To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup The people who work for you are the lifeline of your business. It doesn’t matter which industry you are, it’s the same. There is a very sacred relationship: employer-employee one. It has to be positive for both of them to be successful. It is a very sad state of affairs. This relationship deteriorates as the business stabilizes or scales to the next level. Might be that they get comfortable for their own good. They got distracted by other priority tasks. Whatever the reason, the worst thing they can do is to come across like organisations that don’t care. This is where the rubber meets the road, the employee decides on whether to stay or move on. The moment the employee exercises his veto power, the caring reappears magically. This does not come without a warning. There are several indications which come up. Let me list the top 4 and the most important one:
The list is endless; I accept, but these symptoms are easy to detect and stop the system from getting rot. Why should we do that? Isn’t it too expensive? In today’s cutthroat business world, Organisations do not care about you. They cannot take care of you. All the employee motivation and employee engagements are only on paper and theory. No one has time to put in place, even the first few lines of that policy. Let me take a very simple case, does the bank care about you. NO, they only want your money. They don’t care about you, it’s the plain truth. Neither does your hospital or your company cab service. Does your car dealer really care about you when they ping you for a service reminder? I am surprised that people get amazed when they discover this. Why this amazement? It’s because they are people, simple human beings. What does that mean, they can care. People care for people, but I do not think organisations can. It’s only when demands and regulations (Red-tape bureaucracies) get in the way caring fades. So do I mean to say that Organisations cannot care? No, I definitely say they can care. Then how? If the organisation can fill in caring people at sensitive posts. Simple, fill them in with people and get corporate out of the way. The caring culture will germinate and sustain for a long time. There is a simple way to get into this habit. When you free up your employee to behave like people, caring culture germinates. As opposed to looking at them as pure profit maximising machines. If done so, caring can’t help but grow. So let us put ourselves in the corporate shoes and think for a moment. In the short run, not caring saves money and brings profits. Don’t bother improving the facilities, let the cubicles become smaller. Don’t worry about those small customers, etc. It may seem to work, but only for a short time. They may be busy. Hiring people and improving infrastructure costs money, effort and time (Triple constraints) So what is my conclusion? In the long term, caring pays multifold by itself. Those organizations which put extra efforts, go the extra mile are always rewarded. Their reward is Sustainability and Loyalty. Finally, not to mention that caring makes us more humane, it’s worth it.
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Life improves slowly but goes wrong very fast and only Catastrophe is clearly visible - Edward Teller (American Physicist) The above quote really tells us the whole story - only the catastrophes are clearly visible to us. Before we even start, I think we need to clearly understand the catastrophe theory and then look at the possible connections. According to the scientific dictionary - Catastrophes are bifurcations between different equilibria, or fixed point attractors. Due to their restricted nature, catastrophes can be classified based on how many control parameters are being simultaneously varied. What does it mean in plain English? Catastrophe theory, in mathematics, a set of methods used to study and classify the ways in which a system can undergo sudden large changes in behaviour as one or more of the variables that control it are changed continuously. So what is the importance of this concept? A simple example is the change in shape of an arched bridge as the load on it is gradually increased. The bridge deforms in a relatively uniform manner until the load reaches a critical value, at which point the shape of the bridge changes suddenly—it collapses. This example is for a discontinuous process. While in a continuous process such as heating the gas, the process is very smooth. The temperature change and the rate of change are smooth and predictable since it is continuous. (Calculus and differential calculus solves these) So there was a need to predict changes in non-continuous process, which is what a catastrophe theory does. In the 1960s a French mathematician named René Thom (1923- ) developed a mathematical tool known as catastrophe theory. Thom used his theory to study and make predictions of processes involving sudden abrupt changes. OK, now what is the relationship between startups and this concept? The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. - Michael Porter (American academic) This famous host - Monty Hall who in fact ruled the primetime network with "Let's Make a Deal" in the 60s and ran for more than 30 years has left some serious lessons that matter for every entrepreneur or strategist in the corporate world. Who would have thought that a simple game show could inspire an entire group of statisticians & mathematicians with PhDs to run massive experiments to uncover the truth. The Monty Hall problem confused people for decades (it even confuses me now) So let me explain what is this and then look at the confusing part. Monty Hall asks you to choose one of three closed doors. One of the doors hides a prize and the other two doors have no prize( or goats). You state out loud which door you pick, but you don’t open it right away. Monty opens one of the other two doors which you did not pick, and there is no prize behind it. At this moment, there are two closed doors, one of which you picked. The prize is behind one of the closed doors, but you don’t know which one. Monty asks you, “Do you want to switch doors?” The majority of people assume that both closed doors are equally like to have the prize. It appears like the door you chose has a 50/50 chance. Because there is no perceived reason to change, most stick with their initial choice. Now comes the Monty Hall problem or the time to shatter this illusion with the truth! If you switch doors, you double your probability of winning! (Statistically proven) What!? (Even I was in a shock the first time I heard it) The correct solution to the little game is for the contestant to always switch doors to the remaining door (more on that in a second). The problem is that the solution is entirely counter intuitive even for an experienced educated person. This is because the people see the original option as an entirely independent event even when subsequent revelations are on offer to them. The main argument is that Initially I had 1 out 3 as the probability and now it has become 1 out of 2 after one door was opened. And if you also thought the same, then you are wrong!!! I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is in not trying. - Jeff Bezos As the financial year comes to a close, we all start to evaluate what you have achieved during the last year. You assess your achievements, KPI, career and the teams who worked for you and very soon you come to the conclusion: IT SUCKS. At the start of the year it was full of promise and now at the fag end of it all looks wasted and fatigue. You start to hate your job. Does this sound very much like you? As an executive and career coach, I have listened to hundreds of such stories over a 100 times. Passionate hard-working folks who mostly are thwarted by the management when they come to me, I give them the universal solution - "Be your own boss" The moment when they hear this advice, the backtracking starts. When I say to them, why not put the money in your idea, work it out for some time and then test the results. The backtracking excuses starts to flow:
So what does entrepreneur mean? It means choosing one solution which you think works, you start to work much harder than when you were as an employee, get paid very less initially and have exponential stress levels with unforeseen uncertainties and very less family time. Trust me, it’s very scary and if you think not - then you are really stupid. The next logical question is - if it’s so scary why do it? The main reason is that it earns something which even money can't buy - FREEDOM. Freedom to have no one to blame, freedom to choose your time, freedom to plot your own course, freedom to change the world for the better. But there is something that comes along with FREEDOM as a free package. |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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