Notions on Effectiveness 2021

In early March 2021, I thought of asking my fellow learners to list me their concerns in realising effectiveness in formal organizations. I posted a poll on LinkedIn to get a feel for ongoing phenomena. The poll was open for a week. 51 respondents gave their responses to the question below.

What do practicing managers miss more when being responsible for effectiveness of individuals, groups and organizations?

Skills to engage top mgmt.                                    22%

Managing Self through stress                                18%

Diagnosing Group Dynamics                                  37%

Designing Orgs for performance                            24%

Source: My poll on LinkedIn : March 2021

Practicing managers of Learning and Development, Organization Development and Human Resources specialists of various kinds responded. A handful of academics and line managers, not over 10 of them in all, made for outliers in the 51.

In sheer numbers, 19 of 51 made for a majority. They felt that Diagnosing Group Dynamics was what practicing managers miss when being responsible for effectiveness of individuals, groups and organizations. Just 9 of 51 felt that Managing Self Through Stress was their concern in such a role. Would these be the more vulnerable or honest among the respondents, even if a minority on the poll? Or would some other phenomenon be at the root of such a strange distribution of responses?

I gave myself a good two weeks to mull over the implications. In the meanwhile, I was busy with a team, sensing the context of a group of leaders who contributed to more than half a transnational organization’s sales volume and about 60% of the firm’s profits. The contemporaneity of the poll’s outcomes was of special interest to me – not for these leaders of course. What mattered to them were matters of strain and stress responding to challenges of productivity in a pandemic era. Their roles were in incessant flux. Job security in a remote employment situation, (read working from home) was of grave concern. They were obsessed with surviving the day, the week, the fortnight and the monthly reviews. Their colleagues who they thought were not bad performers could not keep their jobs in a wave of rationalizations for the firm’s global operations.

Batting at the crease may be an admired skill. Scoring while being at the crease is what differentiates a bankable player on Indian Cricket’s professional leagues. A small number of the leaders I interacted with were inclined to ride the wave in these times. They had taken to the most convenient and affordable learning avenues via the internet – keeping busy at the crease – if you will. This seemed similar to busy professionals in other client organizations I engaged. Keeping oneself employable is a matter of relevance and currency both. The simile between keeping one’s wickets and scoring from learning however, runs short of credible parallels. The variety and share of in-house platforms and extranets notwithstanding, there’s an enigma that groups pose in a virtual work environment, where the individual performer assumes to be on a team.

The perceptual threshold for interdependencies between individuals seems low, in cultures where individual achievement is prized over societal progress. Thus this escapes the attention of the busy professional. Figuring out how workgroups coordinated or interacted to provide outcomes they are tasked with seemed a distant priority or perhaps did not come up on the horizon of possibilities at work.

So here are some propositions, if you will; that are placed with plausible reasons. I attempt to lace an executive reading style with what you may describe as academic thought anchors. These few points come on the back of the pandemic induced observations I have of late.

1.      Role boundaries are shifting employees’ goalposts faster than spectator sports analogies

A senior leader of a large firm with Indian roots, sought time with me over the phone, as one among 200 who lost their jobs there. At a point of disclosure, the leader’s exit interview experience was a tell-tale sign of our times “You did not create enough political equity across the firm”, the tactless brazen boss said to the senior leader.

It is as if, the grapevine discusses batting at the cricket crease, when the decisions taken conform to the rules of five-a-side football, where the goalposts are moved across the turf leaving the specialist wicket-keeper and the generalist batsman to misperceive the size, pitch and pace of the ball itself. The players are trapped in the metaphors of paid television sports channels. Conversations at work confuses rather than enables the performer. Subscribing to costly sports channels may provide escapes to your adrenalin rushes, but may obfuscate the career journey altogether.

The language and grammar of careers are no guide to rely on, unless you thought you were reading the only consultancy report that matters on the theme. IF it’s from a touted brand, it must be something to them! Generalists, thought that multi-tasking increases chances of relevance in a role. And yet, there are generalists who differentiate themselves through political savvy or currying favour with particularly placatable bosses. Specialists invest deeply in expertise as individual contributors, at the cost of the scale-anchored span of control rewards for generalists. Without an expressed interest beyond one’s specialisms, the specialist’s role boundaries may not survive within the tight boundaries its specialty segments contain.

