A521.9.4.RB_KumarHarish

Reflections on Leadership

How to become a different kind of leader is my quest from now. Going through this leadership degree it makes me think how to be somebody different than there has ever been? How to do things in way never done before? This is what this module is all about, becoming a different kind of leader as I do want to become one, a real successful one. Interactive leadership is what the text talks about and defines the qualities of an interactive leader. The text calls an interactive leader as the one who works with the world rather than against it. Interactive leadership also adds and subtracts elements from the leadership palette. It is also built on personal integrity and authenticity. It does not depend on the possession of the hierarchical authority. Interactive leadership benefits from an understanding of the different narrative patterns that can be used to get things done in the world and above all, interactive leadership entails active participation in the world rather than detached observation.

I am all set to put the concept of interactive leadership in practice and just about every mentioned dimension is vital for a great leader. Interactive leadership is the one that participates with the work force, it does not rule but acts with compassion by knowing and understanding the point of view. It encourages different perspectives on any topic of discussion and then helps the audience to critically think about it and come up with other options. Interactive leadership is the one that connects with other employees. Like an authoritative manager, interactive leadership does not just comes and defines what needs to be done but explains why it needs to be done and how we can do it better with everybody thinking about it. Great leaders create a connection with their team and that is what creates motivation in the team. I also believe leadership should be like a conversation, where all the parties speak and discuss the matter and have an open talk. It creates a relationship between a storyteller and the listener. 

The text also talks about the leadership that is possible, means the leaders who can actually listen to people and change the direction of the company rather than just being out of reach of a common person. I see Boeing leaders are within reach of anybody and everybody and encourage people to come talk to anybody they want. These are the leaders who fit the modern need. This means they look at the whole global picture of business and technology and use these for informed decision making. It is important to understand what is happening globally in business and how the business is changing. Interactive leadership is not for everyone. There are leaders who just want to follow the traditional mode of management and get the job done. These are the leaders happy with status quo. The leadership has to be free of ego. Leaders have to lead and give, and not expect anything in return. They can bear loss or humiliation and not let the goal out of sight. They put the gold ahead of their ego. 

I think the dimension that touched me most is that the interactive leadership has a feeling. It has compassion and that is what plays a very important role in motivation and moving human beings. Passion in everything we do, strong feeling to all who work for us and are pushing towards the same goal can do wonders. Gone are the days of ruling with an iron fist, those leaders exist but cannot create a difference of make people work from their heart. My idea of future leadership is to keep current in the global business scenario and have a strong feeling towards what we do. I get things done by my contacts and one to one dealing with people and I want to keep it that way. I go out of my way to help people and they do the same for me. I think I will be a very successful leader of the future.

A521.8.4.RB_KumarHarish

Making Contact

Taking to strangers is such an art that either you have it or you do not have it. I guess it can also be learned with practice but can be really tricky. Why I say that is because in order to learn it you have to have real life experience of ice breaking and talking to strangers. People who are introverts have a real rough time in dealing and talking with strangers, even when they are not fully strangers and work with them. Interestingly it also varies with what kind of strangers we are talking about. Are they young and of opposite sex or old people with a great sense of humor. These can also be new people at work as new hires or new people when you moved to different department at work. People have trouble talking to strangers of all kinds and I have been through all kinds of strangers mentioned above and have been successful in breaking the ice.

Fear of rejection is true and great, at least for me. But this is only true when approaching opposite sex. The text has some very good tips on accepting rejection and having a different point of view when rejected. I usually find a genuine reason to talk to somebody and am not afraid to break ice. I can approach anybody and everybody for any reason and break ice, when it is work related. I can break ice with strangers outside anywhere and get the conversation going. I avoid approaching women without any reason, even avoid for the reason of just being friends and sharing experiences. If they work with me then it is fine but not otherwise. There is absolutely no lack of confidence in me and no fear of any kind, I just do not want to start friendship with somebody, being a married man and living a dream life.

The text describes a number of ways to break ice and also teaches a number of ways to begin a conversation. The text also addresses the main ideas of asking questions, active listening and self-disclosure. It also mentions the types of self-disclosures and when they should be used. It provides good tips of dealing with emotions when rejected and also the method of using body language. It does provide good general ideas of making a successful contact and I did learn a number of things by just going through the chapter. I have compared myself to what is mentioned in the text and notice there are so many things that I can make better in my conversation techniques.  Technique of approaching strangers and engaging in a conversation also requires a very good sense of humor which makes the job whole lot easier. 

