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Twelve Words Of Wisdom

This week, I and a colleague of mine taught a small course on fundamentals of Team Management and Leadership – some theories, some games, a few anecdotes and a whole lot of fun. During one of the sessions, we asked all the participants to collectively build a list of all people who they regard as leaders – sports person, politicians, Bollywood stars or people from any other walk of life. The group came up with an interesting list of personalities. We then spent some time analyzing the traits that made them leaders.

While we were doing this, I was trying to recollect the names of the people, who I regard as leaders from my work life. Two names flashed instantly, the third and fourth took about five minutes of search through the memory stack. For that very reason, I am not sure if I consider them as leaders or just ‘really good people to work with’. When I analyzed it some more, I realized that it was actually just twelve words that first made me look at these guys as leaders.

The First Eight
The first leader that I recollect is from my Big Blue days. He was the Solution Project Manager for a large, complicated project that I was involved with; a really, really great guy to work with! After a long release which involved a lot of development work, we were working on production deployment on a weekend. Our team started work early in the morning, and by late evening most of the tracks were done with their work – the mainframe had the latest JCLs, the database was updated after quite a few hic-cups. My work, which was on the web site, was the last one to go in. I had done it quite a few times in the past and was quite sure it will go hasslefree. When my manager came over to check on how I was coming along, I told him that I would need another half an hour to deploy and verify that everything is working. It had been a really long day for him and he had spent a good part of that day on conference calls, keeping the customer abreast of the progress.

Since, I wasn’t expecting any trouble, I told him he could carry on for home. I would finish the work and drop him a note. He was going to be accessible on phone, anyway. I am not sure if he was serious or if it was a casual remark, when he uttered his next eight words: “No. The Captain must go down with the ship! Finish your work and we’ll leave together”… and we did. I started observing his management style from then on. He never left a crisis situation until the problem was resolved and every one of his team member was disengaged. .. and I mean, Never!

He actively practiced MBWA – Management by Walking Around. Every once in a while he used to walk around to one of our cubicles and generally talk – about the weekend plans, the latest Hollywood movies, the latest gadget that we had purchased, the world at large… everything besides work. All of us used to look forward to this chit chat. We always regarded him as one of the most approachable managers and I think his MBWA was a big reason behind that.

During the five years that I spent working with him, he always stood by his team, took responsibility, gave freedom, effectively managed very demanding customers and maintained a great connect with his team! When I was young, I used to think if I can become 10% of a manager that he was, I would make an excellent one. Some of the practices that I learnt from him (and try to practice till date) are:

• Never ask your team to do something that you wouldn’t – Avoid working on weekends at all costs. If it needs to be done then make sure you are there with your team even if the best you can do is arranging coffee for everyone.
• People join companies but work for managers – Sometimes the company and its policies may not align with what is best for the employees. It is the responsibility of the manager to make sure that his team is not affected because of the policies. One of the companies that I worked for had a very poor late night transportation policy. One manager who worked there used to personally drop his team home whenever they stayed late and when the company policy failed to provide adequate transportation options. He was one of the most successful managers at his work.
• Nothing boosts the team morale more than a competent and approachable manager – Competency is easy to acquire but building approachability needs considerable investment of time. During my early career days, I came across a manager who was extremely competent but was a pain in the neck to approach. Anyone who asked him for help was first humiliated and then asked to see him later for solution. Over time, he became the last person that the team would approach in case they needed help. As a consequence, the project suffered and he ended up working twenty hours a day to sort out problems that should not have been there in the first place.

The Last Four
I worked with my second great leader of technologists at my last job. Although, his management style was quite different to the last one that I mentioned, both of them were excellent leaders. After my first year of working here, I was asked to work on one of the most complex assignments that we had undertaken so far. Besides all the technical complexities, this project had an extremely difficult customer and was replete with intra-company, vendor and customer relationship political landmines.

Just before I was about to start my roller coaster ride, I went to see my manager. I was expecting a ‘Good Luck! You will do fine’ type of good bye. What I was told was,”This is going to be a very challenging project. One way or the other, you will be a different person at the end of this assignment. It will get insane, you will be pulled in all directions, Just Do the Right Thing and you will not be asked for justification. By the way, while you are at it, don’t forget to have some fun”.

What that assignment taught me was that doing the right thing can be excruciatingly difficult. It upsets many people with authority, questions old world priorities and creates a lot of work! While I worked on that project, I was apprehended for skipping meetings with senior management, not complying with the norms being followed by other teams. My senior management was quite upset with my style of working. Throughout the project all our streams were in Red status as per customer reports. My team was the first one to come out of the red to a yellow and eventually to a green.

I had to adopt quite a few non-standard practices in order to provide a solution for such a complicated project. I could do most of those things because of the reassurance that I had received before starting. Till date, when I hit ambiguous situations, I try to put them through the ‘right thing’ test and proceed… I am yet to be disappointed. I have learnt quite a few lessons from this manager of mine; here are a few important ones that come to my mind:

• Do the right thing – Like I said, it is one of the toughest things to practice but people do not question the approach much once the results are delivered. There just aren’t enough managers who arm their teams with courage these days. Support – yes, Empathy – Maybe, Courage – Not really.
• Invest in People – Compared to the large part of our company, our group used to pick up lot of un-conventional work. Any successful delivery of such work needed exceptional performance from the team. The good thing about working with this manager was that none of the good performance was overlooked. Everyone who performed well was rewarded in one way or the other – sometimes within the boundary of corporate policies sometimes with exception.
• Connect with the Foot Soldiers – Although my manager was positioned very high in the corporate hierarchy, he was extremely approachable to anyone working with him at any level. Our developers, managers, delivery managers had access to him on first come first served basis. In fact, he used to make extra effort to keep his connect with the junior folks alive. This personal connect enabled him to deliver very complex projects because of the level of commitment that he commanded from all ranks.

