Can we stop change? Surely not. However, can we bravely face change? Yes, we can.
Faith in ourselves, courage and accepting that we don’t know everything and don’t have all the solutions can start a process of introspection and reflection. This can show us alternatives and help us chart a new way.
Companies such as Apple, Titan, Asian Paints, HDFC Bank and Reliance, and social organisations such as Ramakrishna Mission and Society of Jesus have done just that and grown over a sustainable period of 30 years. They have experimented, found new solutions, and become stronger and wiser. Innovation is the key to survival.
The customer has more choices than ever before. The organisations that went southward were stuck in the past and continued to do what they did even when everything around them had changed.
I have been studying organisation transformation for over 30 years and have facilitated change in many firms. Some of the major reasons for being unable to change are old organisational structures, mindsets and unwillingness to adapt. Most industrial firms still follow the scientific management model of Frederick Taylor that aims to fix problems, believing that once the issues are solved, the organisation will go back to a state of equilibrium and start growing again.
Managers are also trained to fix problems. A good manager is a person adept at fixing problems fast and one whose strength is compliance to desired norms, and not necessarily a thought leader.
In many organisations, at seniormost levels, we have highly competent and compliant problem solvers, but they are unable to make the company grow. Tata Motors for a long time had this problem, which led to the birth of an inferior product called Nano. No one had the courage to tell the top management that it was a bad idea. Luckily a new MD arrived. He changed the culture and fixed the issue. The company is now becoming a big player in the EV space.
Many companies still follow an organisation structure that is pyramidal, horizontally divided into levels of hierarchy, and vertically in terms of functions such as marketing and sales, production, etc. It is not just about businesses. The once-largest political party in the nation is today finding it difficult to win elections. It is stuck in the high-command culture and is unable to examine itself. The command and control model works in the Armed Forces, and not in industries and social organisations any more.
As per Taylor’s model, a manager is selected for a function and put at a level. In other words, the person fits a box. While fitting someone in a box has brought in great specialisation and established a hierarchy and a chain of command, it has reduced the consciousness level of a person.
Most types of performance appraisal, be it management by objectives (MBO), 360-degree feedback or balanced scorecard, are designed to measure what a person in a box was expected to achieve, not what transformation he/she has brought.
The second problem lies in the leadership. Most organisations are not training their leaders (department/ unit/ plant heads) to become transformational. Research shows that more than 50% of employees leave companies because of bad behaviour of the leaders. Most managers occupying top levels are not really leaders. They only occupy a leadership position.
Gallup research demonstrates that globally, only 20% of employees of most companies are engaged and many are actively disengaged. If our leaders were so great, why would such a phenomenon take place? Think!
American author John Maxwell says in his book The 360° Leader that managers at middle and senior levels need to be trained in five levels of leadership to evolve as transformational bosses. Robert Greenleaf, a corporate manager, in his books says the leader must decide to serve people, more than lead. The person should have an altruistic disposition and those working under him/ her must grow in wisdom, maturity, knowledge, etc.
Our training programme in transformational leadership—using Maxwell’s and Greenleaf’s theories and teaching participatory methods to involve people over the years with diverse industries in the BFSI, IT and manufacturing sectors—has demonstrated this and once managers are trained, they become effective transformational and holistic leaders. We have found retention, performance and productivity of teams improve.
The third area of organisation transformation is how to go about improving engagement of people. Research in organisation development demonstrates that instead of finding out what is going wrong in the company, the firm should use “appreciative inquiry” and “design thinking” as a method to find out what is going right with the internal and external customers, and then build on the strengths.
We have realised that finding what is going wrong makes the company go into a grief cycle. Old-fashioned employee satisfaction and engagement surveys do exactly that and this does more harm than any good to your organisation. You are paying for your demise.
People should be engaged to discover, dream together, design questions and chalk out their own destiny. This is a very powerful method of engagement and it creates a community of seekers rearing to transform the company.
Ashoke K Maitra
Founder, Sri Ramakrishna International Institute of Management (SRIIOM)
(ashoke.maitra@gmail.com)