3 Lessons learned as an intern that help me as a CEO today

In this video, CEO of Cazton and Microsoft MVP, Chander Dhall shares three lessons learned as an intern that help him as a CEO today. Below is the transcript of this video.

Transcript:

Hi! I'm Chander Dhall, CEO of Cazton and today I'd like to share three things I learned during my internship that still help me as a CEO.

No 1. Asking for help is better than failing

In one of my internships, one of my managers gave me an impossible task.

At least to me it looked like an impossible task with a crazy, unreasonable deadline.

Now I had two options - one was to worry about it and fail, or second was to ask for help.

But I had a lot of confidence in the team I worked for. So being respectful of their time as they were all busy, I decided to schedule meetings with them one on one and then collectively as a team. I asked them a lot of good, bad and ugly questions. And finally to my utter surprise, I was able to finish the task well within the time frame and it was a successful task. So remember! Asking for help is better than failing.

No 2. Take the blame and give the credit

I know it sounds really hard. So one thing, if you can do in your life, you will make a long term relationship with every single person, you ever work with, including the people that don't like you.

I had one of my managers who was a visionary and a man of honor. No matter how many times the team messed up, he would not give up on the team. He would always step up and take the blame. Anytime the team was successful, he was generous enough to pass on the credit back to the team. The amount of loyalty he had was phenomenal. I'm a fan of him till date.

No 3. Make others successful

There were a lot of times my fellow interns were like, "Oh My Gosh! the work is so redundant, it's so boring. I kind of feel treated very shabbily like an intern because I don't like it."

And I looked at myself going "I have so much of respect for the team I work for that it really doesn't matter what the task is. I'm just going to do it because I wanna make them successful."

And the team did the same. They worked really hard to make me successful. It is no joke that till today, we are friends. When we make others successful, it goes a long way.

"Top is not crowded". A lot of people will say that. But there is really no fun in doing anything alone.

Making others successful has a return on investment that's priceless.