An average human being speaks about 10,000 words a day (Apparently, the same limit is 25,000 for women). That’s 70,000 words a week and 3,650,000 words a year. So, in my professional life, I must have exchanged around thirty six million words. Yet, when it comes to the real leadership wisdom that I have harvested over the last ten years, it boils down to only twelve words.

How about you?

If Architects Ran Restaurants

It’s amazing how a small thing can set a tone for the whole of your day. My day started off pretty normally in the morning today. On my drive to office, my iPod shuffled up a very old song hidden somewhere in its complicatedly structured albums. I did not realize that I had this song in my iPod somewhere. The song brought with it a few old, happy memories. Before I knew it, I had replayed the song thrice before I reached office and was, in general, feeling good about the world at large.

That’s when I decided I should make time to do something nice today… like writing. I haven’t blogged for quite some time and the good mood brought the itch back today. So, here I am, reflecting upon an interesting experience from not long ago. Somewhere near the end of 2008, my wife and I went to a practically unknown restaurant along with a few family friends. A friend of a friend had recommended this restaurant to us, so we thought of giving it a shot. We arrived at around 8 PM and took four level of stairs to the roof of the last building on a small, hidden dirt road off one of the main streets

The first thing that struck us about this restaurant was the wide, open seating and a sense of character. You could take the low seating close to the floor, sit up in few sofas or stick to one of the few dining tables. There weren’t any permanent separations between the seating areas. Plants, flower pots and some statues were used to separate out different groups. Something inside me tried to whisper, “This is going to be different... one way, or the other”. Soon after we settled down and ordered drinks, the proprietor of the restaurant joined us for a small talk. The guy happened to be an architect, not a technology architect, but the conventional one. An architect, nonetheless. After exchanging pleasantries and brief introductions, he asked us about our opinion of the place. I do not recall the exact words that were exchanged but I think ended up communicating, in consensus, that it was ‘different’.

He drew our attention to the ceiling of the restaurant and told us an interesting bit of story about it. Apparently, the roof covered a warehouse somewhere in Kerala about 100 years ago. He got the roof to Bangalore, piece by piece, tile by tile and resurrected it atop his restaurant. The wooden beams holding the tiles were original too. The only thing that he had changed was the bolts that held everything together and a few broken tiles which were replaced by the new ones, but were fabricated exactly like the original ones. After he left us for his next small talk with people sitting across from our group, we kept staring at the roof for quite some time. Some of us tried to point out new tiles from the old one.

While ordering food, we realized that we had two different menus. Although they carried the same dishes, some were designed like envelopes, some were wooden. “Probably could not make up his mind about which design was better, so ended up keeping both” – justified one of our friends. “Or… he didn’t see the point in keeping the uniformity, you know how these architects are…” said one of my friend’s wife. After we ordered the food, we learnt from one of the waiters that they did not serve liquor there. Everyone was free to get their own bottle but the deal was that you had finish whatever you got. The owner gets to keep the empty bottle! “That’s queer!” – one of us said, “Or in a far-fetched, weird, convoluted sort of way, that’s architectural thinking for you!” – I said.

Just before we finished the dinner, one of our friend excused himself to go to the rest room. And returned five minutes later with a funny expression on his face. “You have got to see this, man!”- He said. He lead our party of six towards the rest room where we saw an extremely tall wall decorated with empty liquor bottles. He had all the brands from all across the world! And each and every one of this bottle came from a patron. “ I didn’t buy a single one of them!” – the proprietor said. “We still have a few brands missing, but you are probably looking at the most diverse collection of liquor bottles in Bangalore. The middle one of the top row was the first one that I collected. The one over there is a very rare brand that a group got from their trip from Mexico. You will also spot a lot of what I call ‘international local brands’. They are international in the sense that they are from different countries, but local because each of them is a local brand in its own country. Do you see the irony here?” – he said like a proud father holding out an exceptional mark sheet of his first born.

The restaurant wasn’t crowded. We had about four hours long dinner. Just when we were about to leave, the architect stopped by to bid us good bye. “I hope you had a good time”, he said, ”Do pass the word around if you liked our place. You see, we do not believe in advertising or marketing. Everyone you saw here today landed up here because of a recommendation that he heard from a friend.” We hadn’t noticed so far, but the restaurant actually did not even have a sign board. “Yes, we will let our gang know. I am sure this place will pick up pretty fast” – one of my friends commented. “Yes, we have picked up quite well since we opened four years ago.”, said the owner. “Did you say four years? I just live within a kilometer from here and I had never heard of this place.”, exclaimed my friend. “Yes, the word of mouth does take its own time. Have a good night and I hope to see you here again.”, said the owner. At that point, we were all ready to head home and get ready for the Monday ahead.

Architects, and I mean all forms of Architects, leave their mark on their designs and implementations. I am quite close to a lot of architects and given an architecture, I can point out whose product it is, from my group. One of my fellow architects likes to flirt with technical boundaries and it reflects in his work. He is one of the first to experiment with new ways of wiring products ,using search technologies for non-search problems. Another one always sticks to the fundamentals. His designs reflect tried and tested methods and can come really handy if you want a low risk implementation. Some of the architects are very particular about their architecture looking pleasing to the eye, others do not care as long as it serves the purpose. Some can build cost effective architectures; some really complex ones.

The architecture profession gives you an eye for looking for the not-so-obvious, questioning the obvious and building a product that’s beautiful. It does not matter if it is the Al-Burj, Google or a restaurant. An architect’s touch is visible from afar.