manage well

Congratulations! You’ve got the long-cherished promotion that will make you manager – of your own buddies! You don’t quite know what it means for your relations with the team – are you better-off as their manager or as their buddy?

One key challenge with first-line managers, especially those fairly new in their roles, is how to strike right balance between formal reporting relationship and informal personal relations with the team. Considering that most people “leave managers and not companies”, this seems to be a critical issue, but seldom discussed. In my career, I have also seen similar issues when people became a second-line manager or a group manager for the first-time – so, this is not a one-time issue.

I have often seen managers who have been promoted from within going all too out to please the team that “nothing has really changed” and they are still the good old buddy that they have known him all along. In their earnest to earn brownie points from their once-colleagues-but-now-team, they behave and act like one of the guys. Nothing could be wrong with it, except when personal proximity limits or blurs their professional judgment, especially when pulling up low performers. At times, I have seen this was the ‘bribe’ such managers were willing to pay to buy their team’s ‘respect’. The team definitely loves such managers (“I drank till 3am last weekend with my manager”, or “We plan to watch movie with our manager this evening”), and the manager also has surely found a way to make peace with his team, some of whom might be secretly jealous of his growth. Sometimes, they also overdelegate, or recommend promotions too-soon for their teams – which could be an indication of the secret guilt or discomfort they carry inside them. Surely, this is not an easy seat to occupy, and with little preparation or onboarding support given to rookie managers, it is not surprising that people find what appeals to them best. Surely, these managers are extremely popular with their teams! I call them Santa Claus – they come to office with a goodie bag, and fulfill their team member’s wishes every day.

Continue reading ‘How does manager’s proximity to team affects team dynamics and decision-making?’ »

Last month, I sat through an interesting talk by two very senior business professionals, Ajit Chakravarti and Govind Mirchandani. The talk was organized by the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC), and you can read speaker profiles here. I found their talk particularly interesting because they did not talk any theory, and did not use any complex jargon or bulky models to explain their ideas.

They talked about how and why leadership also requires to be mentored, and how a mentor makes the difference. They used the analogy of Krishna as a mentor to Arjun in the Kurushetra battlefield. Arjun is torn by the value conflict – should he fight and kill his own kith and kin for the sake of getting his kingdom back? He doesn’t require training for the war, nor does he require any coaching for the battle – the fact that he is out there in the battlefield, all decked up means he is fully trained and ready to fight the war. What he needs is someone whom he trusts for his knowledge and his unflinching trust and support for him who can listen to him, clarify the value conflict (which, more often than not, is not between right vs wrong, but between ‘right’ and ‘right’  two equally competing options that are both the right thing to do individually, but when tested against each other, put one’s value system to extreme test), ask questions, show him the mirror – so that Arjun can take the correct decision. In their view, Krishna fills that role as a mentor, and they extrapolate the following traits of a mentor from how Krishna goes on to help Arjun:

• Continue reading ‘How Mentoring can help Leaders too?’ »

Last week, NASSCOM organized a talk on innovation by Rob Shelton, co-author of “Making Innovation Work“, followed by excellent presentations by two of the previous year’s winner of NASSCOM Innovation awards, Intel India and Sloka Telecom. It was good learning to sit in Rob’s audience and listen to his perspectives on innovation. I liked his (probably) favorite punchline (because he must have repeated it couple of times during his presentation): “How you innovate determines why you innovate“. I think this is a great way to sum up if an organization is undertaking innovation as a strategic differentiator or just to play catch-up on a tactical level.

In his view, the three building blocks of innovation are leadership, culture and process. His perspective is that innovation originates from business strategy could be either a technology innovation or a business model innovation. I think techies who spend a lot of time doing the ‘core’ tech stuff don’t easily recognize the presence or importance of a business innovation, but from a business perspective, it does make a lot of sense. What Apple did with iPhone might not be so much of a technology innovation (because neither the technology nor the MP3 player as a product were really new) but more of a business innovation, especially when you view the entire food chain of iPhone: iTunes allow a seamless integration of iPhone with the music stores and allow maintaining a music library and buying and downloading music as micropayments and choice at song-level (as opposed to the Music CD model of buying per CD even if you all you want is a single song).

When we consider these two factors as primary vehicles of delivery of an innovation, we can consider a 2×2 grid on how close is the change to its existing state. If both technology and business changes are brand-new, then we are talking of Radical Innovation. However in his view, Radical innovation is very infrequent, Breakthrough innovation leads to high growth and Incremental innovation leads to average growth. Breakthrough Innovation is when any one of the axis is new and the other factor is close to an existing one, and Incremental Innovation, as the name suggests, is very close everything exisiting.

