After two gruelling years of
MBA from Christ College, one of the prestigious institutions in then Bangalore,
I took my baby steps into the corporate world with Mindtree Consulting, the
name by which the company was known those days. It was a mid-size IT company
compared to the likes of giants in Indian IT diaspora such as TCS, Infosys,
Wipro etc. My staff ID was just 4299.
I joined the Staff Operations
department of Mindtree which was entrusted with the critical task of finding
the right person for a job. Those days, Staff Ops department of Mindtree was
designed to have regional teams taking care of staffing requirements of clients
in their respective geographical areas with US being the biggest, followed by
Europe, Asia Pacific etc. There was a Central Operations team as well to
co-ordinate with these different regional teams to ensure that staff
utilisation is effective and optimized. My boss and I were part of the
latter.
While the structure worked,
there were already talks about this model to be redesigned to match the planned
growth of the organization. To facilitate this, the management decided to get a
seasoned Mindtree Mind, how the staff was addressed in Mindtree, who managed a
large client in the US.
The word got out and all of
us in Staff Ops team were quite excited, as this man was to be our new boss.
What was even more interesting was the rumour that he was going to consolidate
Staff Ops function to achieve more synergies. Lot of improvements were
expected. Little did we know that along with him a sea of changes were to
follow, some of them we did not even anticipate. The man's reputation preceded
him.
Dats, that was how our new
boss was affectionately known in Mindtree circles. As soon as he took charge,
he called for a combined meeting of all Staff Ops teams. We were quite
surprised with his demeanour. The man who ran one of the biggest accounts of Mindtree
in US, the man who had been tasked to consolidate the entire Staff Operations
for the company had a remarkably calm way of going about with his business. We
were impressed on day one itself.
The action then started!
His first ask was to get all
the leads list down daily activities we carried out as a team. He reviewed the
list and identified all those activities that did not strictly belong to Staff
Ops. There were a bunch of tasks that our team performed on daily basis which
in fact belonged to other functions in the organization such as HR, Quality,
Recruitment etc. This was quite typical of young organizations, a learning that
was applied over the period of growth. Dats immediately scheduled meetings with
his counterparts in those departments and agreed with them to own their
respective activities thereby freeing our valuable time to do more meaningful
staff allocation specific activities.
We thought we were all set to
start with our new life. That was when Dats broke the biggest surprise. It must
be either the work culture he picked up from US or his methodical approach to
everything that we came to appreciate in the days ahead or both. Dats noticed
that some of the team members worked late in the evening in office for multiple
reasons. He called the entire team into a meeting room one day and made a
statement that still echoes in my head even after almost two decades of the
incident. He said, ‘None of us are doctors and no one is going to die if you
stop working at the prescribed end time of the day. I do not want to see any
one of you staying back in office unless there is an emergency that you will be
able to justify to me’!
Those were golden words, teams across the corporate world would love to hear from their bosses! He was incredible in not just saying that but to live a life and showed us how to really have a work-life balance. God bless bosses like you Dats! You are indeed a rare breed!
