This is a story that I wanted to write for a long time. When I joined the industry from college all I knew was programming, coding and little bit of communication skill. I didn’t know these terms leader, leadership, manager, management, team, team member, team dynamics, team culture etc., I learned them over time from different teachers (in my opinion, everyone who teaches you something is a teacher). Now let me come to the story. I joined a software development company in Chennai (l-cube) through campus placement.
Once all my joining formalities were done, I reported for my first assignment. And to my surprise I was asked to create some MS Access Reports in 2 days. I neither knew VBA nor MS Access UI development. I knew MS Access only as a database. In those days internet was still a set of GeoCities pages with blink and scrolling marquee, yahoo search was still a thing, google was cool, MSDN came in a CD, we were running windows 98SE, Pentium machines with 128 MB of RAM & Javadoc was offline. We were dependent on books and people for knowhow. As a first option, I searched for a book. I found the famous “Microsoft Access 97 Bible”. It had 1536 pages.
I understood my situation now, reading the book, understanding it and creating them in 2 days is not possible. As second option, I approached one of my senior developer, S Rajesh (shortly called as SRJ). He is the hero for this story. Ok lets continue. He explained how a report was created and gave me a sample code snippet. As a Programmer I could pickup VBA faster because I started with GW BASIC as my first programming language. I created the reports by drag/drop and some VBA code in the code behind. All worked fine, we took the software and my senior SRJ showed the demo to our manager. And I didn’t know that our manager was a passionate MS Access Geek. He looked at the reports and opened the code behind. His face became red and he asked “who wrote this?” SRJ asked “why? what is the problem?” The manager showed the code. SRJ could see the blunder that I had done. I copy pasted the code snippet for each of the report. It looked something like this
- Open connection to database
- Connect the report elements to database elements
- Query data
- Close connection to database
Now all seasoned software developer know opening/closing DB connection is a costly operation. And me being a newbie didn’t know that. Our manager was furious because of this reason. I was standing in the same room. I was very nervous and tensed. My heart beat went over the roof.
SRJ answered in a very cool way. I will fix this issue for you in a moment, for now forget about the author. The manager insisted to know the author. I am still present in the same room, wondering why he is not giving away my name and taking all the blame, in spite of helping me. SRJ again answered, forget the author lets fix the issue. I think our manager had high regards for SRJ. He left the room in disappointment. I felt really bad for SRJ. He came to me and explained what was the issue. Fixed it and moved on as if nothing happened. I reported to him for 2.5 years in that company and stayed together in Bangalore as room mates for a long time. He was the first leader I met in my professional life. And the lessons I learned are from that instance were
- To allow your team members to make mistakes and provide them a safe place to learn.
- In case something goes wrong, you own up as a leader and safe guard your team member.
- When everything is fine, bring the team member to lime light and give the credit to the team member.
- Don’t underestimate the technical capabilities of your manager
.
Even now if SRJ asks me to do something I will do it blind folded. I wish him all success..
Ferose Blog 