Independce Day

Dear friends,
As I was almost ready for onsite assignment for a new project, I just checked up with my offshore team and I found they are totally new to my then company-infosys (and two of them were freshers). But I could see the eagerness in them to learn things. We had a bumpy start and the first request was handled by ML at offshore (he was a sub contractor to Infosys) was very decent guy .He used to offer lot of solutions, and work hard in the first few days (being fresh to our AMEX account). All of us learnt the Amex process related things and technical findings together. They shared some tips and I sent them my learning. This continued for 4 months, mean time, the team was fully comfortable with the system. Finally the project, which was started as pilot for four months got extended for one more year.A funny thing happened one day as one of my friends here at onsite asked me during general chat, about my resources at offshore. He recognized my resource immediately, saying that my ML was in his earlier project for 10 days and he was pushed out of the project because he did not know the basics (=3.4) in Mainframe. Then I replied, “ He is the best resource we have in our team”. Later my ML at offshore revealed the secret that he was not a mainframe guy and he learnt everything after he joined our project. Since he was a contractor he had to manage to stay in the job.I never really felt that I was dealing with a guy who is inexperienced (in fact I never faced any problem with him, technically). What made the difference? Is it the positive attitude and freedom of mind?Here’s another shared experience, where my friends were part of two small projects (a team size of 5 each) and all of them are highly experienced and added to this, they are well versed with the application (business rules etc…). The team leader happened to be an autocratic person, with rigid rules and strict controls. The team was questioned for every small mistake and a lot of other cheap politics was deployed. Finally the project was scrapped for not meeting the timelines (though the team worked for all 7 days a week and 14-15 hours for the 4 months) and quality (in spite of regular reviews, DCS).Finally the Onsite & Offshore had conflicts. We could not get the next project. The team never had a peaceful moment during the project execution. Everyone in the project thought it was their nightmare.Did micromanagement and red- tapism helped?What is the difference between the above two incidents? Whether ‘ the learnability and positive attitude won OR technical experience, where the human factor was lacking and micromanagement was in place, helped a project?It is identified decades ago and management schools of thought have elucidated the fact that a humane approach is required for executing a given task. The world is not changed yet. Human being is a complex creation of Creator. Unfortunately the importance has not been identified yet. Some people are lucky to be in S/W business where such incidents are rare and since they also change projects often, the bad phase is definitely for a short duration.What goes wrong? Human mind is like a bow and arrow, the more you stretch and give more freedom (within some boundaries) the more you can give the world. Normally most of the people become demoralized for answering questions for which we ourselves feel guilty. Of course, we get demoralized for everything we are questioned, but sense of guilty, if added to the faultfinding session, will be real disturbing. This demoralization phase will continue to grow and eventually there will be a stage where we question our basic intelligence and we also rethink about our caliber and question our achievements in the past.We continue to make mistakes when we are not free. We all know the famous Tagore’s ‘where the mind is without fear..’. If everyone understood the above fact then why there are still lot of stray incidents where people get demoralized. It clearly tells that we know that fact, but we refuse to implement it as people around spoil us.When I became PL 9.5 years back all my close friends wished me good luck and offered a free advice, ”From today onwards you have to maintain some distance between you and your team mates, else they may take advantage of you. You also need to get regular status updates from them otherwise they will forget who they are reporting to etc.”Problem with the above is that, there are chances in which the above advices can be taken. Chances are fair that people might misuse the power they get. We should not get carried away through such things. As you all know “With great Power comes Great Responsibility”.Every person will have his way of handling things. Wearing false masks will never help us.Also let us try to understand our tasks, depending upon the role we play
Case1: Should the task to be completed where people automatically take up the responsibility and stand till the completion?
Case2: Should we force people to work and intimidate them by pointing their mistakes, demoralizing them, making them incapable to take decisions on their own?
Case 1 requires a participative leader, who provides freedom to his teammates and gets work done without much tension, as there were no misunderstandings. It also helps the personal development of the individual to take up the higher responsibilities, as opposed to case2.In order to give the best we have, we need to maintain a little composure during disturbed times. Try to think of the achievements you made, and identify the problems that we really need to address for our own development.Always think that each and every problem will add an experience to you, where you learn a new thing and become matured. The experiences will not only teach you what to do but also what not to do.Today being the Independence Day, I have chosen this topic. We lost our lives for obtaining the freedom and let us not fall into the rigid hands again.
Tip:The most important thing in life is to work freely within the identified and agreed upon boundaries, to give the best we have to the world to get back the best from the world.