Being tough with people

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 could tick them off for deliverables missed, but I could never "make them walk the plank" for failures. I accepted the reasons / excuses given for failures. I used to give them very long rope. In the long run it affected me and my teams.

My team understood this weakness, and I saw that people sometimes used it to their advantage. There were times when I felt that people had a feeling that they could get away with murder. I realized this when I started to get feedback from my leads that I need to be tough with people, that while I had several good ideas I was not tough to get this to be executed for various reasons. Before I realized, my brand as a soft leader got established. 

As for my teams, we could have achieved much more success had I been tough with them, reached greater heights. Some of them understood this in hindsight, but as they say hindsight makes a man wiser.

The important lesson here is not to be tough always, but understand that Being tough is one of the key traits of a leader and that toughness needed to be used and shown as and when required.

ps: After completing a performance review for one of my direct reports, I asked him for my feedback. Instant response was "raghu you are too soft on people which is not good for you or the team. Even I have taken advantage of you several times" :-)


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