What I learned from Mr James Demers at Nortel

Hi all, I am back with my next lesson and I am switching companies again. I plan to take you all to Nortel, a company I joined in 2002. It was a great company with great technology and a great culture. I can say with great confidence that I am yet to come across a company that is as good as Nortel. In many ways, the company shaped me and my future. I joined that company as an engineer and grew to become the Director of Business Development for India Region.

I want to talk about an important lesson that I learned from Mr. James Demers who was my “Accidental Boss”.

My hiring manager, who was the engineering lead for India, left the company within 3 months of my joining. His manager, who was the engineering lead for APAC, had an internal movement even before we had a backfill for my manager. So I ended up with Mr. James Demers being my “Accidental Boss”. James was then the head of Business for the APAC Region for the optical business for Nortel.

Good leaders can also judge from absence.

I did not get any chance or opportunity to even have a chat with James about my day to day work, but as the year came to an end, I needed to get my appraisal done. I was worried that he may not have any view of what I have done, as he was way high up from where I stood in the organization. He was not even copied on any of the emails that carried most of my work. I prepared myself best for this first real interaction with my “Boss” and was hoping for a fair appraisal against all odds.

I explained what I have achieved and in fact rated myself high on all counts. James said to me that judging someone post facto is not the best thing to do. He explained to me that although I have completed all the tasks that I shared with him with excellence, I was just rating myself only on things that I have completed. He said that I had not made the effort to pre-define the goals with him so that he can fairly judge my performance. He said that he could probably add a few things that I should have accomplished, but he also acknowledged that it would be unfair on his part to add any new items to my tasks for the period that is past.

So I ended up asking him, “Well, given the situation, how will you judge my performance?”

He was very candid and said to me that before I had taken up the role, he faced escalations from India team and the Customers on at least twice a month basis. And that since I picked up the role, the escalations have reduced to the point that he has not really had any in the last quarter. So he said that even though he may not be aware of all the tasks that I was doing on the ground, he is happy to judge me by the “absence of noise”. He said I must be doing something good to make the noise go away.

And that was my first appraisal at Nortel, an experience I have not forgotten to date.

So as leaders, we should not just look at what is happening, but also at what is not happening to make our decisions. May you all learn also from the absence of things.

Stay tuned, I will share another great lesson by Mr. James Demers, next week.