My Learning about Leadership - It is all about People

In 2014, the business challenges I faced were enormous. As I dived deep, it became apparent that business success will depend on how the team responds to the changes I intended to bring. My success or failure will depend on whether the team stepped up to the challenge or not. Here are a few lessons I learnt in the course of my journey-

1.   Words have a bigger impact than you imagine – Within a few months, I realized there are a large number of conversations happening in teams quoting me. It became apparent that what I said in a discussion, was getting quoted “out of context”. I learnt to be more careful with my words and also more conscious of whom I was speaking to – listening to verbal and non-verbal cues.

2.  Focus on communication – Communication both up and down the management chain is often broken. I may evolve the business strategy and the reasons for change along with your direct reports. However, they may not effectively communicate the same to their direct reports. I learn that it is important to share the big picture with as many people as I can. I eventually pulled critical stakeholders in my direct meetings and also created structured meetings across functions to ensure to and fro communications. It is very important for the team to understand the WHY. I was therefore spending a lot more time explaining the decisions, discussing pros and cons rather than just communicating the decisions. 

3.   Everyone owns the customer- Teams are very good at protecting themselves from criticism or blame. No one wants to own an issue, eventually the total number of unassigned complaints becomes a large block. It is therefore important for everyone in the organization to own the customer issues and concerns. Fastforward has succeeded in reducing the number of complaints by 70% with a single minded focus on this theme. Everyone who has touched the customer in any way owns the customer and the complaints. There is no option of disowning the responsibility.

4.  Responsibility lies with the decision maker – When I make a decision, I am responsible for it. However, the success depends on whether the team puts their heart and soul into its implementation. Since the team did not make the decision, they did not “own the decision”. Of course, this changes when the team makes the decision. As a leader, I learnt to limit myself to providing suggestions and brainstorming with the team. When they made the decision, they felt more responsibile for its success. Brainstorming is time consuming and energy sapping, requires more focus and attention than making the decision all by myself. However, in the overall interest of the business, I had to be patient and let the team reach the right decision with my role as a guide or a mentor.

This probably is the most important change in my leadership style which I realize has helped me a lot. I was no longer saying “Let’s do this or that”, I was asking the question – “what are pros and cons of doing this and that”.

5.   Listening and Listening with Intent - Efficient teams may not be effective if they are working on the wrong thing. And the team is often closest to the customer. They have insights which may or may not exist with the decision makers. It is therefore important to listen to the voice of the customer. At a point in time, I was listening to “recorded calls” to understand the customer mindset. And since I was doing it, everyone in the management team was also doing it.

6. Does everyone in the team know what impact they are making- Quality of work is hard to measure, and then the measurement of quantity becomes the norm. Everyone was defining the quantity as their key output. Ownership of outcome (in this case, traffic on site) meant that the team needed access to tools (Google Analytics) to measure the impact. And then, the link between the effort and the outcome was established with trial and error. Team was allowed to experiment on "what" and "how". And the measurement shifted from micro-achievement to aggregate achievement. They could fail in small measures while the overall outcome was achieved.

I am still learning, now the process of learning about myself and my leadership style has become a journey. I continue to discover more about people. There is so much more to learn. The journey continues…