Skip to main content

Master Class

Before Thanksgiving is the time of year when bad news is delivered in all-hands calls. This story reminded me of a time when I was part of a very similar call. The CEO in question came on a Zoom call looking very somber. We had been promised it would be a short call. The layoff was announced in the first few minutes followed by him saying whoever had been impacted could expect to hear from their manager in the next few hours. 

My manager at the time called me immediately after the CEO call ended to let me know I had not been impacted. I was grateful to hear the news and also for his promptness in informing me of it. P was one of the best people managers I have come across in my career - he is extremely smart, self-aware, efficient and unassuming. 

More importantly he understood how to help people maximize each other's strengths when they worked together. P had been at the company for over a decade at the time and held a variety of successful, high-profile roles. If there was a Most Popular Manager vote, he would have won it hands-down. 

That morning, many of us felt that the CEO was not quite the leader that P was. If P had been the one to announce the layoff he would have done it different. He did have to let go a few of his own team and no surprise he delivered a class act. He wrote strong recommendations, made introductions and they knew he was serious when he told them that they will be his top picks when the time was right to hire again. Watching P in action in that incredibly difficult time was a masterclass in how to be a good leader. 

It was good to see that bad leadership was punished in short order. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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