Hands Matter! #PlantDiaries #PlantLife #AccidentalHRProfessional #HR #Culture #Kahnemann #BrickbyRedBrick #AsianPaints #CatchThemYoung

Caveat:This is a dated post..read at your own risk !! Pickles age gracefully..our taste buds are testimony to the same..so do memories..evokes a sense of nostalgia out of ordinary mundane affairs of life..!!

Hands Matter!

Life offers strange choices-while all of us choose as we must, sometimes some of the choices that we make leave an indelible impression on us for the rest of our lives . I call myself an accidental HR professional -sales, training, corporate HR and culminating into a Plant HR Head role..... Typically the path that very often is traversed by a HR professional starts the other way round-but that's for another day..

So one of the choices which we ( Misus says that it was I who made the same ..I vehemently disagree till date! ) made a couple of years back landed me to one of the plants of a large Indian MNC. I talked about choices right ? I also often take pride in the fact that I am an avid follower of Kahnemann ( Noble Laureate, known for his famous work, Thinking Fast , Thinking Slow et al.) and hence have always thought that I am well aware of my biases and the decisions that I take are 'sound' decisions ! Well-it wouldn't really have taken a Kahnemann to make out that I had made a mess out of this choice for sure-with wife's sabbatical not getting approved it meant that I would be a premier customer of the Indian railways and would traverse between Modi land and the Maximum city every Saturday night and would get back to Modi land every Monday morning! So much for 'rational choices' !

I have often wondered how can one describe a company & what makes a company sustain for ages-and copious amount of research is there in the same field. However the ones which I resonate most are the ones that's related to the construct of 'Culture' and the role it plays . In today's time and age with plethora of choices available to employees, 'Culture' to my mind is what really stands out as the single most important factor which can help transcend a company from Good to Great !( Good to Great-Jim Collins)

Sorry for the digression ( you see as a HR professional one gets paid to digress important issues:) -but nevertheless I will make an attempt to converge my thoughts. So one of the Mondays when I returned to Modi land and after having caught up on the previous night's sleep, I walked into the office with bleary eyes and was greeted with the following image

On first glance . it reminded me of Darwin's ,'Survival of the Fittest' ! However here was a group of young ambitious managers who were literally ready to 'roll up their sleeves' for their daily bread. The discipline and magnanimity that they showed was remarkable. Hunger unites! Adversity unites !  ( Remember the coffee tastes much better when diatribes are directed towards the omni present unreasonable Boss that all of us have worked with!) Even adversity as trivial as the mess cook not turning up provides opportunities for people to showcase their camaraderie and bonhomie...companies are built brick by brick ( Brick by Red Brick-TT Rammohan).

These are difficult and challenging times for old age companies.-companies which are fundamentally strong will tide over the difficulties of cosmetic branding & Employee Value Proposition exercises.Testing times warrant challenging & uncomplicated responses from companies-need companies to stay connected with the ground realities..need companies to create a culture of dissent-need companies to create those opportunities where the young managers would struggle yet survive-sitting on a wintry December evening I couldn't help but reflect that this Indian MNC were in 'safe hands'- 'Hands Matter' is perhaps the most pertinent title that I could think of .....

#PlantDiaries #PlantLife #AccidentalHRProfessional #HR #Culture #Kahnemann #BrickbyRedBrick #AsianPaints #AsianPaintsStory #CatchThemYoung #WatchThemGrow #AsianPaints #Learning #Story #PowerofStories