Comprehending the flow and ebb of informal relationships that ride across – atop and beneath task expectations seem herculean in matrix organizations. The survivor on the corporate minefield is no less secure due to the insatiable appetite of the investor. While a mathematical number will still be the atomised formula in the merciless rationale in a return-on-investment (ROI) ratio, survivors experience a helplessness all too different from the privileged decision maker up the pecking order. They are unable to see the moments that make for the transition from formal expectations on their performance management systems. Implicit attributes get reset dynamically after initial goal-setting is done. Just like the senior leader who did not account for creeping factors that would tell upon logic of manpower costs. Little did the senior leader’s boss sense that he was segmenting his role to a tight boundary that was an impostor for certainty of his own position. The unconscionable abandonment of people championship was not an issue for him, as he survived another day on his own job – rather than expanding his role to defend capable leaders on his own team.

2.      Execution has a bias for certainty in scale, narrowing scope and innovation

There is a clamour to scale for the volumes that India’s large human population represents. It is aped even in professional domains of the coaching industry, design thinking shops as a panacea for innovation or even social media techniques and tricks with bots and artificial intelligence tools. While all of that is business opportunity potentially, the temptation to imitate an ecology of fixed-asset-independent growth models has meant excessive reliance on tightly controlled execution of highly leveraged and outsourced operations. E-commerce business models typify this trend as aggregators mop up venture capital funds insatiably.

I remember a view from the erstwhile Rohinton Aga (of Thermax fame) describing how firms without core competencies for a new venture tend to get away with quasi-rents in India’s business ecosystem. The more capable firms effectively withdraw from unjust conditions for survival, when the systems in its ecosystem are incapable of defending merit. Like a shoes or white goods manufacturer pitching for a power plant in a government tender. Today, disruptor technocrats gloat on their fancy algorithmic prowess. Their underlying motive is a pressing need for certainty to tame the Indian economies of scale to their advantage. Incremental tweaks within comfortable ranges seem to posture advantages but fail to be more than of momentary nature on this scale meter.

The mythical unicorn fails to realize revenue from internal accruals. There is no guarantee from substantive capabilities that can make their investors proud. This has some direct implications for what expectations employers set for employees in their workstreams.

It promotes fears of job insecurity, and incentivises compliance for the individual employee’s survival. This numbs employees’ initiative taking, suppresses their desire for challenge and moderates the responsibility that would accompany decision making in more capitalist economies. You can then expect more risk-aversive tendencies and narrow bounds of experimentation, with a default watch-out for what could be difficulties in one’s career path. So, the sustenance required to see a challenge through to its logical conclusion is anchored largely on scale-based growth, rather than differentiation by scope of offering. On the other hand, there’s the espoused collateral of competencies for innovation and creativity or excellence standards, where the individual reward trumps group capability in performance management systems. The mismatch between the operational incrementalism and unrealistic performance expectations is missed by most. Changes in organizations are poorly designed, irrespective of the change fluency that firms like Google posture.

Witness the ecology of e-commerce start-ups. The imitative nature of firms has a Swiggy like feature on Uber Eats; a Big Basket like feature on Amazon and a Dunzo like service on Ola. The scale aspiration is tweaked in one firm. Then in sub-optimal imitation such feature-led differentiations go on to become the norm. Hence, whether for taxi rides, food delivery or home delivery of goods; the distinctiveness of brands blur as they imitate trend initiators in their blurred sectors. That aggregation is not synthesis, is a lost phenomenon in firms obsessed on scale. On the other hand; synthesis of differentiated capabilities seldom survives through inorganic acquisitions. Both the acquirer and the acquired firm may however agree that the unit of reward or incentivisation would be the individual, and not the firm as a collective whole. That’s hardly a firm-specific design parameter for sustainable governance of any contemporary firm.

3.      The interaction between the environment and the individual employee is underestimated

A marketing executive who successfully converted in person conference events into online ones during the pandemic, was marked absent for not turning up physically for work at the office. To top it all, this was the economics wing of a large media house.

