Leader Learns - Lessons From the Floor

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 cou...

A true leader is measured by his Commitment to his stakeholders - his team, his supervisors (in the same order),  his peers and client (interchangeable). To me, as a leader, if I said something, it needs to be done. My biggest inspiration was the movie Devar Magan, where Sivaji Ganesan says "Devanukku vaaku than perusu.. ". One of the many things that I learned on the floor was I earned my respect due to my commitment and how well I kept my word with my team. The more such instances, the greater was respect for me. Thankfully, I learned this important lesson pretty early in my leadership journey. In my first few years, I was pretty convinced that I need to keep my word. I went to whatever extent to keep my word with my team, even at the expense of being lashed at by my supervisors. My people knew that when I said I would try my best, it definitely meant my best effort. This earned me respect, as well as made people to understand that commitment was now 2 way - t...

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...

Last week, I wrote about my mentors. This post is a continuation from that, talking about my experience as a mentor. I had seen two types of mentors - people who were willing to spend time with me when I went to them and people who would come to me when they saw or felt that I needed help. In my early days, I slipped myself into a mentor of the first type. I would help people if and when they came to me for help. This was more due to - my confidence in my ability to mentor (or rather lack of it :) ), my own inexperience since I was still reaching out to my mentors, my hesitation if people would accept me as their mentor. But even during this time, I spent a lot of time with people, whenever they came to me with a question, a doubt or a problem and asked for a suggestion. I never said no when it came to my time. But there were times, when I was not in a position to help, but went ahead to suggest the right person who can help. Over time, I got confidence in my abi...

Mentoring is a favourite topic for me under the leadership umbrella. This is going to be a series wherein I will talk about the mentors that I had, from whom I learnt a lot and being a mentor myself and my experience. While I was in school, my tamil teacher often used to say that teachers are like ladders, they help you to go up but they remain where they are. This was etched in my mind. When I came into the corporate world, I found that a lot of people were there to help me to do my tasks, to help me understand things better, but there were very few people who understood me, who helped me to grow as a professional and more importantly as a person. My first mentor was one of my earliest project managers. It was from him that I learnt Leadership by walking around (refer to post - Showing a lack of bias). Everyday morning, he would check his mails, allocate work and then would come around to every individual's seat to have a chat for 5 to 10 minutes depending on workl...