Continue reading ‘Why do you Innovate ?’ »

In the previous blogs What is the leadership style in your software teams ? and Situational Leadership in Software teams, I explored how leadership has evolved over time, and how we could relate it to the concept of situational leadership in the context of software development teams. Those thoughts were from an essentially western perspective where the ideas such as democracy in life and at work, free thinking, equality, participatory management, individualism (followed by a re-discovery of team-oriented approach to managing work) and shared leadership have been uniformally accepted in the social values and ably institutionalized by legislation. The net result is that we are seeing a great shift in the balance of power from the so-called ‘management’ (a.k.a. the role in an organization responsible to get the job done) to the so-called ‘labor’ (a.k.a. the role in an organization responsible to do the job). The four models of leaderhip helped us understand how leadership evolved at a macro-level down the ages, and the concept of situational leadership helped us understand how a guru, or a manager, could adapt his style of leadership based on the growth of his teams.

In this context, it is interesting to see how Shu-Ha-Ri, an old Japanese concept of staged learning, guided empowerment and inner learning in martial arts supports a learner to graduate through a process of blind loyalty, learning, discovery, questioning and finally figuring out things on his own. In my view, this is complemantary to the situational leadership in the sense that while the emphasis in situational leadership is on the leader (even though his style depends on his follower’s growth), the focus is clearly on the follower in Shu-Ha-Ri model, even if his/her growth is supported by the guru himself. I think a study of this model helps us understand where and why a student’s journey must begin, and what are the stages of evolution. In my view, this model doesn’t explicitly tell how a guru must lead as the student grows in his learning, and I think therein lies an important application. But, let’s first look at the model.

Shu-ha-ri is “a term the Japanese use to describe the overall progression of martial arts training, as well as the lifelong relationship the student will enjoy with his or her instructor.

Continue reading ‘Shu-Ha-Ri and Situational Leadership for Managers’ »

In a previous post, What is the leadership style in your software teams ?, I discussed about four key types of leadership and their evoluation, and how it could possibly relate to software teams. In this blog post, let’s dwell on this topic further, and explore how to decide what leadership style suits a given situation. The assumption here is that there is no such thing as an “all-weather” or a personal favorite leadership style – each tool and method has pros and cons depending on why, how, when, what and where they are applied. The value one derives depends on how well a given style ‘fits’ the context – to that end, it it highly imperative to identify the ground conditions and only then decide what could work here more effectively.

Our industry has a difficulty articulating with what type of leadership we want to have. We surely don’t like the ‘Great Leader’ or the ‘Command and Control’ leaderships (discussed in my previous post). We believe this leads to a highly autocratic or centralized organizations which is the not the best way to manage highly educated, unapologetically assertive and fiercely independent knowledge professionals. We feel empowerment is the way to go, and eventually want to be able to manage own destiny by ourselves. There is a fair amount of consistency in these thoughts among young professionals cutting across countries and cultures. This should make the task for managers easier, because they kind of know what is expected of them, and all they need to do is to just do it! However, like every management advise, it is easier said than done. For one, most managers from the shop-floor era of management might not be skilled or ready for the new-age management mantras. They might feel insecure letting go of almost all their authority, or might feel underconfident about younger professional’s competence, or some other reasons. So, that’s one part of the issue.

Second part of the issue is how young professionals want their leaders to support them. Contrary to most people’s beliefs, everyone does want someone ‘above’ them to support them when they are need help, give them some directions when they are doing something for the first time, give them feedback when they have done something, shower them with praise and recognition when they accomplish something, and (surprise ! surprise !) even pull them up when they mess things up (of course, not in a way that kills them, but in a way that lifts them).

Continue reading ‘Situational Leadership in Software teams’ »

Do you like to believe that the so-called ‘command and control’ is an exceptionally distasteful idea for intellctual work such as software development?

I don’t particularly disagree with you, but just wondering – have you ever worked for a stereotypical ‘command and control organization’ in software industry, where things were forcibly thrust down your throat without taking your views, or you not having any freedom to question or disagree? We all seem to have romantic ideas and idealistic opinions about what it means (rather, what it should mean) but let’s ‘inspect and adapt’ our understanding with the real-world experiences so that we have a correct understanding of an incorrect idea.
 
In my close to two decades of working with European, Chinese (yes – contrary to what most people believe, Chinese also disagree with their managers very passionately just like anyone else, and won’t take a so-called ‘command and control’ directive lying low) and US product companies, I am yet to see one. Prior to that, I worked for Defense Research (not as a military officer but as a computer scientist) where I closely interacted with defense personnel, and as far as I can tell, I never saw a blind ‘command and control’ anywhere – if the guy taking ‘orders’ was not convinced, there was an element of positive negotiation about exploring better ways to do things. It is probably the bollywood style ‘command and control’ (“koi shak ya sawal (Any questions)?”. “no sir”) or the Hollywood-style action-packed patriotic flicks where soldiers are constantly getting instructions on radiosets from generals to “do this, and do that” that makes us think it is all about one-sided communication?

So, is the military really a bad C&C model that serves as good reference for how software teams shouldn’t be run, or it is just our figment of imagination to ringfence our own position and call everything outside as C&C – perhaps taking a safe position without really understanding what is C&C really ? Here, let me share three purely unrelated but relevant pieces of knowledge that might make you think and question how much prevalent ‘command and control’ really is in the military:

Continue reading ‘What is the leadership style in your software teams ?’ »