Not only being Unbiased, but...

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 to my bias towards people starting from region, language, men / women and many more that I never even thought. For me, this was not the case, but the feeling from certain people in the team was otherwise. 

My key learning here was, it was not enough for me to be unbiased, but it was very important to show that I was unbiased. Caesar's wife should be above Caesar ... 

The next problem was how to do it... It was not an easy thing as I thought.. More on this, next week.

ps: The first slap in my face regarding my bias came up in a 360 degree anonymous feedback. I had a lot of good comments and my rating as a lead was good, but one of the comments just said " he is biased ". 

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 4, 2013 at 10:16 AM

    Hi Raghu,
    Yes, a very important trait in a leaders armoury. Excellent Post

    regards
    sathya sundar

    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