Being Humble

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 team had to do that. I was just their lead, helping them towards their goal, of being successful.

It was around the same time I was reading Good to Great by Jim Collins where he talked about getting the right people in the bus and then decide the course of the bus. I could see the parallel here, the only added point was that I was the driver and I had to be careful where I was driving the bus. This fear factor, the fear of being responsible for a team, for the people, for their success and mine pushed me towards being humble till I tasted success. Little did I realize that this was a circle in which I was caught, success brought in fear of higher goals, and fear in turn humility. 

But trouble was brewing. I was getting labelled as not being aggressive. More importantly I was not publishing the success of my team and in turn my own. While not being aggressive did not affect me, keeping things to myself was clearly affecting my team. The team's success and the people's success was not getting noticed. I had to differentiate the thin line between being humble and projecting the success. It took me a while to get onto the balanced middle-path of projecting success and being humble. What helped me here was understanding the difference between I and We, and the importance of getting the We ahead in the game.

A few years later, in a client presentation, when I started off stating 20,000+ tickets solved, 1000+ person days of development work, serving customers from 50 countries across 5 regions with 1 global team, with pride, I had come the full circle.

Until next week...  do wait to read about Being Aggressive :-) 

ps: What saved me a lot of trouble, was the big talk I got from my mentor. During a chat he said "Raghu, you might not like the publicity and hence keeping your team's success to yourself, but remember your team needs it. They need to feel that their success is appreciated, published and all the more importantly these are your talking points for your team during their appraisal."

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 18, 2013 at 1:59 PM

    Good One Raghu !!! I think I can be a good lead being aggressive. Also trying to be too good puts us in a bad shape. On the otherside, I wonder if a person cultivates a negative quality just by doing this. But in the event of breaking this quality, we get into the bad books of many. This results in hampering our personal relationship with persons. People tend to think they are being dominated and they don't like that. I am hesitant to cross this line.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MahiMay 23, 2013 at 1:00 PM

    Raghu. Interesting. It makes me to think our Pfizer days. But if i remember correctly, you were doing a good job of projecting your team success. Nowhere i could think of your team not been projected. week by week, the subject hypes the interest and quality. Waiting for next one.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Treat people as adults

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
Read more

Pass on the baton

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
Read more

Are you listening ???

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
Read more