My failures, learning and hope for organisational performance

My father was an amazing man. The most incredible ability of his was that of constant search, learning and transformation. I had a ringside view as he went from an anxious owner of a startup to a central hands on leader of a company to becoming a person promoting the ideas around self management and enabling hundreds of amazing team members emerge.

Life got me into the organisation at the time when he had begun experimenting with ideas on self management, reduction of hierarchy and enabling responsibility across the company. He was influenced by Recardo Semler’s ideas and also those of Taichi Ohno. However, he didnt just go ahead and copy/ paste from those. He dug deep. He understood that we had strong cultural values and were located in the hindi heartland of India. He felt strongly about the innate abilities of people and began to utilise Indian Ethos in management through Mr Suresh Pandit and Guru Narayana who would utilise and build on Indian spirituality and also folklore that we had all heard over time from our grandmothers. Mr Suresh Pandit and my father actually built a complete constitution, structure and mechanism to shift the management practices towards becoming consultative and team based. They called in Sangh Pranali (System of Togetherness). This was further enhanced through Guru Narayana who infused spirit into the same.

I joined full time as a 24 year old in 1999 and was completely aligned with the ideas as equanimity and connection felt natural to me. However, by the time I joined, my father had taken a back seat and the leaders who were to take up the mantle were not deeply aligned with the values and systems that were being built. I struggled for a couple of years to basically keep afloat in a system that had been overrun by various challenges. I also realise now that my depth of understanding and taking the direction forward was limited and the structures went into their own confused state of comfort. They have more or less stayed there since. We are definitely not an autocratic, hierarchical set up but we have also not managed to take the legacy and ideas of our founder and inspiration forward towards becoming a robust mechanism.

We have to get into the next stage of building as we look to towards a significant impact in the world of business through creation of a purpose driven organisation that works towards leaving the planet cleaner through work in the compostable packaging segment. We are looking to take an organisation from the hinterlands of India towards being a global leader. This will need some serious thought and work.

We will need to think deeply about the kind of systems that we need to build and have a clear pathway in place.

Each of us is conditioned by their cultural backgrounds and social leanings. The Japanese are naturally conscientious, Germans are methodological, Americans are disruptive, Israelis challenge status quo, Singaporeans are disciplined... what do we bring to the table as Indians? As I see, we have to lean on our deep heritage and build from there. We have to make our work Yoga (connection), we have to connect with our search for meaning, we need to build with ideas of community and work towards our deep rooted alignment with Karma (duty/ responsibility).

I have been deeply influenced by Fredric Laloux’s work on Reinventing Organisation which is a deeply spiritual work and also recently by the Netflix story No Rules Rules apart from various spiritual texts from Gita to Dhammapad and now exploration of Upnishads. The key for us is to be able to adapt ideas and then be able to align them in the cultural context to build our own management ethos or ‘The Yash Way’.

We will definitely have to follow a step wise approach as we build our journey towards excellence.

1. Build a culture of performance

Performance can only be build through transparency and objectivity. We have been working on Yash Samriddhi Path (Yash Path to Abundance) where each role is clearly defined and then best practices worked out. Each of us needs to know where we stand and what we need to do in order reach further towards excellence in our role. This whole mechanism will need to be strengthened and built upon as the very foundation for the organisation.

We have been making our mechanism of Lakshya Patra (Goal Sheet) stronger and it now aligns with organisation and team goals. It is a self check mechanism that enables us to ascertain our performance relatively objectively. I am sure the mechanism will evolve further as we go along.

2) Build Talent Density

Our culture of community also tends to breed mediocrity and sociological changes in the past 50-60 years have not helped either. We wish to accommodate. We dont want to upset anyone. We believe in being a family. We want to help people provide for their families. All of that is possible but the first step for survival will remain having the right people on board and perhaps also ‘unboarding’ of people who may not suite the expected roles and performance. We have begun to define roles better. We need to have clear person profiles that suit the role. We need to make sure that we are able to build towards absolute role expectations and then provide each member adequate training and resources to be able to carry out the responsibilities.

A hierarchical society background poses challenges in regards to decision making. That needs to be overcome with clear methodologies.

We are setting up a strong mechanism for Leadership Development where there are standardised Yash Skills that each leader needs to build upon and also technical competence requirements which are more individualistic.

We have also begun integrating and merging our vocational training institute to build towards a strong base for training across the organisation. It is inspiring to see how Tata’s have built their administrative services and this will be our effort in the same direction. We will look to ensure that all hiring either happens through our Skills Institute or lateral hiring goes through grounding training designed for better induction at the institute.

3) Build absolute clarity of organisational structure and roles

My nature of vacillation and lack of complete clarity has meant too many changes for our teams. This leads to enormous upheaval and anxiety. We need to build our structures clearly and then enable the systems to strengthen over time.

We have a strong foundation of Sangh’s (Self Management Teams). These are autonomous bodies and need to be further nurtured towards clarity and delivery. We are working towards building stronger mechanisms within the teams for having clarity in terms of roles and responsibilities. 

We need to amalgamate the ideas that were built originally with the need of the organisation in its present state and then emerge with a clear pattern for what works. We also have to look at social patterns and what enables people to work towards their best.

4) Work towards excellence in communication and sharing

Over communication is better than lesser and we have definitely built towards the same.

We start our day at the Prarthana Sthal (Place of Prayer) and share in details our performance from the day gone by. This enables each member to be aware of what is happening and be part of the common journey we are on. Each team moves from the assembly towards their work place and interacts for Amrit Arjan (Drawing our the Elixir of life) which is a set of statistical practices inspired and adapted by the Japanese practices of Total Productivity Maintenance (TPM). Each member is trained for the purpose and the cross functional teams work continuously towards better shop floor and productivity practices.

Each member of the organisation is trained in Vittya Jagran (Financial Awakening), inspired originally by The Great Game of Business, as it is important for all of us to understand that each action (or inaction) from us has a financial impact on the joint effort.

There are various other methods of sharing that are built into the organisation functioning. Yash Maitri (Yash Friendship) is a monthly newsletter. We have a strong social media presence with Facebook and WhatsApp heavily utilised. There are also a large amount of events and celebrations that are part of the functioning of the organisation.

5) Lead towards Oneness

We have to build an organisation that aligns individual goals with that of the group only then can we find a natural alignment and move from prescribed work towards a natural sense of karmic building.

Each team member in the organisation is a shareholder of the company that makes each of us a part owner. We are also aligned to sharing of profits through monthly team performance incentives and yearly annual individual bonuses based on performance of both the organisation and the individual. All these financial incentives are built to be transparent and easily calculated.

We do have to move from the idea of being a family towards being a team where we are governed by our performance that leads to the performance of our teams and then the organisation. We have to understand that it is important to build our abilities constantly, work cohesively as teams and also look to build strong bench strength as that is the only way teams are able to excel.

There is a long way to go for us on this journey and our time is limited.

We search for the right guides to enable the next stage of building that is rooted strongly in our ethos and builds from there towards systemic excellence.