Trust

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 or lunch. I started communicating my plans to the team, made the deadlines transparent. I made a genuine effort to be part of their world, of their Ajith vs Vijay discussions ( while i still made a point or two about Kamal ), understand their problems at work, share their personal happiness or difficult times, and made them come into my world, both my personal and official space. Over time, people started believing in me, in what I said and what I did. 

It changed me as a person in several ways, so much that at a point I was surprised that an introverted person like me could actually move freely with people, sometimes even with someone I met for the first time.

Thus started my long journey into this new world, with a first lesson to build trust, which has served me in good faith for several years to come. Also, the most important lesson to a leader - to learn

Until next week... 

ps: the coffee sessions continued for a fair bit of time, until "Coffee with Raghu" became a terror and people started running away from me... 



Comments

  1. UnknownApril 1, 2013 at 1:49 PM

    Interesting... you got one more reader.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 4, 2013 at 2:23 PM

    Raghu, very good initiative and you have a great talent to write crisp and interesting.

    Another way to while away your time :)

    ReplyDelete

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