Leader Learns - Lessons From the Floor

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