Dispatch 1

In our line of work, transferable skills are rare. We can’t hire people who already know the job because the job is bespoke. What we can do is hire for curiosity, interest in cars, interest in data and then train from scratch. Ramp-up takes months, not weeks.

That’s why training and onboarding is intense lasting a few weeks, uninterrupted. It requires planning, travel logistics, trainers, training rooms, schedules, and a lot of coordination. When you invest that much time and money, you want new starters to avoid holidays during the training window unless there’s an emergency.

This was one Monday earlier in the GCC build.

Checked my calendar Sunday night for Monday, and I thought I had some free time on my hands.

The only one big thing on my mind that morning was finalizing the start date for the next training group. How hard could it be? Everything was more or less planned, it was just the final confirmations that needed to be made.

The plan was still fluid: either four days out next week, or the week after. If we missed that window, it would slip by another 8 weeks, creating 2nd order consequences.

The group itself was a mix. A couple of internal moves. A couple of internal selections. Couple of external hires. The decision had been made only days earlier.

Then the constraints started surfacing.

Early in the morning came to know that two of the internal selections already had leave booked in the next few weeks. It was the last month of the leave year and people understandably wanted to consume remaining days. A festival towards end the of the week tightened the window further.

Trainer availability boxed us in too. A quick catch-up call with the global L&D team to confirm things led to something else - I was informed that one of the trainers was nearing the end of their rotation. The person who was supposed to take over needed to be present live but had leave booked later in the month. My flexibility to move dates around was thinner than I’d assumed.

A couple of hours in, another twist popped up. We might need to add two more starters into the same group. We had a healthy pipeline of warm candidates, but warm still means calls, availability checks, one final face-to-face, approvals back to HQ, HR processes and hoping they can join next week.

Also, for the first time, the group would be mixed in a way we hadn’t done before: some already comfortable with internal processes, others completely new. First time for everything.

By lunchtime, my office manager was confirming hotels and flights for trainers. Separately, I learned the same trainers were now required to deliver additional short trainings because a business decision had expanded the training scope. Another layer of coordination, same window, same people.

So now it was not just set training dates. It’s ‘avoid double-booking human beings’ across overlapping needs, and across time-zones, while also keeping the start date intact.

Lots of moving parts. Lots of unknowns.

Then came the facility constraints. My office manager asked me to confirm the dates asap as she was working out the training room availability (needed booking in advance), and we were also juggling an office move immediately after the training window. Generally, internal office moves are minor, and sometimes they are. But in a growth phase, it can become difficult: seating plans, equipment, access, phased movement, the inevitable friction amongst dozens of people trying to maintain business continuity whilst physically shifting their setup.

In my head I could already see it: people carrying laptops, chargers missing, someone stuck without a seat, the ripple effect into productivity and morale. So there were calls with the office provider, requests for earlier handover, a quick scan of the movement plan with the office manager. It you don’t reduce uncertainty here, things will go out of control.

Every item on the Monday that was supposed to be free suddenly needed decisions. The job is not to take all of them. The job is to know which three things will matter in 12 months time and make sure those get the clearest thinking/decisions. Everything else can remain on the sidelines. So I guess the skill is not in the speed (yes, to some extent), but more so about knowing the difference.

By the afternoon, it was obvious: this wasn’t a logistics problem but deciding what to decide first and decide right.

When unknowns are many, the best move is to reduce them deliberately, one by one, by freezing the few variables that everything else depends on. Not because the plan will be perfect. It never will be. A perfect plan is never the goal, but a plan that moves is; momentum matters more than perfection.

So I froze the training date. Then I started fixing everything around it.

That did two things. It forced clarity as to who could join, who couldn’t, what trade-offs we were accepting. And it created the conditions for a better outcome: the right trainer coverage, and a cleaner group composition than we would’ve achieved if we kept chasing a best possible date. In other words, it cut the noise.

Towards the end of the day, I sat with our global managers who were onboarding the previous group at the office. One person was severely lagging. My mind went straight back to the assessment scores, discussion, my interview with that person - everything had looked green. Very bright, smart but yet struggling.

That’s what ‘fit’ really means. Sometimes the individual is excellent and still wrong for the role. Which means a decision will have to be made, and communicated, without turning it into a moral judgement.

That conversation alone could have been the whole day. But it wasn’t.

After that meeting, I sat on my desk, saw emails from my boss asking progress on the next groups recruitment, on the new market launch, a few other bits n bobs that go along with it across time zones.

Then a stream of smaller fires: operational issues in my other teams, few unexpected updates, hybrid roster mechanics, reporting asks, sourcing issues in one of the markets, resource reshuffling to maintain continuity.

Then, compensation requests, managers advocating for their teams, HR flagging a step that wasn’t followed, commercial checking readiness for a new client going live…

This is what managing looks like. Not grand gestures. Yes, there’s a place for them but those are few and far in between. It’s 95% triage: what needs attention now, what can wait; what needs a decision today, what can be decided tomorrow. And then be willing to change today’s decisions tomorrow because some new information is presented tomorrow.

You juggle several balls. Some will fall. The job is to make sure the critical ones don’t.

Trying to keep all balls in the air is sure shot way to making all balls fall.

Amongst all this, few long-term strategic things took place, which may have appeared trivial at the time to an untrained eye.

Things that will matter in 2,3,4 years - career path gaps that become structural policy conversation, performance eval patterns that become governance work later (clearer expectations, better coaching, fewer surprises), a training decision that compounds productivity simply because we refused to wait for the perfect date, perhaps minor tweaks in recruitment process, and a quick call with the team sometime in the late afternoon giving me the idea to utilize the existing team as support buddies (thereby building local talent) and in the process save costs in future.

By the time I was nearing the close of the day, obviously the free Monday thought was a distant memory from the night before.

What we gained? We moved forward, cleared the path, acted as a shock absorber for a dozen moving parts and those long-term moves. Some balls still remained on the floor, and that was okay.

I think a free day for a manager is a rarely an empty one. It’s a day when calendar doesn't tell you what to do, leaving you the space to do what the business actually needs. And what does it need? Not all the stuff I mentioned above. What business needs is people who can remain comfortable in ambiguity and be mature to treat it as BAU.

My calendar for Tuesday was packed, and it turned out to be the most predictable day of that week.

— Pankaj

Note: BTW, I have observed (speak for myself), I do not get the same kick and drive from the predictable days that I get from a day like a ‘free’ Monday, they keep me sharp. 😃