What I learned from Mr Atanu Dasgupta at Power Grid – Part 3

Continuing on my experiences with Mr Dasgupta, in today’s blog, I will cover another critical piece about being a good leader. Let us take a look at the next lesson.

Confident Bosses Project their Teams

Power Grid is a public sector company, what that means is that it is owned by the government, but not run by the government. The government appoints a “Board of Directors” to run the company and all rules are essentially defined by the government. You can imagine that the company is in its very nature, hierarchical and structured.

I joined an engineer trainee and after one year, became an executive engineer, grade E2A. Just to give you a sense of the hierarchy, we had the following levels above me at that time.

• Executive Engineer
• Senior Engineer
• Deputy Manager
• Manager
• Senior Manager
• Deputy General Manager (DGM)
• Assistant General Manager (AGM)
• General Manager (GM)
• Executive Director (ED)
• Director
• Chairman & Managing Director (CMD)

Our department was led by Mr A K Bhatnagar and he was the ED and Mr Dasgupta led the Communications Group and he was DGM. I worked with my manager Mr Asit Som, who reported to Mr Dasgupta, who in turn reported to the ED and then the Director and the CMD. We used to do everything TPC (Through proper Channel). Mr Dasgupta had many peers running other functions of our group. If someone from another team had to ask me a question or seek clarifications, he/she had to write an IOM (Intra Office Memo) and route through their manager, DGM to My DGM, Manager and then me. Things moved slowly at best. Do not get me wrong, there were meetings as well.

In this setup, it was rare that a Director will know any Engineer, but it was very early in my career that I got the chance to present to ED, Directors as well as the Board. It was all due to Mr Dasgupta. He used to ask us to work on specific tasks and when our presentations were ready, he used to take us to the ED and ask us to present. He used to set the stage, highlight what we have achieved and encouraged us to go through the relevant details, guiding us in the process. He used to showcase us and our work to the senior management. Through this exposure, I developed confidence and understanding of the strategy and even got opportunities to share my thoughts and concerns with the senior management. The learning was tremendous.

But I can tell you that this was a rare thing in Power Grid, most of the other Bosses, only used their teams to get the work done, never involving them in the senior level meetings and many of the managers remained unknown to the Directors. And I can tell you that only a confident Boss can share the limelight with his team. Many others were just happy collecting credit for the work done by their team, while the team remained relatively obscure.

I am lucky to have had Mr Dasgupta as the department head. I wish you all get your own Mr Dasgupta and hope that you can be such a Boss for your team and be the Confident Boss who projects his/her team. 

Stay tuned for more lessons from Mr Dasgupta