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?
