Now I think I know my goal

..and that is to foster a "we are a team, we are in this together" attitude whenever I get to lead a team. I think I now know exactly what made my manager back in San Jose, the stellar example that he is to me.

No matter what happened at levels above him, the politics, the dirtiness, the negativity, and whatever else crappy, he never let it trickle down to his engineers. If one of us got dinged on a negative feedback, he'd take the negativity, think about it for sometime and bring it down to us in the nicest way possible. When I was with him, all I had to do was give my work my best shot and not worry about who is stabbing whose back and whatever else :) Plus I always used to ask him, "are we the best kick-a$$ team around here" and he'd say "of course we are and you should be proud of it". And I was. I was very very proud of my team. I am not sure if the rest of them also felt the same way, but I felt that we were his army, out to win whatever battle we were fighting. And we were all in it together, end of the day everyone said, "Boy! that guy's team is roaring!"

And what do you think, sad as it is that I didn't witness it myself, my ex-manager has grown. Up the ladder now. And he is held in much awe by quite a few engineers here, and I feel extremely proud sometimes when I say I used to be his report once upon a time ;)

When and if I have a team, I would love to implement what I learnt from my boss back there. Because I've come to realize that for every damn thing that you do, if you have to worry about what your boss might think and what his boss might think, then you are spending most of your energy worrying about implications and the work-load is not going anywhere. The only thing that comes out of it is more stress, sigh! So I want to be one amongst them, lead from the back, lead along side, lead by example (he was so hard working and so honest we all found it difficult to match that guy, phew!) watch where they are going, take whatever crap in and let them simply do their job, encourage them to be better, and be honestly happy for them when they do. (I remember my boss was more excited than I was when I finally finished my CCIE;) )

My manager was all of this and more. And I am much better off today for that. And this is one corporate lesson I am not going to forget in a hurry :)