Describe a good leader you know or have heard about

I'm going to talk about my manager, Priya. She is the head of the software team in the company where I work in Bengaluru. I joined there about two years ago as a junior developer.

She leads a team of twelve developers, and we make a mobile app for paying bills and sending money. It's a big responsibility, because millions of people is using the app every day.

She has a lot of good qualities. First of all, she is very calm, I never saw her shouting at anybody, even when there is a big problem. Second, when we do a good job she always gives the credit to the team, not to herself. And in meetings she asks the quiet people for their opinion first, so people like me, who are shy, can also speak.

I think she is a good leader because of what happened last Diwali. We launched a new feature and on the first day the app was crashed for six hours. Our CEO was very angry. But Priya told him that it was her responsible, not ours. Then she did a schedule so nobody worked more than ten hours, because she said tired people make more mistakes. After we fixed it, we had a meeting without blaming anybody, and we learned a lot. Since that time, honestly, everyone in the team trust her completely.

The leader I'd like to talk about is Priya Raman, who manages the engineering team at the fintech start-up where I've been working in Bengaluru for the past two years.

She's in charge of twelve developers, and between us we build and maintain a payments app that several million people use to pay bills and send money to their families. So when something goes wrong, it really matters.

In terms of qualities, the one that stands out is how composed she is. I've never once heard her raise her voice, even in the middle of a crisis. She's also very generous with credit; whenever the team gets praised, she makes sure the people who did the work are named. And she has this habit, in meetings, of asking the quieter members for their view before the louder ones dominate, which as a fairly shy person I really appreciate.

But what convinced me she's a genuinely good leader was last Diwali. We'd rolled out a new feature just before the festival sales, and on the first morning the whole app went down for six hours. Our CEO was furious, and Priya simply told him the decision to release had been hers and the responsibility was hers too. Then, instead of keeping everyone on their desks all night, she drew up a rota so that nobody worked more than ten hours, because, as she put it, exhausted engineers create new bugs. Once it was fixed, she ran a review where the only question was what went wrong, never who. Since then, I'd follow her almost anywhere.

I'd like to talk about Priya Raman, who heads up the engineering team at the fintech start-up in Bengaluru where I've worked since graduating, so I've been able to watch her leadership at close quarters for a couple of years now.

She's responsible for twelve developers, myself included, and for a payments app that millions of people rely on to settle bills and send money home. In other words, the stakes are high and our mistakes are very public.

Several qualities stand out. She's unshakeably calm; I've seen her field a furious phone call and then turn to us in exactly the tone she'd use to order lunch. She's meticulous about credit, to the point of correcting senior executives who praise her for work someone else did. And she has a deliberate habit of inviting the quietest people in a meeting to speak first, before the confident voices set the agenda, which has made a real difference to someone as reticent as me.

What persuaded me she's the real deal, though, was the night our app collapsed. We'd pushed out a new feature on the eve of the Diwali sales, and within hours the whole system was down. While the CEO was demanding names, Priya calmly told him the call to release had been hers, and so was the accountability. She then split us into shifts so that no one stayed on beyond ten hours, arguing that exhausted engineers only create fresh problems. And once the service was restored, she led a post-mortem in which blame was explicitly off the table. The outcome was that we trusted her more after the failure than before it, which I'd say is the clearest test of leadership there is.