Lessons learnt on management [Part 1]…

Everybody goes through a learning. This post is a collection of the learnings that I underwent while trying my hand at team management/leadership.

Right from school days, I always fancied leading a team. I was in a school where the SPL (School Pupil Leader) was the person who gives out all the commands (School attention..school salute..those kinds) at our school prayer. Every morning that I attended the prayer, I used to visualize myself giving out the commands. In that process, without analyzing what a leadership position meant, I had tend believe that leadership was all about commanding. It’s about giving out orders. With the turn of events and me winning few accolades at schools, I finally donned the role which I was dreaming. It was the year 2000 which gave me my turn to give out commands. I shouted the commands at the top of my voice with pride gushing through my throat for every command of mine. I certainly believed that leadership was all about commanding, until…

I carried that belief onto my college. I started playing the ‘General Secretary’ role for a society which consisted only of freshers. During one of our symposiums, me being the commander-in-charge, the leader in me started giving out commands to every single member of the team.  For every of the activity that had to be done, I pulled up a guy and ordered him to do it. And as before, with every of my command, the sense of pride grew and I believed I was maturing as a leader. But hell broke loose. People were naturally annoyed at the way I was treating them and refused to work for the society. I could not figure out why they had problems in obeying my orders as I was the leader of that community. I was lucky enough to have a friend called Ajith and his team called ‘People first’ who introduced me to John C Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable laws of leadership. Reading the book and the talks with Ajith had 2 changes in me. First, my belief that a leader is there only to give out commands was demolished. Secondly, I understood how prematured was my understanding and leadership/management is a journey.

I learnt the lesson that a leader has to be the first participant of the team and treat his team members with respect.

Mind share

I recently happened to meet one of my school mates. Since we were meeting after a long time (nearly 7 yrs), we had to update each of us about our graduation and employment details. I work in the IT sector and he works in the chemical industry. When I asked him which company he is working for, he replied as ‘I work for abcd n co. Since you are working in IT sector, you might not know it’. I made a quick reply mentioning that I know that company and I also told him how the logo of the company looked like. He was surprised and asked me how do I know. I couldn’t recollect it. After that, we walked off. But the thought of how do I know this company was running in mind. I was thinking hard to recollect…

After sometime I realized how the name of this company had the ‘Top of the mind’ share in my mind. The company operates transport facility for it’s employees and the buses are white with name of the company written on it. While I commute for my work, I have seen these buses almost everyday and that’s how it was at the top of the mind. This made me think how even the buses could create the ‘Top of the mind’ share for a company. From that day, I started observing many of the employer run buses. Some of the buses carried lines about,

* About the awards received by the organization
* Promos of their soon-to-be launched products
* Some significant milestone (like ‘we are 1 million’) recently reached

I came to know about another IT Company also through their buses. What an advertisement mediums these company operated buses are. Hmm…Nice learnings! I will employ these techniques when I need to create a mind share among prospective employees and general public,

* The buses should be clean and tidy because the first impression matters right!
* Park the buses for the night at prominent places. Preferably – near restaurants frequented by youth, near schools (to attract young parents), near colleges, near the other companies of your industry, malls
* Run the bus through the arterial roads of the city during the morning & evening peak hours
* Carry information about significant milestones, recognitions/accolades received, vision, what kind of people are recruited
* Have the company logo on the bus