The Struggle of Being a Good Person and Leader at the Same Time

I worked for Infosys Ltd, one amongst the top Software giants in India, for 4.6 years. I joined as a Trainee and was a Technology analyst by the time I quit Infosys. I have had the opportunity to work with 5 to 6 leaders in the projects I worked on. Amongst these leaders, I would like to talk about my immediate manager with whom I worked in Bangalore, India for a Government project called the GST (Goods and sales tax). We were a team of 10 people working under him.

To talk about Infosys’s work culture, the company is reasonably relaxed and more like a government firm than an MNC. The rules despite being portrayed as stern, the employees had their way around it and the firm was, to be honest, fine with it. It is one of the few firms that can be considered secure in terms of employment. During the recession of 2008, the firm, surprisingly did not sack its employees unlike its competitors, instead paid reduced salaries to them and retained all of them.

My very first impression when I met my Manager, Mr. Sankara (name changed) after getting picked for the GST project was that he was calm and composed and frankly I was very happy about it but, my teammates had a different view about him as they had spent more than an year with him before I joined the team. As days passed, I was starting to relate to my teammates. Sankara as I told was calm and composed but the problem was, he was too calm and too laid back. Almost any and every manager from the other teams and senior managers in the floor could holler at Sankara for not getting things done and Sankara would go on and easily throw his team or one of us from the team under the bus. This came as a shock to me as all the other managers whom I had worked with were the complete opposite. Even when they were aware that the mistake was on his/her teams end, they would still defend their team. The biggest problem with Sankara was that he could not say ‘NO’. Each Time his superiors asked him to get some work done with his team and provided him a very tight deadline, he would easily accept it without even consulting us. These types of work usually demanded more time and all the other managers from other teams would raise their voice and disagree to the deadline but not Sankara.

This attitude of him being a “Yes” man was also noticed while he was handling the leaves and unavailability of his team members. To state an example, when 7 out of 10 people in our team approached Sankara for a leave he would not even consider the load of work at hand and would approve the leaves of all those 7 members while the rest 3 would have hell of a day on that very day of absence of the other 7 members. This created disharmony amongst the team members. This was a classic example of how nodding head for anything and everything in a company could pose threat to the understanding within the team.

To start with the feedback, I would like to consider The Blake Mouton Managerial grid, a group framework for thinking about a leader’s “task vs person” orientation. According to this model, the four quadrants consisted of Impoverished Management, Produce or Perish Management, Middle of the road management, Country club Management and Team management with the X axis representing the concern for results and the Y axis representing the concern for people. I would like to place Sankara in the quadrant of County club Management which represents high concern to his teams needs and feelings but low concern on the results. As a person Sankara was empathetic towards his team members, he would consider the needs of each team member especially when it came to leaves. This obviously meant low results as when he started approving leaves more often, the team members took this for granted and in a month there would hardly be 3-4 out of 10 members in the floor working and when he was blamed for it he would easily give away his team in front of the senior management.

All the above said, I must confess on one important characteristic of Sankara as a manager. He was a very optimistic person. No matter how long or hard the task is he would remain positive that it could be done. This optimism of Sankara was contagious. When we used to get the tasks of the day or the month from him, our jaws used to drop seeing the time and the amount of work that had to be completed. But He always used to make us feel comfortable with it by nothing but his calmness. This quality of his reminds me of the Amy Edmondson’s Psychological safety quadrants model in which the X axis represents the difficulty of the task and the Y axis represents the Psychological safety. I would like to place Sankara in the ‘Learning Zone’ of this model as even though the difficulty of task was high, he made his team feel. Psychologically safe. As mentioned earlier he was very kind and sensitive when it came to personal needs of each team member. There was a time when one of the team members was facing severe family difficulties back home. He acknowledged that and asked that team member to stop coming to office and work from his home instead until everything was settled. He always respected everybody on the office floor working for the project no matter what age, gender they were, and this was highly appreciated by everybody including the senior management above him.

When it came to the knowledge transfer within the team it was sad that Sankara did not make efforts to make sure all the team members were on the same page. It was very disappointing to say that he as a manager knew less about certain protocols and methods used in the project which led to a lot of confusion within the team. If he had made little efforts in making sure everybody in the team had the same knowledge as the one in the team with the highest, it would have gone a long way in improving the productivity and the efficiency of the team.

Sankara according to me was a sorted as a person but was a bad manager or a leader. To simply put it into a perspective I would like to use the 4-quadrant model as created by James R Bailey showing the difference between Good leaders and Great ones. This 4-quadrant model takes into account the Force and direction of a leader and the combination of these two to evaluate a leader. I would place Sankara in the ‘Dangerous’ quadrant in which the leader provides force but lacks direction. Sankara’s positive attitude though provided an indirect push in the team, we lacked a direction as he never really knew himself on what had to be achieved. This misdirected us as a team, and we would end up with lot of incomplete or half-done tasks at the end of the day. He always lacked planning and strategy when it came to deadlines. There was absolutely no guidance from him whatsoever as he himself was lost almost all the time. According to me, he lacked a sense of commitment to his team or his work and lacked motivation. This was observed by all of us which in turn demotivated us to efficiently do our job. After all, a leader is always looked up to and If he is not motivated enough and not inspirational, then there is very less you can expect from his followers.