Where does the buck stop?-> A work place Drama

An engineer X joins an organization and works in a Validation environment. He has good knowledge of the domain and quickly learns the tools and process used to execute his tasks and delivers the assigned tasks with good quality and on time. He also gets due recognition overtime and also shares additional tasks at times when his colleagues’ don’t make it to work for personal reasons. Being overloaded, he doesn’t complain and he tries to do justice in the best possible way to his work.

Mean while there is a development team under his manager where there is huge amount work and resource shortage. In due course, testing work is given less priority over development work and manager tries to manage by shifting the resources to meet the cutting expenditures and deliver on schedule. The engineer X now joins the development team at a time when there is just 1 week before the release with little prior knowledge about the work in the development team mostly based on interactions with his colleagues. Although the schedule becomes hectic for engineer X, He takes help of another team mate Y wrt new process and tools and delivers the release as per schedule.

Work on another release gets started within one month of joining and engineer X falls sick and do not complete the work. Meanwhile Engineer Y is not present now to help engineer X and other members of the team are busy with their own schedules and do not offer help. The deadline nears and engineer X is asked to complete the work at any cost. X manages to complete whatever is assigned to the best of his knowledge from whatever he has learned from Y and moves things to review and takes off during release time due to ill health. An engineer Z reviews, finds a bug and fixes it on X being absent and performs the release and informs the manager not to burden him next time with another team mate’s work. After two days of release, manager of X meets him and humiliates him for bringing in bad quality to work because of the bug introduced. Also gives him feedback of not understanding things and over dependency on engineer Y.

Now X is frustrated and do not know to find a solution. He is frustrated as the manager doesn’t understand his situation, for not being flexible and do not provide him another opportunity correct his mistakes in new environment.

Meanwhile a higher boss of manager is on a visit and X gets an opportunity to talk to him. X gives a polite feedback about his bad transitioning time and humiliation from his boss.

Now the manager gets to know about the feedback of X and gets even more angry with X. He continuously humiliates X at all meetings and tells him indirectly he isn’t fit to work in his team. X loses his respect in the team among the team members, gets demotivated towards work.

Now X is frustrated and confused.

What are the options left with X now?

1. Go to HR and complain and fight for right . -> This will never work in favour of X in a typical organization scanario.

2. Simply wait for team change -> the wait is ambiguous because of resource shortage in current team and uncertainty about another team

3. Explain to immediate higher boss. -> X thinks it may not work as no one is going to support him.

4. Continue to tolerate the current boss and live with it and try to do things better hoping things will change in future.-> Again there is an element of risk as the boss is already biased and may not work in X favour.

5. Resign and leave the place on good terms for better opprutunity with the knowledge he has gained in current place. -> But is resigning the only solution????

Where does the buck stop????

Please provide your ideas on how to handle such situations..

Cactuses @Workplace

In current IT scenario, there is virtually a rat race created by management where employees want to get the best in terms of appraisal ratings, hikes, recognitions and promotions. Some work hard and get it on their own merit. But some get by affecting the merit of others..Such people spoil the work environment.

Finally the work environment will be a quiet place without anyone except cactus and his supervisor..

Its the responsibility of supervisors not to encourage such scenarios and provide a lively and warm work ambience to increase productivity. The biased opinions of supervisors not just affect the work place but also individuals and their career path. So its important to handle things correctly and not to encourage cactuses who becomes thorny to others.

So Engineers be watchful of such cactuses with your words and actions and supervisors dont make work place a desert land by encouraging such cactuses..

Whats In a Pencil

I read this article about pencil.


A pencil maker taught 5 important lessons to pencils:

1st -Everything u do will always leave a mark.

2nd -You can always correct the mistakes you make.

3rd -What is important is what is inside you.

4th-In life you will undergo painful sharpenings which will make you a better pencil.

5th -To be the best pencil, you must allow yourself to be held and guided by the Hand that holds you

But is the hand called DESTINY??

A dotted line In a Relationship.........................

There are many people we come across in daily lives right from School to college and work place and even relatives.But we hardly keep in touch with so many of them. Few of friends will be in touch for a brief period of time and the contact vanishes later..

What may be the reason???

In every relationship, Sharing is important.Starting from Trivial things to important ones, its important to share the moments with a companion. Thts why Man is known as a social animal. Over a period of time, we tend to get cob webbed in our daily life and maintain relation with only those who we meet on day to day basis except few close friends...

Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Google plus do project to get back in touch with old friends who might be out of sight for a while now..but will those vitual connections bring back the spark in the relationship that once existed..( But if the relationship was strong, it wouldnt have faded). Momentatily happiness is definitely felt when the sight of long lost friend is seen on those sites.

