Empowerment – Incredible Leadership Stories

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!