“Ohhhh.. Life… is Bigger.. It’s bigger than You,
and You are not Me.. ….
…..
That’s Me in the corner..
that’s Me in the spotlight,
Losing my
Religion..
Trying to keep up with You,
Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool.. “
This beautiful song by R.E.M
speaks to me of someone who is struggling with a feeling of loss of faith in
their own faith! It is a lament of their attempt to ‘keep up’ with the
expectations of someone from whom they sought
acceptance; someone who did not understand that the speaker is different and unique, to be valued for
who they are (and who no one else can be!)
Having tried to gain acceptance by adopting the faith of their object of
desire (and consequently, abandoning their faith/value system in Life), the
speaker feels hurt, lost and foolish: They are coming to terms with
the realization that life is BIG- Big enough for everyone’s faiths, however
different, to co-exist, and too big for them to alter the truth of their being
for fitting into someone’s scheme of things.
Someone who cannot protect and own the fundamental truth of Who they
have always been (proud of), can never do justice to a Truth ‘borrowed’ from
another. They are obviously not accepted by those who laid down the required
specifications of their Truth, and now, having lost their own Truth (Guiding Light)
as well, they are left groping in the dark (as though blinded); Resignation and
resentment set in.
Organizations/their Managers often
define in rigidly explicit ink (printed on paper or on the walls of mind), the
Standard Specifications for a “Good *Whatever-organizational-Role* In Our
System”. As though, these critical roles are each a kind of exquisite dish,
with a precise “recipe”. We just need the right ingredients (people), and cook
them right (by training, etc). Our view of these roles may even be likened to
that of a customer of a branded product. A particular piece/sample of that
product is like the role incumbent/ employee. Each ‘role’ is like the iPod for
instance, it has a standard, company verified manual describing what the
standard product looks and feels like in perfect condition, and also,
instructions on “handling” it well ( ‘Do not place near inflammable material’,
“Give a break in usage every 8 hours.. “ -sound like our competencies?). The quality of a sample (role
incumbent/employee) is determined by the degree to which it accurately fits the
description in the manual. Deviations
are “defects” which must be corrected; If not, then the sample is to be
rejected as unfit for use, and either be ‘repaired’ with training intervention or
be replaced with a new one.
Yes, it sounds ridiculous when
one puts it like this- almost like a travesty of our very sincere, scientific
approach to Talent Development. I have
been, since my student days, an ardent admirer of the concept of Competencies
and how they can be used (objectively, measurably) for performance enhancement,
by confronting traits that were otherwise thought to be, less external and less
mutable. We desire some non-physical output
– such as enhanced Customer Service, High Results Orientation and so forth, and
we want this output from all of our different people in these roles. All of
them are human beings who have spent the past quarter of their (total) life
span doing things in a certain way, for certain reasons. How do you ensure that
when you tell them what they are supposed to do for you, they deliver exactly
what you wanted? I want a cup of GOOD tea – I study the best cooks (in my view),
record their ingredients and procedure down to the last pinch of lemon they add
into it with a soft stir and then I repeat exactly
what they did. Bam! I have my cup of tea! Yes, can’t go wrong with that one.
Look at, record what the BEST
eat, drink, breathe (– grant me poetic license here), speak, prioritize, believe,
etc as reflected in their behaviors
–which is the only way we get to see
their success formula at work. Get your other good people, and hand out the
magic formula, the recipe to success! The good cooks, with a proven recipe can
never go wrong, can they now? Yes, they
can. There are so many different kinds of good tea. And if you have got a gang
of good cooks- the chances that each
specializes in a different delicious variety are all the more great! Extending
this analogy to a (potential/) business leader, where the fallacy of this logic
is revealed even more: Fine, you want a leader who can mobilize their people
into delivering results of high order. But telling your potential leaders that
they-as as individual- must view
their customers, peers, colleagues and juniors in such and such manner, deal
with them with such and such sensitivity, that they must add a teaspoonful of salt, followed by 1 cube of sugar and not
more than a drop of lemon in all their attitudes/relationships– and then, and
only then, will they be considered effective in their roles – I am not
comfortable with this idea. Whether or not one is or can be successful in a
particular role is a combination of the factors of knowledge/skill and intent
of the role incumbent. For sure, a successful recipe helps the cook a great
deal in terms of building perspective, reflecting on ideas, but denying them
the opportunity to make a new something out of the best ingredients that they
bring is like shutting your doors to any new flavors in life. After all, they
say that if you want something you have never had before, you will need to do
something that has never been done before!
Not to forget that you are
telling a human being (coming with his own personal success story of 20 plus
years) that they only need to tailor their value system/world view here and
there- rip off parts and retain the rest ‘acceptable’ ones and wear the
patchwork to look not like an urchin, but a king- a leader. Even if they buy
the patchwork theory as their road to success, they will never be able to meet
expectations (yours or their own), because a patched up, tailor made soul of a
human being can never make for an inspiring leader.
Sure, there are expectations of
deliveries from each role- that cannot and MUST not be compromised. If you have
hired someone to make tea and they cannot give you a cup of tea you can use-
what is the point of having them? Or if they can make excellent coffee and you
do not need coffee, all you would want to do is tell them so, and show them the
door. No arguments around that!
Also, we definitely need a
repository of the best recipes (or a competency framework)– as a guiding
strength- for structuring the whole effort of Talent Identification,
Development and Evaluation. But I feel a strong discomfort with us getting
obsessively infatuated with our ‘recipe’ in all our training and development,
performance and potential reviews/ discussions. It is worse when the recipe is
not even a uniform result of competency framework within an organization- but
each manager (these days, often a
half-baked-people-expert by virtue of having been trained in a few psychometric
tools) has their own view of what the best ‘recipe’ is- and hence this constant
‘repair exercise’(supposedly scientific and therefore free from accusations of
bias) becomes a sore thumb between managers/management and employees- day in,
and day out.
There are a lot of factors that
go into making a great leader in any context. Blinded by our passionate
obsession with sharpening those that we mistakenly assume are non-negotiable
imperatives of a role, we must make sure we do not have an abrasive impact on
the corresponding core strengths of an individual.
As I conclude, it strikes me that
my issue here is not something that happens only in organizations- such
expectations-value misalignment and consequent dissatisfaction happens everyday
in all our personal relationships as well- we end up with rigid Ideal Type
notions of what someone should do in a role, and constantly struggle with our dissatisfaction
with the ‘gaps’: between parents and children, spouses, friends- and even with
ourselves! We are so engrossed in discovering and applying the perfect formula
for success everywhere- particularly in the others, that, we often lose sight
of the foundation of religion they (only they) have and must never lose! Never,
ever.
