Reward The Right People!!

All through these working years, I got the privilege to work with great leaders. Mallavarao Apparao, CMD of Centum Electronics ( www.centumelectronics.com ) was one of the leaders, who I admire a lot for training his team with all the knowledge he had acquired through these years.

He told this story multiple times to convey a very important message, I will try to reproduce here. This is just a story ( and has no relations to the people I know in my life), being explained by Mr Rao to sensitize us on the importance of recognizing the right people in the organization. 

Once on a production shop floor, there were two different machines running 24X7 for very critical operations. One of these was a moulding machine and the other was a CNC machine. 

What happened one day, during operations in the late hours moulding machine broke down. One of the bearings got damaged, and the production comes to stop. As there was a very important customer delivery planned for the next day, the whole management was made aware of the breakdown Immediately.

The lead engineer ( Let’s say his name was Mohan ), who was responsible to maintain the machine was left for the day as he was working in a day shift. There was a shift engineer but he was not able to fix the machine on his own, so his senior Mohan was called for repairing the machine. Mohan is a great guy, he reached office around 10 PM. It was raining though, but for Mohan organization is his priority all the time. Overcoming all the odds, Mohan came to office on bike fighting heavy rain, worked overnight and repaired the machine. He also needs the bearing, which was not available in stores. So he called one of his friends, opened up his spare shop at 1 AM at midnight and got the bearing so that the machine can be repaired.

By the time he left the office, it was almost morning. However, there was a downtime of 10 hours. Had Mohan not attended the breakdown in the night, customer deliveries could have missed the next day. Great work by Mohan.

As Mohan has helped the organization to put in extra efforts, he was awarded a cash price of INR 10K. He also got a special appreciation letter from the top management and got recognized during the monthly town hall meeting too.

On the other hand, the CNC machine was maintained by another lead engineer ( Let’s say his name was Krishan ). Krishan being a very systematic engineer always maintain his CNC machine very well and does the required preventive maintenances very thoroughly. He maintains all the spares very well, trains his next level of night shift engineer to take care of minor abnormalities on the machine during the night operations. The CNC machine never broke down in the night, so Krishan never had to come to the office during the night and so management never recognizes him ( Verbally and cash awards ). No one talks about the CNC machine and good work done by Krishan in maintaining his machine. It was always stated that the CNC machine is a stable machine so it never broke down. 

Hardly anyone appreciates the good work done by Krishan to maintain his machine very well. 

This is a very interesting story about two engineers, with different styles of working. As this is just a story, we don’t know how these guys shaped their professional careers in the long term. However, based on my experience Mohan would have been still maintaining the machine after 20 years, whereas Krishan would have been a leader handling multiple engineers like Mohan as was systematic, dispensable and proactive and knows very clearly how to scale the operations. 

Two questions

1. As an engineer: Do you want to be Mohan or Krishan? Do you look at the bigger picture in the long term?
2. As a manager: How do we develop more Krishan in the organization for smooth operations? 

Good Luck, my friends for a bright and prosperous career ahead.