Some time ago I had boasted about how I had successfully nurtured a second line of command in the office and how well it was working. Since experience has taught us not to get complacent about any aspect of our business if we are to succeed and also since I was on look out for new mentors for the newbies who would come in from next week or so I decided to re-evaluate how well the things had percolated.
Things on commercial front were perfect everyone does/is doing their job and providing the much needed billing hours…. however much to my dismay people were stagnating and getting bored!! The job had become a dull chore for many.
What had gone wrong?
My fiercely loyal lieutenants had failed to teach the others “How to learn?” specially about self learning. Maybe I am at fault somewhere because I have taught them, the second rung, not so much by direct instruction as by example. Also I found them to be too impatient with their juniors, giving up too easily or worse labeling them not fit for anything but mundane things.
On talking to them, the baseline was “they, the juniors, don’t learn” – my answer was “before asking them what did they learn have you ever questioned yourself? What did you try to teach them today?”
SANIsoft has till now retained people because it is exciting to work here, there is a sense of openness (as in Open Source) in the working environment, daily there is something new to learn, you get ample time to work on your own open source projects, open code you work on here goes under *your* name. I want all this and more to be instilled in to every newcomer who joins… With SANIsoft poised to triple, perhaps quadruple, its team size in next 12 months – it will be imperative that this continues as we want it to.
I, among other things, am back to doing what I once did very well – Teach – I am now teaching “How to teach”