Acceptability

Changing businesses with their own profit and loss responsibilities, even within a big company is like joining a new company by itself.

I have heard about the nightmarish stories of people changing the org, at leadership levels, and within weeks realizing, they do not fit in at all.

Most of that time, that "fit in" is just acceptability by the existing team to the incoming leader. Especially when they see it as being "planted" by someone else even further up in the organization.

And being "planted" in these cases, is a universal strategy, often just influenced by level of comfort and creating an ecosystem which is very much against the change every one seeking in terms of new challenge. Its hypocrisy in a way. We like to talk about "change" but then we seek the "old" comfort in the new place.

And this acceptability is very annoying at ground level. For example, one complete morning I was in my new office, my calendar is full with appointments, but NO ONE showing up - every one giving some silly excuse 5 mins in to the meeting. Basically, no one really wants to meet and take it forward.

In a team outing, in the bus en-route to destination, the seat next to me remained open ! No one took it. Any sports or discussion I tried to join, it dispersed in moments !

Its a very different feeling, as it has always been the reverse so far .. The "fitting in" is  - to a large extend is "being accepted".

Management Comodity

Since long I ve been nourishing this idea in my head, that the IT industry management professional is becoming a commodity. While the true on-the-ground skills like coding, testing, troubleshooting have become very difficult to find.

The counter argument I heard from managers is, you get a lot of engineers too, may be not many who have that spark of applicability to business (not spark of brilliance - those are destiny's children !).

But then same goes back to management too - Most managers today work in the same level of creativity and spark of applicability to the business. A few 2-5% make solid, soaked transition to a brand of leadership which is again rare.

So, that was all theory on a foundation of gut-feel and 360 observation.

And now I ve good data points to prove a lot of it.

We are building a grounds up team, with new energy and new charter. I have openings for both technical leaders as well as managers.

And for  manager posts I have probably 10 people for each post who have already approached me, but for technical people, hardly a handful !!!

And, managers when approach, ask me how do they grow in this new business. The technical leads, ask what would we build ? How is it going to be different that others ?

With the industry maturing, we should pause and think, are we (the managers) managing ourselves (our expectations vs. value add) well ? Are we seeing that we are out-dating ourselves ? its a matter of just few years, I can sense the movement sweeping the industry and managers feeling the heat of  even landing a decent job !!