HUSH
NEGATIVITY – THE ADVENT OF ETHICAL MANAGERS!
Imagine
the world where your office had the sensor that beeps around the whole office
when your boss starts his usual harangue and beeps till he speaks something
positive. So, presenting before the world is the “Hush-Negativity Sensor”. Coming in the office at 1030 (when your
boss comes at 0830) and seeing his usual smirk face puts the day off the edge.
Why
not start the day by greeting each other? Why not start the day with a cup of
coffee discussing things only in a positive manner. Feels Great! This article
comes straight from the heart of ‘not an HR’ person who gets really
irritated when you have to start a day with someone else nagging and cribbing.
Be it your mistake or not, for our boss we are the puppets in his hands to vent
out the feud with his wife.
Why
we need it? PYGLAMLION EFFECT
I
think everyone in the OB world would know about this effect. All managers would
have noticed this after their tenures of at least 10 years! Then why
Un-Pygmalion Effect?
I don’t know how relevant it is but by if by
encouraging people productivity increases, then my pessimism does it decrease?
Nobody needs to study this! We all know this! All the pessimism around us
discourages us. I, being an engineer, got discouraged a lot not because my
manager was against engineers but he felt there were way too many engineers in
this world and nobody really know anything about technology other than how to
use Google effectively. This happens very often when a non-tech manager is
assigned to a technical project!
The
cultural diversity in India is HUGE! It cannot be ignored in
this tech world! All this feud of north India and south India is never going to
end! A South Indian thinks that the North Indians are way too open and
irresponsible. They don’t come on time; they party all night and use
invectives. A North Indian thinks that a South Indian is way too monotonous and
boring and doesn’t live their lives to the fullest. They are bound by their
crutches of responsibility and traditions. Well, people are different! Isn’t it
the work (the very core work) of a manager to understand the cultural
diversities, ethnicities, different faiths, different beliefs and different
upbringing of each and every person he has in his team?
During
my tenure, I had a wonderful team of six people excluding my manager. We used
to respect each other, exchange our diverse stories and discuss a lot of things
about life in the past and the life we wish to have in future! We had huge
diversity. I belonged to Delhi and am very open to night life and parties. I
used to talk about different English plays I had seen and they used to cherish
my moments from their eyes. One person was from Punjab with his usual cool
attitude and hardworking nature. Everybody admired him for his no-panicking
attitude even in the phase of failure of deployment (technical jargon). There
was a lady from Maharashtra and we used to love listen her hamlet stories. She
used to sing beautiful Marathi songs. I remember how I ran to her when I fell
in love with ‘Navrahi Majhi’ song but didn’t understand it. There were two people
from Orissa and they couldn’t stop themselves from gauging on sweets and
talking about Rasgulla (and proving that Rasgulla came from Orissa and not
Kolkatta). And there was a very simple guy from Jharkhand who used to amaze us
with his beautiful stories of sitting beside a river.
See
the diversity? Immense! And we all had different needs, different way of
working, and different style of speaking. We wanted holidays at different times
of the year. Our working time was different, our goals were different, and our
ambitions were different! The problem aroused when our manager didn’t realise
that Vijay Dashmi might me important for some people and Diwali for some. Some
people might be comfortable starting work at 8 in the morning and some at 10 in
the morning. He wanted everything to be strict, stringent and timelines
attached to all.
He
used to come at 8 in the morning (though I caught him reading newspaper at that
time) and expected everybody to follow suit. Soon, the whole team expressed a
lot of cold and negative vibes towards him and a lot aversion was formed for
him. This affected both the team and him as well. He gave a lot of bad
appraisals to a lot of people despite they had worked equally hard.
The
time is not far when we will have another category in our hierarchical level ‘Ethical Managers’ who will
ponder on the ethics of each person. This will be the most difficult portion
even for OB people. To see the underlying emotions of some person(my manager in
this case) and trying to discern why he chose to do that and then make a
judgement of wrong and right ethics. A colleague of me who got bad appraisal
eventually left the company. The company was void of a very good resource only
because of the animosity between the manager and him. Ethical managers will be
like the Investment Bankers in the
area of Human Resource and Organisational Behaviour and will take the
call of investing in the right people. And we all know how difficult it is to
get the right person for the right job in this quagmire of too many people but too
less skills. This corporate world is like a quicksand of thousands of us where we
all just keep flowing with the mud but a very few people are able to come out
of it!
And
those are people who know and understand diversity and respects optimism!
Written
by: Shagun Maheshwari
This article was written for a competition conducted by FMS OB society.
Results Awaited..
SPJIMR,
Mumbai
