With Great Power...

Way back in 2010, I had the good fortune to work with an exceptional leader, who believed at the core of everything was the employees of an organization. As soon as he assumed his new role, he probably was shocked. With a two digit attrition level, considered one of the highest in the industry – he soon realized the crux of the problem was how employees were getting treated in the organization. Here is the story of an amazing transformation, and how I realized that with great power lies the need for immense courage.

What was happening?

People quit every single day, and every single person had issues with the way their dignity was being questioned, and complained frantically about the culture of the organization. HR was helpless and their measures were shot down by the leadership citing that for the organization, what mattered the most was its customers – after all, wasn’t that our core value? No amount of engagement activities could salvage the situation, and we could see the situation worsening day by day. Leadership went about the daily affairs as if these were regular issues, but the talent acquisition team had huge numbers to fill the seats as they got vacant. Some of us spoke in pockets about why there needed to be change, a massive one, to save the situation.

Change is inevitable – change is good

As soon as he joined the Bangalore office from HQ, this great leader analysed the situation thoroughly. He had numerous meetings with all the senior management members, and told us to conduct engagement sessions for employees to meet him one-on-one. In a couple of months, he started questioning the decisions, challenged the existing status quo and grew impatient. Gradually, the senior leadership members of the organization, who till that point spoke only of customer focus, were pulled up and asked to focus on the employees in their teams. He formulated a unique code of conduct for managers to follow – and as the Communication team, we were asked to focus each of our communication deliverables around this. Every meeting included a message from the code of conduct, every manager was asked to practice it, and every employee to raise a hand and challenge situations. Many quit as this transformation went about like a tsunami in the organization. He shook the system, and urged people to think beyond their regular scope of work.

Our work in communication increased – we had to drive this change, make it like an experience, engage with our people, hear them out…but never once did we feel that work was tiresome – his passion rubbed off on people who worked with him, and he gave a free hand to do the right things always – “just do it”, he would say.

And we loved every minute of it. We were change itself, and we believed in it.

What if…?

Having personally worked with him, I was always a star struck child when I heard him speak of the vision he had for the organization.

I feared that our initiatives would not work – but he assured us that failure was part of transformation, and to change, we needed to embrace opportunity, challenges and failures alike.

I have often wondered, what if he never had that courage – what if he thought that he would be just like the others who came and went for a couple of years?

In the years to come, the organization went from being a back-end R&D center to the hub of service and technology delivery. To this day, I hold close the values I learnt during those most challenging times, the passion with which we committed to the cause, and my most favorite lessons of all – “Just Do It”.