The relative democratization of access via the internet has disrupted a few norms in institutions seeped in hierarchical social power. Teachers cannot afford to misspell words among informed students, parents cannot afford to remain insulated from teenage fashion trends, and universities cannot afford to design curricula that are out of line with global trends.

To imagine that climate activists, wellbeing and mental health advocates do not register on the conscience of internet savvy employers is to sound surreal. To translate the impact that an employer can have on the employee in the context of such societal trends however takes more than routine coordination within an organization. The underestimation of the role of the environment on employees comes up when employers tug at social privileges to exploit employees’ fear of unemployment.

A few contrasts will help us here. Consider large sectors representative of scale. In the retail sector, manpower supply is greater than demand. This gives employers the unfair opportunity to lower costs of operations by keeping retail sector wages low. In the construction sector, manual migrant labour is seldom given formal sector guarantees like a creche, or schooling opportunities for children of labourers, or even provident fund membership. Teachers in private schools were not given full pay despite working for more hours during the pandemic. On the other hand, however, the more media savvy white collared professional ranks employers on sites like Glassdoor. Their employers buy space in formal media channels to manage their reputations.

The short point here is this that attempts to design cultures and install values are given more credence in the belief that such effort would outdo any direct or indirect phenomenon in the organization’s environment. That this principle is disembodied from corporate governance in spite of the intense impact of the pandemic is to be noted with concern.

4.      Emotional Agility is on Test

There is a hushed idiom of the internet era (including for this article) that I summon to our attention here. People pay for entertainment, and want information for free. The reduction of effort in enquiry to bits of streaming pools of information is an abomination born of recent numbing. This is another way of stating our disembodiment from ourselves. The rank and yank survey-based rewards are external validations sought after by those who want more for their own worth within their organizations. In the garb of nobility and privacy, happiness like coaching is sold as an industry, objectified to the boot and codified in templates that leave consumers in an endless loop of undetected anxiety for misplaced wants and needs of human beings.

Impostors as these awards rob people of their inner essence, their emotional wherewithal in all its variety and thus the wholesomeness of human experience. A compulsive positivity masks even the branding of downsizing and right-sizing campaigns by unconscionable agents in line and staff functions. Even balanced scorecards do not loop back what process and learning does for the financial and customer dashboards.

While this is not peculiar to India, its manifest dysfuntionalities ravage societies the world over. Social systems such as busy business corporations have lost capacity to host the fullness of human experience, the emotional bandwidths entailed and dare I say the honesty to admit, acknowledge and act on this dimension. The default response is to cover up systemic blindness by throwing individual coaches at individual leaders, or free subscriptions to online MOOCs or curations of depersonalized content containers.

Dr Susan David’s work on emotional agility is on cue here. Comprehending blocking of emotions, brooding on them and the compulsive positivity hooks seldom get focus in the busyness of corporations. These are coming in the way of understanding Anger, Fear, Joy, Grief, Disgust, Surprise and Contempt as basic emotions that need more specific calling out. This mind blindness impoverishes fuller presence of people. As Dr Edith Eger points out in her books The Gift, the opposite of Depression is Expression. What does not get expressed gets physiologically embedded within the body.

There is a correlate to this myopia in the use of assessments at workplaces. Scales of neuroticism are deployed to label people for their abnormalities, and consequently categorize people as finite limited entities. Such stereotyping is done with no consideration for contexts present or past. Moreover, there is no ethical guideline on how the assessee can assert his or her own rights for being subject to assessments of this kind.

What then happens in the garb of employee wellness programs is anybody’s guess. Internally contradicted paradigms as these operate either self-critically or defensively, seldom able to raise the esteem from which internally embodied validations can arise. Leadership in such firms requires a vulnerability and the paradoxical choice of walking into the fear from which anxieties are lived through to more liberating human growth. Strutting around on social media is no cover for deeper emotional distress.

5.      HR is struggling between business partnership and people championship and neither is winning.

The tensions of the HR role were once templated by Dave Ulrich to a 3-legged stool. The metaphor had 3 elements to the legs of the stool – a) transactional HR, b) HR Centers of Excellence (COEs), and c) HR Business Partners (HRBP). In Ulrich’s model, HRBPs are viewed as integral and strategic members of BU leadership teams. The tensions lay between strategic and operational elements of the role. The erosion of the role’s strategic impact is an admission of the non-maintainability of the metaphor.

