The Rise of ‘Compassion’ in the Corporate World

Once upon a time there were two managers in the organization – Autocrat and Compassion

Autocrat was born during the industrial revolution and had grown up with the mindset that all employees are lazy, inefficient, unproductive, disorderly and untrustworthy. Often, Autocrat was heard saying “If you delegate the work to them, it would never be done”. Hence, Autocrat would want to be involved in all the activities, small decisions of the organization.

Autocrat never expected people to use their mind, because he believed they had none! “You are not paid to think”, he would snap. “You are paid to follow”.

For the Autocrat, achieving the end result was everything. He believed, people were a means of achieving the end result. If the end result was not achieved, the person had not put in any effort. The person was a non-starter, a failure, a disaster! Autocrat would not entertain any reason for failure, be it internal or external. No reason was good enough. No matter if the market had crashed, no matter if the corporate bureaucracy posed infinite hurdles, no matter if other departments did not collaborate enough to get the job done. ‘No result’ implied ‘no effort’. And ‘no effort’ meant ‘no reward’.

Autocrat’s natural style to accomplishing any task (especially an important task, a crisis, a challenge or any tough situation) was to take charge, bark orders at employees and ensure they followed his orders. The greater the challenge, the more oppressive Autocrat became and demanded compliance to his orders, leaving no room for individual thought and creativity. “Just do as I say and confirm to me that you have done it”, he would tell his people.

Autocrat’s popularity grew rapidly as he rose through the ranks to take charge of critical operations. Autocrat was always in demand for his ruthless, action-oriented style of generating profits in the short-term. This involved firing 5-10% of the employees each year on the basis of poor performance. What Autocrat failed to notice were shortcomings in his own leadership style that contributed to the employees’ poor performance. But since he believed ‘No Result = No Effort = No Rewards” he was pretty much merciless in asking people to go.

Once in a while Autocrat got intelligent people to work in his team. People who were more competent than Autocrat himself, people who would think through the situation and take sound decisions for the organization’s benefit, in the long term. Autocrat’s response to such people was to break their confidence by constantly identifying mistakes, to highlight the short-term losses while downplay long-term gains and to shout at them in front of others, to castigate, criticize and condemn them.

Autocrat has made himself indispensable for the organization, never allowed anyone else to settle down below him and do good job.

Compassion on the other hand was relatively unknown till about recently. No one is clear when he was born or how he was raised, but Compassion had been around working somewhere under the shadow of Autocrat for years. Some attribute the existence (& rise) of Compassion as the ‘antithesis’ to Autocrat.

Little did anyone know that Compassion had a strong mass following among its employees. People who had worked for Compassion found it impossible to work with others, especially Autocrat.

Compassion operated at a high level of trust. He believed that every employee wanted to do ‘good work’, to achieve something. Compassion hypothesised that no one ever got up the morning with a feeling of “today I will not achieve anything significant at work, and in fact I will prevent others from achieving something significant in their work”. Compassion strongly believed while everyone wanted to achieve something, it was the environment, the culture, the work systems and processes that prevented employees from doing ‘good work’ and if you can provide the right environment / culture at the work place, employees could take significantly important decisions with little or no supervision.

Compassion defined a new paradigm to view & evaluate performance. Absolute performance was passé. Performance was seen in the context of the environment in which the employee operated. Quality of effort was given equal if not more weightage. High quality effort in a tough environment, could qualify for excellent performance. This, however, required Compassion to provide timely and accurate feedback to employees; to coach and guide the team members; to identify the challenges the team members were facing & to remove obstacles from their path.

Autocrat always looked down upon Compassion. He believed Compassion was weak and would never rise to the tough demands of the business environment. “Tough business situations need tough decisions and Compassion was not matured enough to take those tough decisions”, Autocrat would say openly. Autocrat also believed, Compassion was way too focussed on employee feelings and emotions while there was no place for these in business.

When Compassion was asked to respond to Autocrat’s statement, he could only smile at Autocrat’s short-sightedness. Compassion believed that managing employee emotions was a critical aspect of a manager’s role. “If you can elicit positive emotions from an employee at the workplace, you need not worry about productivity, quality, efficiency or effectiveness. Neither would you have to worry about taking tough decisions. The employees would take those decisions on their own, with little or no supervision” responded Compassion. “When an employee is in distress and not feeling positive, it is easy for the manager to ignore the employee’s emotions. On the other hand, it calls for a lot of maturity and strength from the manager to say – I understand how you feel and I will help you overcome it”.

There are two secret ingredients in my recipe for success as a manager, says Compassion. Long term thinking and Trust. You need the courage to forego short term benefits for long term sustained results. You also need the maturity to trust the judgment of your team member. And for both you need to communicate more, share as much information with your team as you have, remove obstacles from their path, provide them access to resources they would not have in the normal course of their work and coach / guide them constantly.

Compassion’s rise in the corporate world has been slow and laborious but he is highly visible today. He has created his own identity and his own importance and is challenging the foundations on which Autocrat has thrived for centuries.