Chapter 21: Training: Accidental Entrepreneur (Building Credibility)

 “Those who can agreeably set forth their acquirements before the learned will be regarded as the most learned among the learned.”     -- Thirukural

As I publish these articles, I get many private queries from young professionals and mid-level career people on advice to prepare them for career growth or to become entrepreneurs. As I reflect on my life, the first thing that comes to mind is the importance of building credibility among the stakeholders. Stakeholders are defined as executives or managers, technical leads or seniors and juniors or peers. This allows you to develop trust and as I remember from the play Hamilton that you gotta be in the room where decisions are made (“The room where it happened”). It is easier said than done. I hope my approaches with different kinds of stakeholders would set some light into getting there.

Executives/Managers: As people move up in management, their responsibilities change from managing day to day projects to setting overall strategies and making sure that the right team is in position to execute these projects. Most of these high-level decisions are data driven along with identifying the various industry trends. These executives don’t have enough time to understand every employees’ concerns and address them individually. 

         I have worked with many of these executives. As human behavior, if you were to help them achieve good results with minimal headaches to them, they would like you very much and likely to help you in the future. My approach to executives and managers is to first try to understand where their pain points/rough spots are. Most of the time, if they have a decent team, it is beyond the project what they are working on currently and likely to be a new competitive threat or some advanced features which the team didn’t foresee. For example, when I was working at Intel, they wanted to repurpose the processor core to go after the security area. While the entire team was just looking at adding few features to enhance the performance, I went out of my way to learn about hardware security along with the use cases at application and software level. That gave me insight into what was important and what is not. This helped us optimize the complexity and schedule which gave my executive very good visibility in the organization. In turn, I was given more responsibility on future projects and my manager started including me in executive reviews where I got more visibility into higher level people in the organizations.

Group/Tech Leads: In any technology company, the first job would be to work under technical leads who are not managers, but they control your work assignments and visibility among peers. I had the luxury of working with many very good technical leads. I wrote about a few of them in my last article. Most of the time, these technical leads are difficult to work with. They have their own assignments and on top of that they are expected to mentor junior employees. 

         My approach with the leads is a bit different than waiting for them to tell me what to do. For example, when I joined Rockwell, my lead William was working on implementing an arithmetic multiplier to improve the performance and reduce the power consumption. I didn’t understand the implementation at the beginning. Therefore, I asked him to assign me some validation tasks on that design as I spent the next few months understanding the ins and outs of his existing design by simulating in the verification environment which allowed me to get more familiarity with the requirements. I had studied at Stanford University in this area and the latest research which was being done that period of time. Once I understood the requirements, I started suggesting new approaches to my lead with humbleness. We started having good conversations about my ideas and eventually my lead recommended to our manager that I should take over the design. That led me to become the project lead and later I used that foundation in my startup to build the core technology. I hold many US patents in these areas which can all be attributed to me taking initiative and following through with proper engineering contributions.

Peers/Subordinates: When I Joined Rockwell, they hired around 6-8 fresh graduates like me. We came from various universities in the US. At the beginning, all of us were given similar assignments. Not all of us were prepared at the same level. Stanford University and University of Minnesota had prepared me well with great fundamentals and tools to contribute immediately which I used to connect with many executives and leads. 

          Understanding the gap in education level and experiences, after discussing with my peers, I talked to my manager about using remote learning to bring some of the courses from Stanford University to Rockwell. This was in the early nineties when the internet wasn’t there. I remembered Stanford University recorded the classes on VHS video tapes and kept at libraries for students to view. I reached out to my professor at Stanford and administrators to get those tapes to Rockwell for a fee. They agreed and I set up lunch time “Lunch and Learn” sessions for anyone interested. That was a hit and many engineers attended those sessions and really appreciated me for setting it up. Just like that few of these activities made me stand out in the group. They respected me well. Within two years, it led me to lead the team of engineers and become their managers soon after. 

I always looked for ways to connect with others in meaningful ways. At no time above, I was directly looking for any returns. I wanted to improve the team capabilities and increase the visibility in the organization. That led me to advance in my career and connect with people from other organizations. One great memory was that when Rockwell wanted to go back and recruit more engineers from Stanford, I was selected by our Vice President of Engineering to fly with him to Stanford University and present my work experiences. This gave me a great opportunity to connect with many executives at Rockwell, when I was just 1-2 years out of university. I think these all worked out well since I built credibility among my peers, managers and finally executives. Go try this, be humble, add value to others and don’t expect things in return, most of the time, it works out for everyone. It is not what others can do for you, rather what you can do for others and help advance everyone’s productivity along the way.