Vatsan’s Ramblings

Day 3 of Management Excellence Event.

We are finally starting to finish the slide deck for tomorrows presentations. My only dubious contribution to the presentation itself is the agenda catch phrase – How to Push Someone Off the Cliff and Feel Good About it. Our research is about how we can change our current reward system to better equip managers to defend themselves when an employee who is on the edge of the average-bad spectrums has to be bumped down… boring subject (and a really bad sentence!), but very important for us who must face this system every day.

I played the project lead for the day, with a co-lead Randy to share my responsibilities. Randy came in with a well done schedule and job assignments. I felt left out of the job assignments, but I was working on being less pushy and being less about “I”, so I let it pass. After all, it was a sound plan. So we proceeded to run the show, with me largely deferring to Randy’s initiative.

After a couple of hours, we had already been slipping for a while, and were not making enough progress.

We had a pulse check with our manager Mark, who suggested that I should start focusing on the competencies that I wished to grow – which was to learn to better set and execute on goals. Another point he made was that he would like us to focus on growing our teams better – by allowing them opportunities to grow their own self-identified deficiencies in their competencies.

In retrospect, I did moderately okay as a project leader, and made more mistakes than right choices. But in the end, the project seemed to converge into a good form – which is testament to how smart and effective the people in my team were.

During feedback, this is what I heard…

• Did not have a consistent management style with co-lead
• Did not have a coherent voice as co-leads – acted as 2 voices instead of 1
• Did not help follow the initial schedule very effectively
• Does not clearly convey changes in (previously articulated) plans/priorities

• Strong, opinionated and smart

• Well organized
• Detached from work when watching over the clock (i.e., after switching to a schedule driven project management mode)
• Agitated
• Lack of compassion for reasons behind project slip
• Did not have other choices for management style given the constraints/bubble the team was in.

• Ignored causes for project slippage
• Put too many people into a single unit which wasted time, instead of pairing up

• Interrupted focused activity which was being lead by one team member (this happened when I walked in to reset the schedule and recreate priorities and scale down scope based on what time we had left).
  • This felt very abrupt and almost insulting
• Went off to do other things while being paired up with one member (this happened when time was limited and did not have the luxury of randomizations, but had to leave for meeting with leads)

• Many times, one-upped co-lead and made decisions without consultation or even a courtesy information.

• Completely forgot about the mandate from management to focus on competencies and instead focused on project completion. (This is the equivalent of losing sight of business priorities while being shortsightedly focused on completing coding)
• Learned from and adapted to prior feedback very well.