Management: Are we Free from it Ever?

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) is often one of the first few names we are exposed to as students and practitioners of management. He opined ‘To manage is to forecast, to organize, to command, and to control.’ 

What’s striking is that a closer scrutiny of our everyday lives reveals that this conception of management is not only limited to our working lives but actually extends to the fabric of our everyday life. The ‘hegemony of management’ overpowers almost everything that we do in our day to day lives.  Right from the time we wake up till the time we go to bed and for some of us even our sleep time and thoughts within are not our own but are governed by the ‘management speak’.   Following headings from some articles published in the Men’s Health magazine provide us some insight on what I am referring to here:

• How to have the Sexiest, Most Relaxing and Most Productive Hour of Your Life 
•  Trusted Advice On How to Secure Your Future and Avoid Costly Mistakes 
• How to Deliver in the bedroom 
• Life Management Principle: What Gets Measured gets Managed

The liberal splattering of management jargons signifies the widespread understanding of these ideas and the seepage of managerial discourse in our everyday life.

Furthermore, books like ‘The Checklist Manifesto- How to Get Things Right’ or ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ have made it to the best sellers list and have sold millions of copies underlining the supposed superiority and  popular uptake of managerial recipes to achieve success in everyday life.

In fact for most of us even the early decisions on what hobbies to pursue or what sports clubs to participate in are governed by the future jobs we seek to chase. So, mere participation is not adequate but we have to demonstrate leadership skills and strategizing ability to have adequate talking points in place for the job interviews we will face 5-10 years down the line.

The managerial pursuit of ‘excellence’ extends to our personal life where we are expected to establish our personal goals, create strategies for achieving them, put in place plans that will get us there, set up rigorous execution schedules and adequate review mechanisms to keep the achievements on track. So, right from weight loss to getting married anything and everything must be subjected to this managerial approach to achieving success.

Now, if there is this widespread seepage of managerial discourse and excellence is seen as an outcome of following a managerial approach to planning and achievement, then why is it that we often see management and by extension our working lives as constraining our ‘true’ selves? We have images of suit wearing corporate honchos staring forlornly at the sea wanting to break free from the monotony of their working life and seize the waves as a surfer or the successful lawyer who actually wanted to be a musician and still has guitars stacked somewhere in the closet. This dichotomy of ‘management’ as a constraint and a hegemonic force and at the same time a tool to achieve excellence in everyday life makes me wonder if we are caught in this web of our making where we are constituted by and are constitutive of ‘management’ as a way of thinking and being. What are your views- are we ‘free’ from management ever?       

Monday Morning Blues to Monday Morning Sunshine: Is Changing Your Approach to Work an Answer?

‘You wake up in the morning and look out of the window, blurry eyed but hopeful, ready to welcome a new day, take on the challenges that it has to throw at you, wanting to stand up and be counted’.

This description would have probably resonated most with you when you were young and clueless. The ruthless world of working people had not depleted your enthusiasm and the cynical side of your brain had probably not developed. But as you grow up, things start changing, the pressure to pay the EMI’s, meet the sales targets and please your boss, takes away all the charm and promise that everyday used to hold. The pall of gloom of a Monday morning starts clouding your Sunday evening and eventually you go to bed cribbing and complaining about beginning of another week at the office.

I am sure not every one of us feels this way and there are many of us out there who simply love their jobs and cannot wait for the week to begin. But why is it that such lucky people are so far and between. Why is it that the hope and promise of youth is replaced by cynicism and distrust as we step in to our workplace? Where we spend close to 80% of awake hours every day.  Just imagine, you spend more than 40 hours each week, 160+ hours every month at your workplace and most of it is spent harboring negative emotions. Thinking and complaining about things that never go right, colleagues who are trying to pull you down and a boss who does not appreciate you.

What if there was a way to reverse this trend and start everything over? What is it that you would want to change? Think about the things that are in your control, don’t try and enlist stuff that you practically cannot do anything about, stuff like corporate policies or your ‘not so nice’ boss.  Things that were in your control, like changing the way you approach your work, prioritizing stuff in your personal life, treating everyone the way you would like to be treated etc. Basically simple things which all of us were taught when we were young but we somehow forgot all of those, the basic ingredients of a living a good life- simple values like- respect, integrity, and honesty.

While these are the basic ingredients that I think could help transform my work life, do share your thoughts on the basic ingredients that you think could help make your work life better.  Help you in changing the Monday morning blues to Monday morning sunshine…

Global Standards for HR: Are We Missing Something?

