Leadership: Why I Love Going to Work

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Ian Uy posted this in Articles on April 12th, 2009 |

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On April 17, 2009, I will be attending a leadership seminar sponsored by Accenture Philippines. Accenture Student Leadership Conference is a 3-day seminar that will be held somewhere in Tagaytay.

According to Accenture’s website, participants will “learn about key Accenture leadership contribution areas by being value creators, business operators, and people developers through seminars and fun activities… They will also hear first-hand testimonials from some of the top Accenture Senior Executives, Managers, and Leads from various workforces and projects”.

If you have attended at least one leadership seminar in your life, you know that it will be full of ego-massaging and morale-boosting talks from some senior-management guy from some Fortune/Global 500 company. And some funny “group dynamics” that the event coordinators will link to a certain “leadership” quality but in reality, it will just make you tired and sweaty. I have yet to attend a leadership seminar that will really teach me on how to be a really good leader. Accenture SLC… here’s hoping!

During my College days, whenever there’s a new project that had to be done in groups, people never failed to nominate me as the leader (Mostly on CS* and IT* subjects) and I have always gladly accepted it. I like being the leader because I have total control of everything… from the implementation details like naming conventions and algorithms to project management details like deadlines and task breakdowns. And looking back, I was very successful on all of those endeavors. Successful in the sense that we have always submitted 2 weeks (at most 1 month) before the deadline and the specs and feature set (Including documentation and packaging) of our project is above and beyond the agreed upon requirements. As my co-worker puts it, we may have “underpromised and overdelivered“. Truth be told, all of my project related subjects garnered a grade of 1.0. (Making a point here).

But it begs the question, why did my groupmates chose me as the leader? I don’t really know. But what I know is this… They did not choose be because I was inspirational, motivational nor because I have good leadership qualities… They chose me because I can deliver (and because they know that I will always do 85% of the work). They chose me because of my technical abilities and not because of my leadership abilities.

You know what? I don’t really think that I have “leadership” abilities. In fact, I suck at being a leader, or at least I suck at the people-side of being a leader. I do not know anything about being inspirational or motivational. I do not know how to handle a group efficiently. I don’t know squat about WBS (Work-breakdown Structure) or Teamwork. Up till the end of my college days, I have, mostly, always worked alone.

That’s why my biggest learning from my On-the-Job Training is learning on how to work with my teammates. Although I have learned a lot of technical stuffs like Software Delivery (From Automated Unit Testing to Image Builds) and a whole new field of Process Automation, I still consider learning to work harmoniously in a team environment as the most rewarding experience.

At work, there are real leaders. People like my immediate supervisor (Development Manager) and his immediate supervisor (Director of Software Development) are the *real-world* leaders. And to tell you the truth, I think that they are GREAT at what they do. In both technical-side and people-side of leading a software development team.

When I was in college, one of my biggest fear is to have an immediate supervisor that has an MBA (Business Administration) degree. I call those people “the suits”. Joel Spolsky said that “Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf… The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand”. Which I totally agree-on… based on experience (I had this certain professor in college who have a PH.D. in BA and teaching management subjects like Quality Management who argues that the PENTAGON was infected with a virus ["the LOVE bug"] because their “firewall” was weak and not because, against the better judgment of his computer science student, of social engineering techniques).

So it was quite a relief when my supervisors at work happens to be really technical guys. Once in their careers, they were programmers. Real, actual, programmers. And that’s one of the things that motivates me at work. For me, that is what being a leader is all about. Leadership by example.

It is such a joy to come to work and see your supervisor, the development manager, DEBUGGING and TRYING to fix an issue. It is also a joy to have a manager who actually knows what you are doing. And there were instances at work while we are trying to fix a very complex issue, it is our development manager who cracked the case! I mean, there were times that our manager is much more smarter than us!

Just the other week, I saw the Director of Software Development seating at my co-worker’s workstation trying to fix an installer issue! I was shocked. A senior management guy directly working with a computer. That single event alone restored my faith on the system…

…the belief that geeky guys can still succeed in a world where business acumen is valued more than technical skills.

I’ll leave you with a short story from Joel Spolsky’s blog about Leadership as this story shares the same sentiments as mine. Enjoy!

For a few months in the army I worked in the mess hall, clearing tables and washing dishes nonstop for 16 hours a day, with only a half hour break in the afternoon, if you washed the dishes really fast. My hands were permanently red, the front of my blouse was permanently wet and smelly, and I couldn’t take it any more.

Somehow, I managed to get out of the mess hall into a job working for a high-ranking Sergeant Major. This guy had years of experience. He was probably twenty years older than the kids in the unit. Even in the field, he was always immaculate, wearing a spotless, starched, pressed full dress uniform with impeccably polished shoes no matter how dusty and muddy the rest of the world was around him. You got the feeling that he slept in 300 threadcount Egyptian cotton sheets while we slept in dusty sleeping bags on the ground.

His job consisted of two things: discipline and the physical infrastructure of the base. He was a bit of a terror to everyone in the battalion due to his role as the chief disciplinary officer. Most people only knew him from strutting around the base conducting inspections, screaming at the top of his lungs and demanding impossibly high standards of order and cleanliness in what was essentially a bunch of tents in the middle of the desert, alternately dust-choked or mud-choked, depending on the rain situation.

Anyway, on the first day working for the Sergeant Major, I didn’t know what to expect. I was sure it was going to be terrifying, but it had to be better than washing dishes and clearing tables all day long (and it’s not like the guy in charge of the mess hall was such a sweetheart, either!)

On the first day he took me to the officer’s bathroom and told me I would be responsible for keeping it clean. “Here’s how you clean a toilet,” he said.

And he got down on his knees in front of the porcelain bowl, in his pressed starched spotless dress uniform, and scrubbed the toilet with his bare hands.

To a 19 year old who has to clean toilets, something which is almost by definition the worst possible job in the world, the sight of this high ranking, 38 year old, immaculate, manicured, pampered discipline officer cleaning a toilet completely reset my attitude. If he can clean a toilet, I can clean a toilet. There’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. My loyalty and inspiration from that moment on were unflagging. That’s leadership.