Behavioral Interviews How To

Suresh's Response:

Situation: In our firm, we have well defined technical path and management path. However, there is no clear pathway for a techical engineer to become manager or choose management path. It is a catch 22 situation where one has to have people mgmt experience to become manager but one gets the experience only after becoming manager.

Opportunity: My team was growing very fast and within 5 years, we grew from 2- 3 people to over 50 team members. Hiring managers, training them, ensuring they align to our own culture was very time consuming process. I floated an idea with my superiors about why cant we come up with a process to train technical engineers who are interested in management path? My leadership was very supportive and they said they are very open to listen to my idea.

Action: As first step, I reached out to HR and collected the job roles/responsibilities and skills required for management and techncial career path. I also identified the kind of coachign and internal training sessions organized for managers and found equivalent trainings outside. We had many subscriptions such as Harward ManagerMentor and other technical libraries.

I created a new role called FPM (Future Project Manager), defined the roles and responsibilties requird for first line manager, identified trainings, timeline etc. and socialized with my leadership. They were very enthusiastic and even joked that I have come up with a structured approach for my succession planning. I then ran the idea with HR along with my leadership, and they OKayed this idea.

Result: I made a presentation on this to my team and invited their feedback. Some where skeptical because this is not formal role and feared what happens after an year or so. There were a couple of engineers very keen to explore this further. I made them poitn of contact to lead projects, point of contact for communciation and gave them ownership and responsibilties. At the end of 6 months, we could fast track them to managers and the idea got larger support across other teams. This got visibility all the way to senior leadership and the HR dept took over this framework and expanded the concept. I must confess that I could not have pulled this by myself. I received excellent support from my leadership and HR.

Situation: The team I was managing was more into CPE or something called sustaining engineering. The main focus was to fix bugs and address customer issues and limited involvment in new product design. In all hands and other company wide activities, the product design teams used to garner all the limelight and my team developed a perception that they are second citizens.

Opportunity: There was serious motivational issue within the team. I wanted to ensure my team is proud of what they are doing, they are making huge difference and lack of visibility is no way limiting the importance of their work. I knew this well. I believed this. I wanted my team to know the same.

Action: I started socializing with product management teams and engineering management and asked for a slot in their monthly meetings/weekly team meetings. I brought my team members to this meeting and used it as a platform to explain customer problems and scenarios. It was interesting to know that many of the engineering teams had very limited visibility to real customer problems and pains.

Result: The customer scenarios, troubleshotting pains, simiplicity and usability issues and how the team handled these while facing wrath of angry customers made great story. There was excellent support and renewed respect for our team and we started getting lots of visibiltiy in leadership meetings. More importantly, team morale went up and they starte believing in their work and its impact. It was a very satisfying end result for me.