It's now been over seven months that I have been working at a start-up. What began, in retrospect, as a gentle initiation into the operational side of things has evolved into a foray into fierce and turbulent waters. To say that it's been difficult would be an understatement. Every day, every week, I experience a whole gamut of emotions - exhilaration, disappointment, frustration, joy, and so many other colours of life.
The one experience that I least expected to be as dominant in my life as it has turned out to be is managing my team. When I joined, the team reporting into me - directly or indirectly - consisted of seven people. I identified hiring as a major challenge and immersed myself in it. Today, there are 24 people in my team. That's twenty four times the maximum number of people I had managed before this.
Before this stint, the one person I used to manage at any point in time received my undivided attention. I could spend hours every week getting to know this person, both personally and professionally. We were more friends and confidants than manager and reportee. It helped that they came from an academic and social background that was fairly close to my own. It also helped that I had enough time to compensate for their occasional inadequacies, as I'm sure they did for me too.
With my current team, none of that is true. They come from backgrounds and parts of the country that I am completely unfamiliar with. With some of them, their career and personal aspirations are completely alien to me. And, most importantly, the law of numbers wears me down. I can no longer spend as much time with them individually as I used to with my earlier reportees. My strength - of forming deep, meaningful bonds with people around me - seems no longer relevant.
Moreover, the day-to-day pressures (and, oh, the month-end bhasad) of start-ups further impacts these relationships. When I experience pressure to meet targets, I often lose my patience with those around me, and come across as a hard taskmaster. And in fast-growing Indian start-ups, that abrasiveness is not atypical at all - in fact, it is seem to be an important way to get work done. Softness and nuance - once my key strengths - are seen as distractions at best and counter-productive at most.
So, I haven't yet found myself in this new setting. Do I play the sherpa or the disciplinarian? Do I use carrots or sticks? Should I be friendly or firm? Will vulnerability at work - a trait I strongly believe in - be perceived as weakness by my reportees? If I'm being stern at work, how do I avoid carrying that heavy emotion back home every day? These dilemma come up at my workplace every day, and I haven't yet found a good response.
In life, however, the only thing that has always worked well for me is service. When I've found myself most lost, I have immersed myself in service for others. In college, this manifested in trying to help my friends do well in extra-curricular activities. At work, it was to help my one reportee be his best self in front of the management. Service gives me a sense of direction, a sense of purpose, and a feeling of lightness/weightlessness. Service is when you are so immaterial in your own head that almost nothing as the potential to affect you.
What service means in a team of twenty-four is something I will try to find out in the weeks and months to come. But I can already imagine what it would feel like. I imagine that it means having difficult conversations without once doubting the bona fides of the other person. It probably means feeling nourished and well taken care of, even in the most trying of circumstances. It means an unflinching commitment to your reportees' professional development, as an end in itself (and not just as a means to getting better productivity at work).
I also have a fairly good sense of the kind of leader I don't want to be. I don't want to yell at people or belittle them in public. I don't want to have to censor myself while providing feedback - in fact, I want to lead a team of winners and create a meritocracy, but one that has character, ethics and care at the center of it. I don't want to tell people things about my reportees that I don't tell them directly. I've seen these traits in some leaders around me, and are things I vehemently disagree with.
When thinking of myself as a leader, I am often troubled by what my maths teacher told me about Emmy Noether back in undergrad. That she was a brilliant mathematician, but could never be a good teacher because she was not comfortable in front of large groups. In 1:1 settings, she excelled. Could I - as a strong introvert - suffer from the same challenges as her? Only time will tell.
But while I let life play out, I am certain of one thing, and that is how I want to be remembered by those I work with. A person driven by values, ethics, and a sense of service to those around him.
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