An Event That Changed My Life Forever For The Better | #MBAIITKanpur

This was becoming a challenge for me as the morale of the team was going down and was surely a test of my leadership. We went to every
team present on the event site asking to check their inventory for that part and we all returned barehanded. It was 6 o’clock in the evening and day-1 was not so cooperative for us. Two days were remaining to get our technical inspection sticker. I started searching for the teams with international presence, which are not participating in this event and took the help of their Facebook pages. As we were in the south so I decided to get in touch with two of the south teams for help and even after the hours of discussion, they seemed not convinced as the part was too costly (Names confidential). After searching for a few more hours, we found the team of Delhi Technological University.

I spoke to one of their team members and he was ready to help us out after a discussion of 30 minutes. That showed a sign of relaxation among the team and we went for a nice dinner. Now, the task was to bring that part from Delhi. One of our team members volunteered to travel from Coimbatore to Delhi and bring that part on the very next morning. This decision was crucial for every team member and this was a challenge for everyone. We participated in the event successfully with a tag of design finalist for the very first time in the history of Aligarh Muslim University and stood at 11th position among the 70+ participating teams.

What are the key learnings from this incident?

1. You have to be focused and determined enough to achieve your goal. When you work in a team with cross functions, this becomes more challenging for team manager/ leader to walk with every member and keep the morale high in the case of breakdowns. We had a presentation on design the very next day of the incident which would have been affected if the morale was not maintained.

2. When you lead such a big project and your hard work of two years is on stake, you should be ready for every kind of challenge and be ready to resolve irrespective of whatever it demands. I had to invest extra 25k for the air ticket from the team fund at the time when we were running out of money but I did it anyway.

3. We have been shortlisted for design finalist for the very first time in our history. It could only become possible because of rigorous mock design session at our end and documentation of each process and part. It is always important to write down about your product in detail. Keeping everything in mind will hamper knowledge transfer in every organization.

4. When something goes wrong, never ever panic. This would lead to mental pressure and you will not be able to think about the solution strategically. If you panic a little, please cool down as soon as possible else you would end up screwing everything.

5. A leader is in charge of the ship. If it sinks he will be the very first person to be blamed and if it comes with flying color he will be rewarded. But every member of the group contributed equally and the team won because of every team member’s efforts collectively.

This project didn't just teach me engineering, it was a breakthrough in my life which inspired me to explore for a management career. And now, here I am at IIT Kanpur pursuing MBA (2019-21).