The Million Dollar Employee: Recent Episodes
Ketan Krishna
A small-town boy, an HR Practitioner, a Coach, an Author, a Speaker, I have been helping Organizations take care of their people.
Having served more than 25,000 people till now across various organisations, I work closely with employees, managers, teams and leaders to enable them to deliver extraordinary results.
I believe we have been working on one side of the problem for a very long time. There are high expectations that employees have from managers, leaders and the organisation as a whole. What has got ignored is the focus on employees taking ownership, showing accountability and demon
We received a letter from a customer from abroad.
It was addressed to our CEO. It detailed about things we had gone wrong with, and the reasons why the customer was furious.
We checked our quality snapshots, did our diligence and found out that we had followed the due processes. We opined that the customer was blowing things out of proportion.
The product was reasonably expensive and would have costed us moderately. For a small and growing company, this was not easy.
But our CEO took an instant decision to send another product to the customer. He also connected in with the customer.
He made a choice where he did not take opinion from the production team.
This sounded like production being proven wrong, and the decision being taken in favour of the customer, without fact findings.
Upon asking him, I learned a lesson for life.
Twenty-five years back, we got a vacuum cleaner at home. For a small town, it was cool stuff, unheard of. I was super excited to see this robotised product at home. The sound was the best part, like a machine in a sci-fi movie.
Every time I would go to him with a problem, issue or challenge which was not functional or technical, he would rarely give me a solution, instead ask questions. This used to put me off. Why would a manager shy away from his responsibilities of solving my problems? Here is a powerful lesson that I learned!