Defining Moments in a Career

2. Describe a “defining moment” in your experience. How did it significantly impact you?

There was a particular incident where I had a tough time making a decision. One of my team members from a mission critical project wanted to return to India as he had a personal emergency. He wanted to sort this out as it had begun to impact his work.

I had learnt that peace & happiness in personal front will reflect into your professional world but till this incident I never stood up for such cases. But this time I decided to discuss the issue with my supervisor. To my surprise, he was more concerned about the $ losses and losing credibility with the customer. He out rightly rejected this. But I wasn’t convinced with the supervisor’s approach and decided to discuss with the client directly leveraging my personal rapport. The Customer was empathetic and was willing to let go of him after a week of overlap with a new person. While this action of mine got me into the good books of my team members it made a seamless entry into the bad books of my supervisor which had a direct impact on my performance rating. I felt dejected but beside this entire scenario I was convinced I was right in my actions and this was my defining moment where I stood up for what I believed in and I continue to do so till today. Meanwhile the new person had picked up job very well and the project had no impact because of this change. This was a big sigh of relief to