I have seen that most of the people appreciate a good sense of humor and also possess a good sense of humor. They respond well to people who can break ice with a funny note and also become comfortable easily. It is tricky to choose a topic to make a funny comment but that is where the talent comes in. I am quite proud of myself for possessing such a talent and making people feel at ease and breaking ice easily. Text has given me couple of good pointers that I think will help me in future approaching strangers.

A521.7.4.RB_KumarHarish

Knowledge Sharing Story

If life was all simple and everything went as planned, there would be no stories. There are stories only because there were some anomalies and things did not go as planned or things happened very unexpectedly. Everyone has some kind of story where there was a miss and a lesson to learn or when things just went out of hand and it was too late. There was still something to learn from each story. I can think about a number of stories for knowledge sharing and were nearly misses. I also have stories when I was late and missed the train. I am going to share story that was a near miss and taught me a valuable lesson. Near miss is a situation when you were about to be in some sort of situation or trouble and were able to avoid it due to good luck or being in the right place at the right time. 

There was a time when I got selected for the Indian Air Force as a flight lieutenant and an engineer. This was something very hard to get into and I was the only candidate selected from my college. I had to report for joining on September 5^th and was in preparation for starting a career in the Air Force. Interestingly before I went there, in the month of August a vacancy for the post of a lecturer opened up and I applied for it. Having the top grade I got selected and since this was in my home town I decided to stay there rather than joining Air Force which was about 2500 miles away from home and in a different state. My family was happy as I had a good job as a teacher and stayed in the home city close to everyone. I was happy too but also missed a great opportunity of being in the forces.

The story does not end here but begins here. All the guys who got selected with me in the force used to write me letters and also wanted me to join the forces with them in September. I wrote to them that I had a job as a lecturer and decided to stay at home with my family. The selection process for the Air Force was quite difficult and involved 5 days of testing and physical exercises. There were also a number of guys who could not make it but remembered me because we became good friends over a period of 5 days. I forgot about the whole Air Force thing and became involved in teaching and got very busy. It was not until the month of November, when I went to New Delhi for some reason and met a group of guys who could not make it to the Air Force. They looked at me as if I was a ghost.

This is where the story takes an interesting turn. They asked me how did I survive the crash and I just could not understand what they were talking about. Apparently the class I was supposed to join on September 5^th went on their first flight on the Russian built AVRO aircraft in October for a learning trip. The airplane crashed and the whole class including the pilot and an instructor died in the crash. Air Force did not allow any photographs for the crash and also avoided the main stream news. They did not let any journalist come near the crash and had cordoned off the area. I stood still for a minute and then after the shock was gone I told the guys that I had decided to not join the Air Force and stay home as a lecturer in the engineering college. Had I decided otherwise, I would not have survived the crash. 

This is my knowledge sharing story of a near miss. This was just by chance that I decided to take on a different career, which saved my life. I had lot of people suggesting me to join the Air Force but had no answer when I told them about the incident. The story had made it to a very few national newspapers and I had to go to the library to did the news out. This was twenty years ago.

A521.6.3.RB_KumarHarish

High Performance Teams (HPT)

High performance teams at my work place bring out the optimum solutions for the most critical and complex problems. At Boeing HPT’s play a very significant role in analysis for decisions that involve a lot of expense and have a critical time limit. The major elements of high performance teams are; they actively shape the expectations of those who use their output, they rapidly adjust performance to the shifting needs of the situation, they innovate on the fly, they grow steadily stronger and over time members come to know one another better in strengths and weaknesses, the members grow individually and develop interchangeable skills, the team has goals that become more important than anything else and their motto becomes to succeed together or fail together. HPT’s are very important in a company just like any other team but these teams carry special attention and focus by management. 

At Boeing we have a number of HPT’s for special projects, which are created for a purpose and then dissolved once the task is accomplished. Before the development of the 787, there was a HPT that sat down for months and months to go over the pro’s and con’s of the whole engineering process and finally they decided to go with the project and make it happen. I think this is a great example of the HPT that worked at Boeing. Then there are lots of HPT’s working on different issues connected to the airplane at different times. A company like Boeing with highly specialized people can have a HPT any time and resolve any issue. Recently there was a HPT formed to implement the “lean System” integration at the Boeing Everett factory and the plan they came up with was highly successful. Boeing has a vast list of technical people who have excelled in their respective fields and become a part of such teams.

