HDFC Bank - the person is not to blame. It is their system.

W Edwards Deming wisely said, "A bad system will beat a good person every time."

And that is what organisations who have struggles similar to HDFC Bank have to digest.

Suspending or firing the manager, who was caught abusing his team on video, gives further insight into the culture of the organisation. That is not the answer. It is easier to make this manager a scapegoat than to own accountability for the lack of training and the lack of culture. Who's going to answer for that?

Mistakes are to be met with counselling and training, not with firing. Manager training is one of the most ignored areas in industry. Anirban Bhattacharya wrote about it in a heartfelt, revealing post this week. In the 10 years that I spent inside organisations as a manager, I must have received only about 10 days of manager development training; but even those ten days were useful. THAT was a big reason why I moved into training - I wanted to improve organisations by giving managers what I had learnt the hard, long way. I soon realised the problem - the people who need the training and the people who decide to invest in it are two different sets! Decision-taking is too far removed from where the action is, as my friend Geoff Marlow routinely points out. I sometimes refer to it as "Ivory Tower Leadership".

It's not hard to understand that manager training is KEY to:

• building a thriving organisation, that
• does not damage employee wellbeing, and
• doesn't end up with egg on its face.

It's not just me who is saying this. Dr. Deming offered 14 key principles that senior management must implement to significantly improve the effectiveness of a business or organization. Point 6 of 14 is "Institute Training on the Job".

Despite the likes of Deming and other experts urging for more manager training, why is it not happening? I believe an erroneous understanding of management is at play.

For the last many years, there has been a trend to promote people not for their ability to manage people but for their ability to "deliver outcomes". I remember hearing for ten years that "you are not there to be friends with the team; your are there to get work done from them". This toxic understanding of "management" has now grown into a pandemic.

Ideas such as "single-minded focus" were pushed on managers instead of training them on seeing the whole picture, developing a systemic understanding, perspective-taking and empathy. So today we have managers (and of course their leaders) who are highly skilled at narrowly focusing on delivering results. And where is this single-minded focus driven from? Could it be the 50 basis points fluctuation in share price that the owner and the board monitor?

Speaking of which, I am surprised that this incident did not affect the share price of the company. Imagine if it was an oil spill or the cockroach contamination at Cadbury's! Does this show us how much investors and modern society value humans? Does it suggest that what happened inside the organisation is only a reflection of what happens in society? That kali yuga thrives in organisations too?

If our culture worships "results" or "profits" above everything else, do psychological safety, wellness, health or good culture stand a chance? Studies on "the dark side of incentives" have told us that when profit is the only objective, there is bound to be misdemeanour. Akshat Shrivastava recently pointed out that "Infinite growth is just another name for infinite greed". It is the enemy of sustainability and the exact opposite of what the world needs.

Clearly a lot is wrong in the corporate world today. And it needs fixing. But it won't get fixed automatically. Here are three things I foresee that might make it happen:

1. There is growing focus on Environment, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) compliance in the West and Indian organisations that do business with Western MNC's are also being expected to be ESG compliant.

2. With the passage of the 2013 POSH Act to address sexual harassment in organisations, POSH training became mandatory. We need an act similar to that - a Prevention of Employee Abuse Act.

3. ISO45003 has taken some steps in this direction and while it is currently a guidance standard, I am hoping it quickly becomes a compliance standard.

These three moves give me hope that Boards in organisations will start to make substantial investments in manager and culture development. Here's hoping it happens soon. ??