15 years and counting

This month (Sep 2020), I completed 15 years of professional work experience. I guess I could add a couple of years to this if I count the days when I tutored school kids (mostly for pocket money) or when I taught electronics to first and second year Marine Engineering students of my own college as a professor while I was waiting for my job to start back in 2005.

Now, looking back at these years, I can see how each of my career choices helped me grow and make me become who I am today. And there are many valuable lessons I have learnt all along..some of them cliche.

Even though no one has asked, I feel obligated to share these learnings with my network here in hope that it will help someone in one way or other. So here you go -

1. Everyone is a mentor - 

In my entire career, there were many mentors who have inspired me, coached me, pushed me to become better. I will not name any as it will only do injustice to those I may miss to mention. What people fail to understand is that mentors can literally be anyone. From the student that asked you difficult questions (which made you prepare for the worst so that you don't fumble in front of a class of 78 students) to the client that wants nothing short of perfection from everything that is done by you. From the micro managing lead of the team to the client director who stopped your billing and almost made you redundant. From the VP who wanted only superhumans on his team to your reportee who will always make mistakes. 

The point is, each one of these personas and situations have a lesson to teach you. They all are mentors. They help you grow as a person but it all depends what you see. You can see a problem or opportunity.

2. No work is small -

I have a habit of diving deep into all the work that I do. I cannot just swim on the surface. I have an OCD to understand what I am working on and then work on it. I get my hands dirty to understand things better. But ever since I got promoted to lead role (back in 2007), most of the feedback I have got from managers/peers/seniors was to not get too involved in the project. While the higher level feedback was to be learn how to delegate, which is a must, I feel people misconstrue this feedback as not to care about what is in the work and then often argue “this is not my job”. Part of this could be attitude in general and part can be due to the way this feedback is communicated. But I have learnt that you need to do whatever it takes to get shit done. Yes, even if that means you do things that you would ideally delegate to L1/L2 level people. Because what matters in the end are results. 

Note that I am not saying you should not delegate but if the push comes to shove, get your hands dirty and don’t think of it as a ‘lesser’ work that you are doing. A lot of companies expect their mid management and even c-level executives to be hands-on. Plus, if you know it, people cannot take you for a ride. 

3. Empathy -

One quality that will take you a long long way in becoming a successful person is “Empathy”. This has a lot to do with attitude. For example, when I was a noob in the industry, I got a lot of BS from my leaders. I was asked to do drop everything at hand and build reports just because someone higher up wanted something before lunch, I was not given timely feedback or the right feedback many a times, annual appraisals felt like cheating. Now when you have been through this and still grow in the industry, you turn out either being ruthless, the kind that doesn’t give a damn as no one did when it was his/her turn OR you become a person who can empathise. I chose the later. For every issue I faced, I decided to not let my team, my function, my company face the same. 

Empathy goes a really long way. It helps you bond better and make a stronger and more loyal team around you. And to be successful, you need to work along with others. You will need all the support that you can get. Empathy doesn’t mean that you give in to the whims and fancies of the other person, it means you understand their view point as if you were experiencing it yourself. 

4. Communication -

This is something that everyone knows. You have to be good at communication to succeed. But the point is communication is not “Spoken English”. Yes, if you speak English well, it will help you in most of your jobs but what I mean with communication is to be able to express yourself. I am not hooked up on English but if you are not able to say or write what you actually mean, you will end up getting frustrated. And the second part to this is to be able to present. You may have a lot of ideas, lot of data points, lot of valid arguments, a perfect business case, but unless you are able to present this in the right way that people can consume, it will not add any value. This is something I am still learning. I have a few colleagues who are really really good at this and I always look up to them for getting inspiration. I have seen them sail through in meetings with help of their command on communication. 

5. Reading -

You must have all seen the posts that says “Bill Gates wants you to ready these 5 books” OR “Elon Musk is an avid reader”. I always wondered if these posts were true. I mean, the richest guys of the world have time to read? This sounds crazy. But as it turns out, it is true. Not that I know Bill Gates or Elon Musk personally, I say this because of what I see around now. In all my job, I have been fortunate enough to be able to speak with top leaders of the industry - CXOs, VP, SVPs, etc. from different background and different sized companies. A few things common across most of these people were (a) they could speak about any topic (b) they could quote one or the other author relevant to the point of discussion and yes (c) they all read books. Being well read does add a lot of weight to what you say and how you communicate. Until my college days, I could gobble books of any size in no time but have lost touch since then. However, I trying to rekindle my love for reading. Last recommendation made to me was “Radical Candor by Kim Scott” took 20-25 days to go through 240 pages.

That’s all for now. I will see you all in another post 15 years from now :-)

Cheers