From becoming a boss to being a leader

By the time you realize that your parents were right, you have kids who begin to think you are wrong. The journey of having a boss to becoming a boss is very similar. 

Your first few bosses have a lasting impact on how you shape up as a professional, and you go through this metamorphosis without much realizations. I have been fortunate to work with some of the most level-headed, sharp and high-achievement orientation managers early on in my career. 

With my very first assignment, it was a privilege and a delight to be mentored by a leader who had a flair for developing people. Apart from learning the tricks of the trade in functional aspects like HR & IR, one of the biggest learnings was understanding and developing a sense of emotional intelligence while managing people and delicate situations. However, the best thing to have happened to me was my manager giving me a clean slate to chart out my own plan for engaging the workforce. He wanted youthfulness and innovation to overtake processes and old patterns. This exposure gave me the opportunity to try new things, fail better and grow faster. 

Post my first assignment, I was fortunate to work with organizations that exposed me to completely different kinds of bosses and leadership styles that helped me enhance different facets of my personality. 

Having worked with CEOs over the past decade in both Global MNCs and startups, 2 things that have really stayed with me. One was their obsession with perfection and other was their hunger for value creation. These are also the 2 things that I always share with my team. As HR, what is the value creation that we can make to our stakeholders and customers and the organization and how do we do that with the highest level of perfection. These two principals have not just driven my professional but also my personal decision making.

You have to be really lucky to get tough bosses in your professional career, even though you may hate some of those times, but on hindsight, they will be your biggest stepping stones to success. 

Today with over 2 decades of experience working with bosses and now being a boss, the 3 biggest elements that became a part of me that drives my belief as a leader are: 

I can’t help but recall the story from mythology, where a lady asked a saint, ‘if mythology books can answer all our questions, why do we need a Guru’? The saint smiled and politely replied, my dear, ‘why don’t you ask that to the book’?

On World Boss’s Day, the one thing that all the bosses could do is probably assume the role of being a Guru. Be the source of encouragement, learning, and inspiration to our teams, just as our bosses have been to us. We are just the torch bearers that own the responsibility of setting the right example in front of our teams, who unconsciously might be learning from us what really a boss looks, acts and is like!