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How Bosses Impress Their Subordinates (Lessons in Leadership)
The company had set up a new corporate marketing division in the capital city of the country. The chairman of the company used to reside in the capital city too and he wanted this new marketing setup away from the main corporate office of the company which was located in another metropolis. His theory was that the new marketing setup should not get contaminated with the hackneyed thinking of the corporate office of the company. The company existed for over 50 years and its products were as old. The chairman wanted the new marketing division under his own wings. The current CEO of the company was also from old school of thought and the chairman, being from the new generation of the family that had promoted this company, was not particularly pally with the CEO.
That suited Mr Harman too. He could thus be nearer to the chairman and away from the CEO. Harman was recruited by the chairman from his company’s competitor to head the new marketing division as its marketing president, mainly due to his high profile connections with the government officials. Government offices were the major customers of the products of the company.
After recruiting Harman, the chairman expressed to Harman that he wanted the entire division to be fresh blood and instructed him to recruit all the heads of the departments (HODs) under him from outside of the company.
Accordingly, Harman recruited four brilliant engineers with considerable managerial experience as head of marketing, head of sales, head of customer service and head of management services. Each one of them was a seasoned professional with excellent track record of success.
And that’s where he made his first mistake as a leader. The cardinal leadership rule is: as a leader, make sure that your subordinates are incompetent so that they keep looking forward to their leader to be led by him. Harman did not follow this rule. He recruited a bunch of real competent subordinates. They were pretty autonomous in their own behavior and would hardly need to be bossed around.
Then Harman also realized that his own professional qualifications (a mere bachelor of history with some vague diploma in management from a vague university) fell terribly short when compared to the qualifications of his four heads of the departments who were first class engineering graduates of the top notch universities of the country topped up by MBA degrees, again from the top notch universities.
All the five of them now were working in one office and they were all strangers to each other. And Harman became desperate to prove himself to be the real leader. He became obsessed by this thought and even in his dreams started planning out various strategies to achieve this objective.
Then on, in each one of his divisional meetings, he started bragging about the stories of his past glories- how single handedly he had set up the marketing division in his earlier employment, how he had become the youngest head of the department in his previous company and so on. Listening to all such tall claims, as the four heads of the department were about to get impressed, one of them suggested to do a bit of research on Harman and they found that he was holding a pretty junior position in his previous organization to have achieved what all he was claiming.
Then, Harman started sermonizing the four heads of the departments on the technical intricacies of the products that they were selling. He would learn one technical detail every day from somewhere and elaborate on it (by mostly using the wrong technical jargon). It was glaringly evident that he was trying to prove his technical supremacy despite being a history graduate. The four heads of the departments started enjoying these technical meetings. They would have lots of fun after every such meeting.
Harman was intelligent enough to understand that things were not really working out the way he wanted them to. His four subordinates were still not getting around accepting him as their leader. So he thought of another strategy- dropping names and showing his high profile connections.
One day, early morning he called a meeting of his HODs. He ordered tea for all of them and while they were waiting for the tea to arrive, he was fiddling with a flashy looking wedding invitation card. Then he kept it on the table such that the four HODs could clearly read from the wedding invitation card. The boss was invited by one of the most influential ministers in the government to attend the wedding ceremony of his daughter. He was expecting that at least one of the HODs would probe into the wedding card that established his connections in the high government offices. When no one did that, he asked his personal secretary, on the intercom, to connect to that minister and mumbled some instructions into the mouth piece of the telephone which others present did not care to listen.
Then, after hearing a click on the intercom signaling that the connection to the party on the other end of telephone line was made, Harman said, “Sir, thanks for the kind invitation. My wife and I will definitely attend the wedding. My wife joins me in congratulating you and the madam (minister’s wife) and your daughter. And sir, I will definitely give it a thought to consider your invitation to join your party. Good day, sir.”
Then Harman turned towards his subordinates (the HODs) and addressed, “Oh, this minister is actually my senior batch mate from my school days (he mentioned the name of some high profile school) to join politics and even offered me a post as an assistant minister to him. What do you guys think? Should I join the politics- all you know you could see me as your prime minister in the days to come?” And he gave a throaty laugh in his self praise. No one else did.
And the next day too, he called another meeting of all the four HODs. As the HODs were entering his conference room, he signaled them to sit down while he was totally engrossed in a telephonic conversation, “Chairman sir, you know that as secretary of executives’ ladies club, my wife works very closely with the madam chairman. Madam chairman need not bother about the arrangements at all. All she will have to do as the president of the ladies club is to cut the ribbon inaugurating the new premises of ladies club. Rest my wife has already taken care of. Good day sir.”
While this conversation was on, one of the HODs walked out of the conference room to fetch some papers and walked past Harman’s personal secretary and casually remarked, “Hey, boss seems to be talking to the chairman. I say, he and his wife seem pretty intimate with chairman and his family. Impressive!!”
The personal secretary was quite puzzled, “Why, the telephone is idle. There is no one speaking into it.” He lifted the phone and let the HOD hear into it.
Now, this HOD was real curious to know a few more things. He asked the personal secretary, “And the boss was speaking with the minister yesterday- seems as if the boss has connections in high places in government too.”
Again the personal secretary looked quite puzzled, “No, yesterday, I spoke with the personal assistant to the minister to convey thanks to the minister for his invitation to our boss. Boss did not speak with the minister- in fact he does not know this minister at all. The invitation must have been a routine affair.”
The HOD kept wondering, “Then what was the boss doing on the past two days? Faking the telephonic conversations? To impress us?”
The stories being published on these pages here are available in the form of a book: eBook version titled "Funny (and Not So Funny Short Stories" from Nuubuu http://nbuu.co/1 and Printed book from Amazon.
(Also, refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)
For “out of box thinking” articles by Shyam Bhatawdekar, refer: (Out of Box Ideas) http://wow-idea.blogspot.com/
Read other blogs and knols of Shyam Bhatawdekar at: (Home Page for Writings of Shyam Bhatawdekar) http://writings-of-shyam.blogspot.com/
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