Skip to main content

Leadership Bubble

Interesting article about how Google identifies leadership talent. The list of questions make sense and thinking back to managers I have had in my life, not one of them would score more than 7 out of 11. I have been lucky to have had some great bosses over the years - ones who have taught me to be a better person and professional, gone on to achieve amazing things in their own careers. Makes me question the validity of the standard Google is touting here. I can pick a couple of questions in this list that are not always easy to answer "Yes" to:
  • My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leaders.
  • My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about career development in the past six months.
Sharing of relevant information is not always an autonomous function or decision for the manager in question to make of their own volition. The organization should have a culture of openness and transparency that allows and encourages it. Say if my boss is going to leave her management very displeased if she shares "relevant information" with me, then chances are that she won't despite her natural instincts to do so. I have found myself in this very bind many times. 

On the career development question I have found the organization culture to play an over-sized role. The boss may recognize your talents, talk it up with his peers and managers, even recommend you for roles where you will thrive professionally. But there is limit to how far he can go alone. The culture should support his goals to create a career path for his best performers and allow him to nurture new talent. He must see a trajectory for his own growth as well. 

These things are all inter-related. He cannot afford to lose his star players and have his own's team performance take a hit in the process. The organization and his leadership should enable him to succeed as he enables his directs to do so. Often this is not the case and even managers with the best intent cannot do what they know is right and very much want to do it. 

This whole approach to identifying leadership excellence feels rather juvenile and out of touch with reality. But again, this is Google we are talking about - a business without any real peers or competitors. It is easy to build a bubble when you are in an island and no one can touch you.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more