This post is a “Thanksgiving” to one of my American Senior Leader – Cindy.
I was told that she was a force to reckon – very particular about quality of deliverables and very strict. This became evident with the weekly calls that she insisted we should have (she and her DR team + me and my DR team).
I was desperate for a breakthrough in our relationship, that eluded me for no reason. And before long, our company went through a major transformation. With that, Cindy moved into a different area. But since my projects were associated with her role and responsibilities, she insisted that we have monthly status meetings – and I was happy to set them up !!!
It was during this time that my team was working on a very high visibility, highly critical project. Sadly, the team composition made it an uphill task to complete a simple project such as this – leading to 2.5 months of sheer hard work and tension. Those were the most difficult and sleepless nights i ever spent on a project in this organization. I had never expected to see a project crumbling like this one.
At that time, when everywhere there was finger pointing and my delivery capabilities were under scrutiny, one unexpected person who supported me was Cindy. Over the monthly status meeting, I was apologising to her on the mess this project had become. She immediately said “Vidya, don’t be so hard on yourself. Look at this project as a lesson learnt. Lot of mistakes have happened on this project – people moved at wrong time, ownership changed, Non-functional requirements were not adequately captured, Business did not come back with their Non-functional requirements early on. Considering all this – we should purely look at this project as a lesson learnt – nothing but that. So, don’t penalize yourself”.
I cannot express how much consolation these words brought to me. I had buried myself into work and was really not facing anybody (including my peers). I had started sensing that people were looking at me with doubts in their eyes. But Cindy’s words changed me completely. I felt better immediately. From next day onwards, I stopped worrying so much about the result and stopped berating myself as the cause. Started focusing on action items and soon brought the project into a deliverable state.
Needless to say, although this project was not HIGHLY successful, I am happy to say that we did deliver the project to our business. They were, indeed, happy to see the application working well 90% of the time and mapped to all their needs (along with the few errors they were seeing!!!).
So, in the end, it did end well
Cindy – post this conversation with you, I realized why everyone thought you were such a good leader. It taught me a lesson that we should support our teams not just in wins but also in failures – motivate them to do better. No wonder, you have reached this high in this organization. I am very fortunate to be working with you. Thank you for guiding and supporting me through this tough time. I will never forget this….