The profession is blowing any way the wind blows, with no canopy for employees on the one hand. On the other hand, they only wish the ‘know -how’ rather than reason the ‘know-why’; not realising that both are critical to the function.

Sacrifice the ‘know-how’ and business value is in peril. In product manufacturing or in service operations, execution is critical to standards of excellence. Knowing differentiated pay for differentiated skills helps realistic wage bill management among A, B and C pools of talent, given the diversity of skills a firm needs to engage when dealing with complexities of today’s business value chains. Know-how helps get there.

Neglect the ‘know-why’ and the patch-ups crack up the system when or where least expected. Placing the fibrous salads up in the sequence on an assembly line food counter may increase the chances that it is consumed via the visual nudge toward healthy eating. Impacts on medical bills and absenteeism tells as a lag indicator when food is served a la carte as a perk with hidden derailers. Similarly, placing talent in roles for dispositions they least enjoy, sucks the delight in performing, due to the sheer stress in having to put up with expectations distant from the employee’s passion or retention factors.

The long tail of discontent is not merely upon the direct customer of the Human Resources function. This is largely because, HR leaders succumb to wishful, ungrounded propositions from their bosses in the line organization; without the ‘know-how’ and ‘know-why’ considerations in anchoring the function. So, it is not uncommon to find bosses in business who have their alter egos in HR pander to escapist tendencies of employees, and reduce the HR function to event managers in the name of inclusion and fun at work.

On the other hand, the HR function is unable to demonstrate scenarios for business leaders from a scientific and decision analysis standpoint. In recruitment costs of poor quality or opportunity costs of hiring decisions are surely an opportunity area to demonstrate Know-How and Know-Why. When business leaders aim at headcount reductions, they miss that the generative capacity of human beings can lead to augmenting potential from the core capabilities of a firm. Else business leaders will continue to fire employees from HR’s shoulders with no care for reputation loss, disengagement indicators and the effect they have on survivor morale.

Essentially, the non-resolution of inter-role conflicts between the COE components of specialisms, transactional HR of generalists and business advisory strategic business partnership are to do with how HR devolves its operational components to line managers. To focus on the science and art of engaging employees, their workgroups and whole organizations in their ecologies of business impact, HR would do well to assert their core than run away from it in the guise of execution pressures. This would require HR leaders to embrace the wholeness of human beings at work, than to reduce themselves to statistics on a business leader’s dashboard. It is no wonder then, that business leaders wrest the initiative from HR, when the firm would take a pro-people stand in spite of the potential that the HR professional represents.

So, what about the poll? Does it have anything to do with these 5 ongoing trends?

Maybe there’s something in there that speaks to the mystery surrounding the effectiveness of individuals, groups and organizations. Two items there have to do with the strategic components of the HR professional’s stated intents. Designing organizations for effectiveness is one of them. For long, this was not even formalized as a competency area for HR professionals. Skills to engage top management come from the need to strike relationship without which strategic agenda cannot be productively pursued. These items together make for 46% of the respondent spread.

In this light, seeing the need to diagnose groups more effectively; is probably the enigma that represents the unfinished agenda between role holders in the larger organization. It is as if, this singular majority of 37% wished as the trump card in a hand of the four suits in the poll. It represents the implicit need to include several constituents in an organization on the one hand. On the other hand, it is acknowledging of an unknowing that if known, may help the integration between interdependent elements of the organization.

The transition from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism is perhaps on. HR does not need an exit strategy. Business does not need a pretence for conscience. The ongoing tension from this dynamic points us toward taking responsibility for a systemic understanding of society’s fallible stretch of the profit motive and the simultaneous overreliance in individual capability.

That’s one way to look at self-correcting minorities who acknowledge felt stress due to forces they experience in their context. After all, As Dr Susan David of Harvard puts it – we cannot heal that which we do not feel. When we are in touch with our human essence we begin to choose when to grit and when to quit, without giving up responsibility for ourselves.