Standards may be defined as a set of rules. Rules that determine how certain people would behave in certain situations. Rules and predictability go hand in hand and predict the behavior of individuals in given situations. They also act as a means of classifying people into categories- as those who follow certain standards and those who don’t.  Recently I read this piece on tlnt.com on approval by ISO to create Global HR Standards. This acceptance got me thinking on how feasible it will be for ISO or any other such body to create universally applicable standards for a domain as socially constructed as Human Resources (HR) and what it would mean for organizations adopting these standards.

Much like the Fair Trade standards governing the procurement of coffee or the fair labor practices standards, most standards are created by voluntary bodies and are free for adoption or rejection by the larger audience for which it has been designed.  Also, standards can be created by anyone and it’s the adoption of it that determines its success. In effect there could be numerous available standards whose success would be determined by the willingness of organizations to adopt them.

Unlike the organizational rules which are backed by a hierarchical authority to ensure their adoption, standards have to rely on other means of adoption.  A standardizing authority may use scientific evidence as a means to highlight how the standard created by it is backed by science and hence warrants an adoption. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) will be developing standards for global HR and how effective they will be in convincing organizations on the scientific validity of their measures beyond statistical correlations would be interesting to see.

Additionally, a standardizing agent may try and create an elite identity around the followers of its standards and thus encourage active membership.  Most organizations are forever attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the hope of attracting the brightest and the best talent. While following a global standard and benchmarking of performance may please the analytical side but I have my reservations on the kind of usefulness that such global standards could offer in terms of actual improvements on the ground. Unless this is actually backed by active nurturing by corporates which would mean active sharing of best practices and in turn a perceived threat to the pursuit of uniqueness that I earlier referred to.

Furthermore, standardizers may actually involve certain organizations in the design stage and the power equations at the design stage could determine the final shape of the standards as and when they emerge. This could in effect mean standards would mirror the practices of a few, with the expectation of making them applicable for a larger audience. This could actually undermine the creativity in practices and may actually encourage firms to look more like the powerful elite who created the standard in the first place.

I am not against a globally accepted measure on the cost of hiring or the heads to account for while calculating it, but my point here is to highlight how in our effort to standardize we may be turning a blind eye to certain realities which could have a bearing on how our organizations may look like in future.  My two cents on this would be for organizations to assess their existing systems, account for their own realities, outline their future outlook and then determine the relevance of these standards in their own context. Our organizations are loaded with numbers and standards to follow and it may be wise to take an informed call before deciding to add to this long list of numbers we track.    

Look Back & Move Forward

Source: www.scientificamerican.com

I know it’s a bit late in the year but it’s never too late to make a fresh start so a very Happy New Year to all of you! Hope this greeting helps you restart the year and shake off any negativity that a not so pleasant start (I hope not) would have brought with it.

Starting off is something that can be very exciting and scary at the same time. Exciting because you are embarking on something new, and, scary because you never know what this new challenge might throw at you or the lurking feeling ‘if I am good enough for this’. Well at least these were the two predominant emotions that were clouding my thoughts when I started this blog on 29^th November 2009. Over the past 14 months a lot has changed in terms of the layout, content and of course my philosophical and professional stand.

When I started this blog I was focused on using this as a platform to spew on the world the ‘wisdom’ I had gained while working as a consultant, advising some of the biggest and most reputed Indian business houses with a global footprint. Over the course of the past 3-4 months that I have been back in school (Warwick Business School, UK) for my second masters I have started questioning a lot of the things that I wrote and suggested to my clients. This is not to say that I was recommending actions that I did not believe in or I suggested action plans to my clients that were not right. Everything that I wrote or suggested my clients was a testimony of my understanding of the given context. All the advice that I gave or the programs that I designed were taking into account the ‘world view’ that I had at that time.  

Reflexivity is a great tool, it helps you take a look from the outside and critique your own work. That’s exactly how I feel at the moment, taking a step outside the boundary of my self-constructed world and looking inside to assess, evaluate and critique my own actions. In fact how interesting would it be if our hard working, extremely busy and under pressure executives could step outside their little constructions and peep in to see how it all adds up.  I understand that the pressures are relentless and expectations abound but is it too late to Assess, Recognize and Reflect!  Unlike my other posts where I try to outline a problem and attempt to underline certain prescriptive actions as a solution, in this post I would urge all my readers to adopt a reflexive view of any situation or action in their personal or professional life and unwrap the strands of  behaviours  which govern it. You are bound to unravel certain thoughts, ideas or actions which are embedded in your behavior and are playing a part under the surface to propel you to act in certain ways. And I am sure this renewed understanding of self would go a long way in helping you make more informed if not better decisions in future.

I hope you found this rant useful in some way and I look forward to hearing your views as always.

Stay blessed!