From Apprenticeship to Mentoring

I have been meaning to write about the events that transpired in my group that have made me proud, gave me immense satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment at the same time.

The TL;DR version of this post is that I have used the leadership lessons learnt from my seniors in apprenticeship during my stint in the Indian Navy and I have achieved an extremely satisfying result. My team members have moved forward in their careers while being highly productive for the organization and simultaneously achieving their goals in life. It is the story of two inspiring youngsters who came to us straight out of the college and are now on their path to achieving greater heights.

Now the Longer version

While back in the Navy, I had encountered two varying examples of leadership. Early on in my career, I was very weak in running and I had a commissioned officer who chastised and humiliated me in front of my class of 175 apprentices to exhort me to run. On the other side, I had senior apprentices who ran with me everyday, gradually increasing the distance day after day till such time I was able to run longer distances. They lead with empathy and example. They left no one behind and never accepted that something could not be achieved through perseverance. The latter form of leadership is what keeps me going today and I am eternally indebted to those Seniors and Juniors of Artificer Apprentices of the Indian Navy who helped me understand how to lead and also how to follow.

The fundamental mantra of apprenticeship was that Juniors came first for everything and from juniors well-being and professional competency did the seniors drew their strength. They made us sweat, toil and ground us to what we were to become. Their guidance extended beyond training, while at ships and even now while in the corporate as well. They are the mentors, I always look up to.

Coming back to the corporate world, the same principles were applied when Shrinidhi and Soundarya joined our group in the beginning of 2021. They were clueless about cyber security. They were just assigned to our group. They were given a three week period to decide if they wanted to continue in cyber security domain. They had to choose between the perils of being in a penetration testing team to any other development team.

We started with a bootcamp in security to bring them into the security domain. From the bootcamp to conducting classes on automotive protocols, both of them were put to grind. Both of them stuck to their guns. They persevered and they never gave up. All of this was happening with pandemic in the background and all the team members were equally stressed about projects. But their professional competency and their well being were given utmost importance. They in turn gave their unconditional commitment to achieving perfection in whatever they were working on.

In a short span of time, both Shrinidhi and Soundarya started working on different technologies and started exhibiting different competencies. Shrinidhi was very good in managing projects, her interaction with customers and ability to understand the nuances of project management was way beyond her year(s) of experience. Soundarya on the otherhand displayed ability to think differently and out of the box, a hall mark of a security professional in the making.

When I joined the corporate, I saw an associate who left us to do post-doc but never mentioned the same till the time of exit. There is an unspoken practice of managers being excluded or being kept in the dark. Personally, I wanted to be a part of the growth story of all my team members and work along with them for their growth. In the same spirit, I had several discussions with respect to their future and it was a great honour for me when they let me in, when they let me know their aspirations and allowed me to be a part of their discussions while they were charting their career. It helped us plan the transition, we had six month heads-up of their exit and more importantly they were so happy and confident that they made their presence felt till the very last day.

Today I am proud to say that, Shrinidhi has made it to the prestigious Cornell University and will be doing Engineering Management, a calling we discovered together. Soundarya has made it to another prestigious one, University of Central Florida where she would be pursuing her Masters in Computer Science.

I wish both Shrinidhi and Soundarya all the very best. Though they are not Artificer Apprentices, they do have the same spirit, a spirit to endure and persevere, to soar towards the sky !!