Hire a leader, not a boss!

There is an age old adage that employees leave the bosses and not the companies. Why?

Most bosses only think about the growth of the company and targets attributed to them and forget totally about the team which will help him/her to achieve company’s objectives. But when Mr. Vineet Nayar said, “employees first” he meant understand your team, help individuals grow and they will reciprocate with great work and help your company over achieve its goals. Thus, after 2 years odd in my job and on my 3^rd assignment, I started to believe in the importance of having a boss who is a LEADER and not just your boss/manager.

Being an Indian engineer and an MBA, I can assure my boss of doing any job whether I have requisite skills for it or not. But what is more critical is having a leader who understands my strengths, makes me do the work I am good at and complement my weaknesses with other team members’ strengths. For me that’s a leader. For me that’s how bosses should be. For me that’s an ideal place to work. For me that’s team work!

Sometimes it is critical for the employees to don the role, which he is not good at, simply in the overall benefit of the team, the company. For ex: Rahul Dravid keeping wickets, but that doesn’t mean that he will give up his batting. It only means he will do that extra for the benefit of the team. But it will be stupid to think that he will start concentrating on keeping wickets and not practice his batting skills. Having said that how stupid a decision it can be is evident when Irfan Pathan was asked to concentrate on his batting skills and coach wanted him to be an all-rounder rather than becoming more lethal as a bowler. A good coach/a leader is thus very critical in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of his team mates.

In this year’s IPL when Chennai Super Kings lost their first outing, MSD in a post match press conference made a very remarkable statement. He said, it is a young team and as a captain he is not fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each of his team members. Hence CSK lost. MSD by stating this took the entire fault on his shoulders as he is the captain and at the same time implicitly said neither his team nor any player should be blamed for this loss. But once he was aware about his team members, CSK turned around in this year’s IPL. That’s what a leader does.

Hence, it is very critical for any company to hire a leader and not just a manager. Because it is a leader who takes additional pain and has patience of going that extra mile in building an atmosphere of camaraderie amongst the team members.