But will this nurture a valuable relationship?..

This is what I call a dotted line because the connection exist but still there is no relation.Similar to dotted line hierarchy in a corporate sector. When a person reports to his higher manager in a dotted line, the higher manager do not decide his ratings or performance but still the person is expected to please the boss.

As I said, Relationship ceases to exist when there is no sharing..

Mild Tremors at ITPL today

I was reading newspaper post lunch today. It was around 2:15 PM. I felt the desk shake.I thought it was due to my head spin or something like that.As I walked back to my desk, there were discussions of tremors at many cubicles. After about 10 minutes

we were asked to evacuate the buildings.Fortunately no more tremors were felt.After  30 mins , I am back at my desk typing my blog :)

C ya...

Job-seekers join great companies but leave because of bad bosses

It happens...Encountering someone who bad-mouthed you, offended you is terrible. What’s even more terrible is if he/she is your boss. Then don’t be surprised, you are not alone: D .It’s just not enough if you get a good job in a good company, one needs to be lucky to get a good boss too... This is one of my realizations after being 5 years in the industry.

If someone (who is intelligent also) is in starting years of industry, one shall immediately quit the current job and get a new job. But as the years go by, one learns to tolerate bad boss around. There is no point in fighting back because that creates a hole in the resume.

But what makes a bad boss?

1.     Lack of Trust

Most often I have seen that these people don’t trust that a task can be delivered. It can be due to many reasons.

1.  Person lack skills-> Then provide him      sufficient        training and time and give him a chance
2.  Previous Failed Experience -> Point out the reason for failure and ensure the mistakes don’t happen as part of process. This is called Quality check. Provide another opportunity to boost his confidence and morale and provide more such learning opportunity instead of putting him/her down.
3. Biased opinions-> this ends up in giving the task to same old experienced people and curbs the new talent.

2.     Lack of communication:

When a junior employee commits a mistake, then it can be communicated to him explaining him what was wrong on his/her part. Expecting other person to be a mind –reader unnecessarily creates both technical and non-technical issues.

           

3.     Know It All Attitude:

Curbing ideas when they are to be generated is like killing a person’s enthusiasm at work. Yelling at employees only makes them feel reprimanded. One needs to be open minded and learn from juniors to create an innovative work environment.

Being a manager, one should know the skills of bridging the gap between higher management and engineers and create a positive environment to achieve the organization goal. Managers should handle failures in a positive way to make it a learning experience rather than a fearing experience. Everyone in the organization has their own role to play. A Manager is a manager as he has the experience to handle things and see the big picture and guide the juniors, not make their job miserable. One needs to understand that everybody is an employee first and their designations follow next, not the other way around...

An Inspiring Story of Anu Aga

Some people are born with Silver spoon, yet life does not spare them from facing the harsh difficulty. One such story is the story of Anu Aga.

Anu Aga, the ex-Chairman of Thermax India has been awarded the Padma Shri.

Her name featured on the list of awardees announced by the Government on the occasion of Republic Day 2010.

Here is a short excerpt from a 2005 article on Arnavaz Aga

Aga is always in her trademark cotton or silk saris, whether it’s for a talk on women achievers at a convention organised by the Indian Institute of Management (Kolkata), for the pages of the November issue in Business Today as part of the top 25 most powerful women in business, or while accepting the lifetime achievement award at the Financial Express-Electrolux Women in Business Awards, as she did last year. Just like the sari, the no-nonsense expression on her face, reflecting steely determination, is an intrinsic part of her.

This calm determination has helped her family and company Thermax India tide over trying times. The death of her husband Rohinton in 1996 from a heart attack thrust her into the chairperson’s role of Thermax, an engineering company that was begun by her father A S Bathena three decades ago and later managed by Rohinton. Just as Aga, till then director of human resources, was finding her feet as the head of Thermax, she suffered another deep loss – the death of her 25-year-old son Kurush in a road accident.

At the time, Thermax’s growth curve dipped and share prices plummeted from Rs 400 to Rs 36. An anonymous letter from a shareholder accusing her of letting him down forced her to take stock of the situation. “I realised I wasn’t capable but was only pretending to run the business,” she says. Losing no time, she detached herself from day-to-day operations and brought in a foreign consultant to restructure the company – the move revived its fortunes.

Since its turnaround, Thermax, with its presence in 14 countries, has emerged as a leading manufacturer of engineering products and systems for industries. “Despite stiff challenges at work and crises at home, she succeeded in separating her ownership and professional responsibilities, so crucial in the leadership of a closely held family enterprise,” recalls P M Kumar, former head of human resources, under whom Aga had trained in the 1980s.