By Devangi Vyas and Gayatri Dixit
As part of the Access Life America Leadership Course, we met with Corporate Leader Amit Kachru for a leadership enlightenment on the topic of trust. Kachru is the Vice President (Finance, IT) for Medtronic – a leading medical device miracle in Healthcare and effectively, one of the largest medical companies in the world. With operations in 150 countries, their products treat 70 major health conditions and aid over 75 million people every year. With 90,000+ employees, Medtronic pushes its mission, to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life, in order to take healthcare further.
Amit Kachru is a very experienced leadership professional. He has 23 years of work experience and his 15 years dedicated to the company has allowed him deep insight into the finances, marketing and key missions of Medtronic. Aside from being a strong worker, I had the pleasure of hearing Kachru divulge in some interesting ‘facts’. He was a lead actor in the Minnesota Fringe Festival Play, initially started a career as a hotel management trainee and was a global innovation fellow with Nobel Peace Prize winner, Professor Mohammad Yunus. Evidently, Kachru’s large range of leadership experience makes him a very diligent and adept individual. In contrast, after a long day of working hard, Kachru highlighted that his personal interests (including cricket, hindi movies and being a diversity champion) make ‘playing hard’ very enjoyable and are key to maintaining his clear-cut work-life balance.
Mr. Kachru believes that there are 2 pillars of trust that are crucial if you want people to trust you. 1, you need to be transparent with your work and with the information that you have. And 2, you need to be accountable for your responsibilities. Transparency is crucial because if your team members know that you will not lie to them about a certain situation then, they will be more willing to follow you because they know exactly what they are getting into. Accountability, your team members should know that even if you don’t meet a requirement, or fulfil a responsibility, then you won’t make excuses, and you will try to get it done. Now that’s getting your team to trust you and vice versa, but why? Why should you trust your team? Amit says that trusting your team is necessary if you want to get things done quickly. “In cricket, the two batsmen need to trust each other’s judgement on whether to run or not to run. When the batsmen hits the shot, if the ball goes behind him, it’s the batsman at the non-striker’s end who needs to take a call on whether to run or not. If the batter takes a look back and takes a call, he is losing approximately half a second.” He explained.
Q&A Session:
What should you do when a more experienced and close person disagrees with what you are planning on doing but your instinct says you’re doing it right? Who should you trust?
Trust your instinct. If your instinct is telling you that you are doing the right thing then you should follow it otherwise you will always regret it.
As a leader, is there a line between being just transparent enough or being too transparent?
In my belief, I aim to be transparent in front of everybody so I don’t hide anything. At times, on a specific occasion, if I cannot be transparent or say something for a reason, I will tell you. I will say ‘I cannot tell you right now, just trust me, I’m not intentionally trying to hide anything’ and people respect that. There isn’t a line as you cannot be too transparent – you just have to be honest on every occasion.