When in ISB, we had a course called management of organizations. It was the first course in organizational behaviour. Prof. Huggy Rao from Kellogg took a full session on networks in organization, where in he talked about the various kind of networks that get formed among people in an organization. One of them was the trust network. If one were to map the trust network in a firm on paper, the person at the center of this network becomes a sort of a pivot in influencing the way people behave, especially when they are under pressure. Someone at the center of this network can weild a lot of positive influence as she is trusted by the crowd around her.
At Verizon India, the three of us who have joined are the first MBA campus recruits. Its interesting as the organization tries to adjust itself to these three new characters, who seems to belong to a different genre of employees they have not seen before, but have to be fit into an organization, that at times it seems, is growing too fast for its own comfort. We are three new employees who have this stamp of a business degree in an organization that otherwise breathes only hardcore technology 25 of the 24 hours in a day.
Given that we are these new species, that too higher up the ladder, it is all the more important for us to first gain the trust and respect of the people we manage. Only if we manage that can we think of then building a trust network around us. Building a trust network is extremely important for us here, for one, we are in a very people centric organization. Besides the nature of work, the very fact that we are small and growing fast means that a lot of the success resides not in processes but in people. If our ultimate aim is to stay with this organization and play a significant part in its growth towards what it is potentially capable of, then we will badly need that trust network. And to begin towards that goal, we start with our own team, which, apart from invariably comprising of people elder, is also extremely technically oriented.
The implication of such a technically oriented team is that, respect is born, not out of your knowledge of how capable you are of identifying new market segments, but how capable you are in developing a complicated new feature, not out of your understanding of the consumer market, but out of your understanding of the technical design, not out of your ability to talk about the GDP, currency fluctuations, market research and statistics, but by your ability to talk about .NET, J2EE...
The requirement is to find the balance between the two. You need in depth knowledge of the technology, not just to understand the product but to be able to articulate that and get your team to work towards it. You need to be at the same time, aware of the customer perceptions and use case scenarios. I dont know if its as complicated as I make it sound but still, is extremely interesting and challenging.
