Leadership: 3. Always With You

Leadership: 3. Always With You
People come first. Not the company (or Organization, or Corporation if your hubris wants to call it that) and not the customer (whatever you have read so far lets you to believe). Your team and the people that constitute the team have to come first.
This can be in contrast to whatever you have learnt in many management books. Of course at a larger context the common good comes first; we are not discussing who is right and who is wrong, all things being equal, the individual should get the benefit of your leadership. For instance, I have heard this about a leading company in India asking its system admin to come to office during an emergency when the man was actually grieving the loss of his daughter (less than 7 days); the GM had apparently said “there is nothing you can do about it (the loss of the kid) why can’t you at least come to resolve this issue” or something to that effect. I have no way to confirm the authenticity, but this was narrated by a former employee and colleague of the sys admin. This is probably a case of extreme – but to illustrate the point to which a leader can be blinded by the organization goal. Leaders should weight the situation and always consider the options that will favor the individual. Simple example of a critical resource asking for leave since his mom is not well and the project is on a critical path. What will be your thought process? The first thing is to see is how you can manage without this person, how you can facilitate the person to move out on leave, or do you think “how can I make him stay”.

You need to create an environment where people are not afraid to try out things for the betterment of the organization and the team. A team that is afraid to try new things will stagnate and mentally rot. As a leader it is your responsibility to provide the safety net, or an environment of comfort that the team is allowed to try new things. A word of caution is that, you are on top of the change and have understood that the change is for the good and betterment of an existing system or process and has been tested out. When someone comes out with an idea I have seen many getting on the defensive and back of their mind thinking about points to counter the idea. This sets a pattern of no change and no creativity at work. There can’t be anything more demoralizing than the lack of creativity at work. You need to provide a nourishing environment for new ideas, however small however improbably the idea may sound. At least, hear them out.

Leadership: 2. I am here to hear

Your team should not feel a barrier between them and you. You should be highly approachable and be able to listen to them, without looking at your watch. If you are busy when someone comes to you, give them a reasonable amount of time (5 to 60 mins; not more) and call them yourself to discuss the issue. Don’t interrupt with your ideas and interpretations of the situation; if you are not clear on something, ask for clarity, but otherwise listen without interruption.
Once you have heard out completely, think it over and arrive at a solution. As you may know there are many ways to arrive at a solution and the best is probably the Socratic Questioning (said to be institutionalized by Socrates) method, basically it means that you ask (a lot of) questions and help the other person arrive at a solution to the initial problem – Also know as the “teaching by asking rather than telling” method.
It is also important to be among the team, you need to get out of the exalted chair and walk among the team, if you are inside the cabin all the time, you will not be able to persuade people to come to talk to you. You must be seem as one among the rest rather than being aloof and trying to keep yourself away from the team (the ages of babudom has gone for good). Again, if I have to derive examples from the past, I don’t think we could ever forget Uma being more of a friend and less of a boss.
You should be able to read the underlying feelings of the team very early; this will not be conveyed in any meeting or thru email (at least not until it blows out of hand). You can only gauge this thru informal interactions.

Thoughts on Leadership...

Don't know if I am really qualified to write on this subject, but Venkat forced me to write it... so any amount of brickbats are to be sent to him... and all bouquets can be sent to me ( this is your first lesson in leadership!).
The way we have gone about is to take the many facets of a leader and discuss about them one by one... taken some examples from our collective past... thanks to all good and bad managers I have come across - this is dedicated to them all.

Leadership:
1. Technical Expert
You need to be a Technical Expert, in whatever field your team is working on. You can be a manager and get the job done without having an iota of technical knowledge (which we will discuss later), but if you really want your team to respect you as a leader, then you should be able to roll your sleeves and get your hands dirty. You should not overdo this so the team member thinks that you are in contention with them for something!
The team should know and feel that you are there to provide directions when required. Intellectually and technically you should be sharp. You need to know how and when to think logically and when to think out of the box. You need to bring in fresh ideas to the routine job and at the same time should be able to bucket new problems into known patterns, by breaking them down into smaller manageable pieces. So typically; you need to think out-of-the-box for routine issues and think logically for non-routine issues.
You need to be up-to-date and be able to ask intelligent questions. I remember Bhujanga used to read everyday on technical issues and sometimes discuss them. It is a different thing that most of his ideas will go over-the-head for most of us. I also remember how Uma used to explain things from the very basic (once he did that to Gururaj and Guru tried his best to confuse Uma). Till this date we respect them for their technical expertise and willingness to share them with us; so the same applies to all of us, right? If the team knows that you are a subject matter expert and if they aspire to be like you; I guess you are a successful leader.