We know of the right as right simply because we are oriented that way since our childhood. So believes Virendra Gupta of Huawei Technologies India. As Associate Vice President, and leader of a team of 290 engineers at the India center, his take on right people for the right role is quite simple: “All of us have the capability, it is the orientation that is important.”

In keeping with this view, Gupta spends a lot of time interacting with the engineers under
him, focusing on their orientation and direction. “It can only be done up to a certain point though. Beyond that, you need to give them the freedom to perform,” he says. In charge of the embedded software division at Huawei India, Gupta strikes what he calls ‘optimal balance’ between business and people. He explains it thus: “India being a services hub, the orientation is such that managers give more preference to people than
business. Engineers too want to have as many varied experiences as they can.”

“Even when they shift to product development, after a year, the engineers feel that they are repeating themselves and want a change. They want to move over to a different product,” he says. Gupta’s years in Huawei have taught him to decipher the fine line between logic and emotion in such cases and figure out whether such a movement will benefit the company’s business. “Most often than not, such frequent movement hurts the organization. Hence the need to educate engineers of the value of expertise, and how they stand to benefit by staying on the same product,” he notes. For this, the techie’s accomplishment and his contribution to the company need to be pointed out at regular intervals.

The eternal challenge for project managers, believes Gupta, is to ensure higher quality. Central to this are the following tenets: