Friendship and Leadership
The inspiration for this article came from a fantastic session between Ravichandran Ashwin and Robin Uthappa that can be found here. While the entire interview covers Robin's journey and his ups and downs, the most interesting part of it is his description of his friendship with MS Dhoni and his move to CSK.
For those following cricket, you would be very familiar that people like Robin and RP have been great friends of MSD. So when Robin came to CSK in 2021, most people including me thought this was facilitated by MSD thanks to his friendship.
It is fascinating to see how Robin describes the role of MSD in his move to CSK. MSD let the support staff make the decision and made it clear to Robin that he had nothing to do with the decision. As a leader, he wanted to be objective and let Robin come on his own credentials and didn't want their friendship to be the reason for his move. It is also fascinating to see the clarity and honesty in communication from MSD to Robin that he will not play in the first eleven at the start of the tournament.
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As I reflected on this interview, i was reminded of several water cooler conversations in our work places where we hear comments such as "so and so is the Manager's golfing partner and it is no surprise he/she got promoted" or "they stay/serve in the same community and are good buddies" or " they are quite close outside of work as they joined the company at the same time" and i am sure there are many more.
Some management authors have theories that Leaders should maintain a balance on personal friendships as it will affect objectivity in decision making. MSD has taught us that it is possible to remain objective while being a good trusted friend.
One more feather in his Leadership journey and one I cherished as I am sure all of us have gone through similar experiences balancing friendship and Leadership. Hope you enjoy the video and my article.
Product at Myntra
2 年Thanks for writing about this Srinivasan Venkatesan! Made me watch the interview and I loved it. MSD's clarity in thought and communication definitely made him a very strong and trusted leader. Some other takeaway from the interview was the importance of investing in your learning (something we keep hearing in professional life) and how it has benefitted experienced cricketers like Uthappa during their lows (DK's training with Abhishek Nayyar is also one such inspirational story)
Global General Manager - Enterprise Platform Engineering / IT Operations - Ford Motor Company | IIM Lucknow | ex-Infosys | Tech. Product Management | SRE | IT Strategy & Planning.
2 年Well articulated Venky. Both Leadership and Friendship are respected if done with Trust, merit and right credentials. ? ????
Cyber Security Leader - DevSecOps, Software Supply Chain Security, Application Security, Cloud Security, Cyber Advisory & Consulting, Emerging Technologies Security ( Block chain, IoT, AI ML, etc ), API Security
2 年Great example of how one must be differentiating personal and professional relationships. It's important to eliminate any sort of unconscious bias to build a high performing team with a very high happiness quotient / Job Satisfaction Index. Thank you for sharing your insights Srinivasan Venkatesan