It is of prime importance that the team believes in shared values when they target a common goal meeting the organization mission and vision. It is very difficult to get from “me” to “we” as per (Denning, 2007) because people work with different values. It is the reason why people end up being at worse state than they were before collaboration. But if the values of people are aligned with the organizational values, collaboration results will be good and everyone feels good. That is the reason companies like Boeing tend to train people to be in alignment with the organizational values. It still becomes different while dealing with diverse cultures and people working in the different corners of the world like the suppliers of 787. This airplane is being built by suppliers in different countries and very different cultures than Boeing Company. We have daily meetings to collaborate on various issues and it is indeed very difficult.

The four patterns of working together work group, team, community and network have their own good and bad. While the work group has people who were specialized in their fields there is no active collaboration required to get the job done. The good thing is they work independently and focus on what they do and the negative aspect of this is that there s no collaboration and hence no interchangeable skill learning process. Team is the next working together pattern and teams tend to work together and achieve more as a good thing but the bad thing in a team is that everybody is not a team worker. They need more control and focus to get things done. They need to understand each other and be dependent on each other’s expertise. Community is the next pattern and the good thing is they share the common values and interests. The bad thing is they are heterogeneous and diverse. Most of the community work is voluntary and hence there is less motivation to get things done.  It also generally involves a lot more people than a team. The last is the network and it can have thousands of people working together. The good thing is that it has a lot of people and any type of issue can be communicated in a flash and spread like a viral. The bad thing is people have no sense of closeness due to no face to face contact. They have no feeling of oneness but only know each other by nicknames. 

My experience with teams has been both good and bad. There have been meetings where we accomplished a lot and there have been times when there was total frustration. I am not a big community member but I do go to some community meeting where people come and go. Being a voluntary work, it does accomplish a lot but only because the leader has not changed for a long time. I know for sure if the leader changes, the whole community is going to fall apart. For teams I have been through teams where some team members come not prepared and then the whole agenda of discussion falls apart. If the member would have been prepared, knowing that the whole discussion depend on their take on the discussion, the whole meeting and the outcome would have been very successful. Networking is a great tool of today and a privilege to have but the meetings we have with suppliers in other countries and no face to face contact, most of the times the suppliers do not care about what we have to say and depend on the top level decision makers, which hurts our people. Networking is a great tool but no face to face discussion sometimes leads to not a very successful outcome and hence proves to be a bane instead of a boon.

Ref:

Denning, S. (2011). The Leader's Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass

A521.5.8.RB_KumarHarish

Value Narrative

This story demonstrates the power of Boeing processes and a great example of employee loyalty and trust in company values. The value in question here is ethics. This is something that is taken very seriously at Boeing and nobody is immune to it. If the employee decides to take action and feels that ethics is being violated, then it can be against anybody, even the CEO. Boeing has a separate ethics department where all kinds of ethics questions are promptly answered so that the employee can take the right decision. Ethics committee is headed by senior Boeing people who are very conversant with the Boeing processes and procedures. They also have special powers to take action against anybody and everybody. No messing around with ethics and all employees are encouraged to contact ethics in case of any doubt and before they take any decision that might go against company values. This can save them from a lot of trouble in future. 

The protagonist in the story is an employee who thought it was unethical to release the incorrect drawing and fix it later just because of pressure of the schedule. A manager, his boss, asked him to go ahead and sign the drawing and get it released. When he asked that the drawing needs to be fixed, the manager replied that the drawing can be fixed later but at that moment adherence to schedule was the only important thing. The employee decided that it was an ethics issue but was also afraid not to make the manager angry as the manager had the power to stop his raise and promotion. Still he decided to do the right thing and contacted ethics through the ethics hotline. Hearing the whole story the ethics department decided that the manager was wrong and promptly took action against the manager. The unnecessary details about the drawing and the release process have been omitted. The manager was demoted right away.

The story is a characteristic of Boeing's strong processes and employee belief in company vales. Boeing trains employees to do the right thing and not compromise any company values. The story was broadcast all over the Boeing intranet with concealed employee names as an example of courage and loyalty. There are more stories that we read at the Boeing internal website where some employees have violated company values. These stories encourage employees to do the right thing as well as set an example of violation and the consequences.