31 October, 2005. A group of 8 management trainees join the team. The idea that was passed on to us was that they would work in the BD team and in a couple of months 4 out of the 8 would be shifted to the Delhi / Mumbai Airport project team, if GMR won the bid, that is. A pretty logical decision since we did not have a sizeable experienced team. Rohit and I joined at a time when V. Prasad and Ashutosh had left. They were one of the very few highly capable, outstanding professionals who gave in to the mediocrity of the department and the company as a whole. We were expected to take their places, to fill the large void that their absence created. Well, thats a different story. I continue with the Trainees.
My first interaction with them was in the following week, the usual introduction about the Group, the company, and the Business Development team. A week later, on 8 November 2005, the new office building at the site was inaugurated. I was to show them the site, the masterplan, the runway, the terminal building etc. Malathy and Naresh also were with us. They had also joined a few days back as support staff to the senior management. Malaty was in the Business Devleopment team and Mr. Naresh Verma in HR. I has infact come to the site in the company bus with Malathy. After showing and explaining the site to them, to the extent I knew, we boarded the bus back to the office. This was a different bus to the one I had come in. I had left my helmet in the bus and now I had to contact the bus service provider manager and request him to send the helmet to the office. On the way back, I distinctly remember sitting in the second seat. Naresh Verma was sitting in front and Raghavendra beside me. A rail line passes along the edge of the site and their is a small village between the border and the rail line. While passing through that village, Naresh Verma asked me if that is what we call the Airport village. I was dumb for a moment. I nodded my head and said no, and explained to him the concept of an Airport village which basically was the area just in front of the terminal building where the meeters and greeters and other non-passengers could see off or receive the passengers. Another conversation that I would not forget for a long time was the one I had with Raghavendra, Raghav for short. He narrated to me his life-story, inlcuding his childhood, schooling, education, projects, etc. and his English was really hmm..he has improved a lot though. I had only one question for him - "What do you want to be" and he gave me a straight answer - "I want to be the COO". I was amazed, amazed at the clarity and direction of his goal. We then discussed on how would it be possible for him to become a COO, the skill set that he would have to acquire, the communication that he would have to improve and the mental thinking process.
In the following week, I was assigned another task of allocating work profiles to the Trainees. I made a list of their majors, the projects that they had done before and the kind of work they were interested in. Philip and me interviewed all of them over two days. Meanwhile I was also discussing with RK and he was clear on who he wanted to be a part of his team. We, as in Philip and me, wanted two Trainees in our team and we shortlisted Mithun. The second was after a little discussion on Prakash and Sikander. I was of the opinion that Prakash was good at logical thinking while Sikander was good at finance, and we needed people who were good at logical thinking. They could learn anything. We eventually choose Prakash.
The Trainees had to be divided in to 4 groups of 2 each. One group to support RK, one to support Philip, one for Rajesh Vetcha, Corporate communication and one group to be assisting the Finance department, which incidentally was not part of the BD department anymore. This was the toughest part of the profiling as none of the Trainees wanted to leave the BD team. The Trainees were given a choice of deciding among themselves on who would join the finance team. Meanwhile, we had decided on who should ideally go to the finance team. After a lot of showdown and convincing, I had to reveal to the Trainees that Sikander and Meghana were the unfortunate ones. Unfortunate only for that day, whereas they had a gala time at the finance department. So the final list stands as follows:
Corporate communication : Bhuvanya, Raghav
RK and Rohit : Nidhi, Abdul
Philip and Vivek : Mithun, Prakash
Finance department : Sikander, Meghana
Over the first few days, Raghav was being more and more involved in our team, also because there was not much work in the communications team.
I got to go pick up Rani, she has caught a cold is not sounding good on the phone. Shall continue this blog
