Assignment 1

The author had experience working under both good and poor leaders. A good leader they worked with was their technical lead who mentored newcomers, communicated well, distributed work evenly, and helped the team meet deadlines. As a new leader, the author tried to emulate this approach. However, a supervisor at another company was abusive, did not explain work expectations, and created a stressful environment. The author believes studying organizational behavior and leadership is worthwhile to develop necessary managerial skills for their career.

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Assignment 1

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Soumya Das

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Assignment 1: Individual reflective assignment

What kind of experiences do you have on leading people or on the other hand on being lead?
What is a good leader like? How about a poor leader?

To answer this question firstly I would like to share my experiences working in a different
companies before beginning my master’s study. I have 3 years of work experience in different
multinationals in India. While working in the companies I had the opportunity to work under
managers, technical leaders and also with different kind people with different technical
background. Since the companies I worked for were mostly IT companies, the company hired
professionals with different IT skills for instance some people were very sound in operating
system(linux programming) and some were with database and others were web developers. But
it is a leaders task to effectively manage his resources effectively and make best use of their
skills to deliver the work on time.

One of the good leaders , I have experienced working and will always love to work under him
was my technical lead at Automature Inc.In automature we worked in small teams, each team
was focused on different aspect of developing testing software. He is an expert software
professional, he knew his work very well. As well as he acted mentor to the freshers those who
joined the company. He was honest and his commitment towards his work made him can be
trusted asset of the organization. His confidence with the technical issues while working and his
strong communication skills to explain the problems to other team members made him a
delegate. Other than that his sense of humor ability to interact with all team members helped the
team function effectively.As a fresher I didn’t know lot of practicalities of work in industry,I used
get stuck in coding and other technical areas while working. But my techinical lead’s constant
guidance as well his inspiration to work helped me overcome those problems. His creativity lied
in planning a task and effectively complete within the deadline.he also helped the entire team
and put in extra work so that even the freshers those lacked technical skills can develop new
skills and complete the work by deadline. He also had the intuition to predict risk scenarios
which came to him over years of experience working in firm, avoid those situation strategically
by means of daily meeting with the clients and ability to negotiate with them explaining the
situation. According to [1] presence of above qualities makes a person a great leader.

With my work experience and qualities that I gained at Automature Inc. helped me get a position
of lead software tester at Yotto Labs. Here for the first time in my life I had the opportunity lead a
group of testers.I tried to follow the footsteps of the my techlead in my previous company and
wanted to excel in my new role both as technical staff as well as a manager. I used to
personally coach and help new testing engineers those who joined the team. I tried to distribute
the work equally among the team members and also divided the work based on the ability of the
team members and developed a trend among the team members to prepare for knowledge
transfer sessions and help the freshers with technical problems they faced.I also followed my
knowledge agile software development where there is a requirement of daily scrum meeting and
daily update done by the team members and everyone in my team did a little of all the work the
team was expected to do so that even in critical situation or during absence of some team
members the other members were aware of each others work and the team remained
completely functional.

The bad supervisor I faced when I was working in a big team at Cognizant. Though Cognizant is
a renowned multinational but I was very much disappointed with their resource
management.The supervisor I was working under was more of dictator , than being my
supervisor. In Cognizant I was trained to be developer but while assigning project I was given a
project in the support team. I didn’t like the work. I explained my supervisor that I didn’t want to
work in support but my supervisor left me with no choice other than working in support.
Well I started working in support team , but the life in the support team was so bad. No one was
happy with their work nor with the environment. My supervisor was abusive and there was no
knowledge transfer related to the work I will be doing in the team and I was expected to be
productive from day 1. I will never forget my first week at support team, I was asked to monitor a
system but was not explained well what to do. Well naturally many of the things I did was wrong,
and my supervisor used to insult me so badly in front all my colleagues.It was not only me, the
other guy who joined the team was also insulted. The environment at support team reminded
me of bad leadership at Enron, as it impoverished lives of employees in team and pested them
with stress,anxiety and fear[2].

Is organizational behavior and leadership worth of studying? Why or why not?

I think it is worth studying because from this course I expect to learn more leadership qualities
which will leverage my managerial skills , since they are one of the most necessary skills in the
industry. After my academic career someday or the other I have to join industry, other than my
technical skills my leadership and management skills will be necessary plus for the growth of my
career.These are the motivations I think to take up this course and learn new leadership skills
which I will find necessary in my future work life.

References: