Patience... the power of a leader

I am glad I recvd the professor's email on what topics we can blog about. After reading Joi's comments to my blog on human perceptions, I would like to post something that we discussed and found very useful for ourselves in our professional and personal lives.

As a leader, one of the key qualities to success and relationship building is Patience. It is true that we deal with seniors, peers, team members in our everyday lives. We spend 8 hours of everyday at work. The remaining we spend with family and friends. As we can observe, our primary duties on a daily basis involves interaction with people - be it in our personal time or professional time.

For relationship building, patience is a key strength to develop. Patience is a friend of "time". We are given this gift so we can understand our opponent or peer better so the interaction can be a value add instead of a pain for both parties involved. As Joi observed, I do place building relationship as an asset over trying to be defensive of my position in a relationship. Over the last 2 years as a Manager, I have a built a better relationship with my team members and customers due to this quality. I would have failed to do this if I had not been patient through the ups and downs of the relationship building process. As well, noting that people can be perceived wrongly, one has to work really hard at some relationships. One of them for me, we winning the trust of my team members. As Joi also observed, gender played a critical role in my case, when I started leading projects since all my team members were men and I was the first woman to lead a project in my organization. One of the sad things is, one of my projects had to be moved to a male project manager due the gender related issues I was continuously facing with the respective customer dealing with that project.

The lessons learnt in my personal and professional life have taught me that there is no substitute to patience and time. Every reltionship needs time and effort. In a professional setup, we dont have time as projects have deadlines and there is no time for relationship building allocated in the project plan, however this is a process that needs to go on in parallel for future projects with the same team members. I actually had a request after 2 years from a project member last week, if I can take over all the projects he is involved in as he prefers me as his PM. This has been one of the key compliments I have received so far and I believe that one of the contributing factors is my relationship with him as a team mate.