I trusted them.  The first thing I did was ensure that I met my people regularly both officially (as formal meetings, in small group discussions) or unofficially over a coffee

Greetings Over the last month or so, I have been thinking to write a blog on what I have learned in leading a large multi-cultural, multi-location team for a few years. This is THE START. I plan to write about things that have impacted me, the lessons that I learnt from my teams, lessons from the floor which made a good lead (some may acknowledge and others will not :) ) and a better person ( which I will acknowledge). Plan to post short articles every weekend, starting this weekend and looking for your support in forms of comments and responses. Regards Raghu