Best out of worst

There are enough research and writings to the effect that people leave their managers and not the companies/organization. It makes me wonder what makes people do wonder under some managers and the same people turn out to be underperformer horror stories under some other managers. Very young in my professional life, I wanted to sack someone and approached my then manager as to why the person should leave.


I was given a simple challenge then. Anyone can get work done out of good and talented people, how do you demonstrate you are a good manager? The idea is very simple if everyone is good in their job and did justice to their responsibilities, there will not be need for managers in such pefect world. However the world is not perfect and we have to get the best out of worst people. At that point of time I seethed with anger, feeling my manager was behaving like a Bengali socialist protecting incompetence. However it gave me a great learning, it was not him who was a problem, it was more of me who did not look at his skills, his strengths and his usefulness in the organization and tried to look at him through a paticular lense and was not happy with the image.

Over a period of time I have tried to assimilate this learning in the way I work and have never been disappointed by a team member. After all its our job as a manager to get best out of worst