The Hindu Business Line : Know the organisation you head

It has long been taken as an inviolate axiom that Governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed. While CEOs will readily accept this as citizens, they will find it odd if they are asked to apply it to themselves vis-À-vis the organisations they head.

Just as in the case of Governments in relation to a body politic, it behoves the CEOs and the Board of Directors too to take into account the views and wishes of the employees of their organisations in effecting improvements and making future plans. The know-all manner of running organisations by the persons at the top without eliciting the frank and honest opinion of colleagues on future courses of action could be said to have been behind the collapse or the tottering of a good proportion of the companies in recent years.

This way of working is the direct consequence of most CEOs and Board Directors being appointed to their positions, as if from on high, without any prior training on the manner of exercising leadership and with little awareness of the revolutionary changes in the practices and techniques with respect to human relations, conflict resolution, negotiating techniques, technological advances, project implementation, risk management and environmental protection.

The assumption that only employees of subordinate ranks need training, refresher and reorientation courses is wrong. The CEOs and Board Directors need more of all of it most of all. Lacking such sensitisation, they consider it to be their sole prerogative to lay down the law, and demand others’ unquestioned submission.

Harmful side-effects

The most difficult task that the top management is up against is taking everyone in the organisation along, and align his/her thinking and working exactly to its vision and goals.

A vital precondition for this is for the CEO and the Board to function with the knowledge and consent of the employees whom they must learn to look upon as valuable associates.

In very many organisations, their field of vision or circle of consultations hardly goes beyond the second or, at the most, third, level immediately next to them. This is fraught with several harmful side-effects.

The second and third levels — the Excecutive Directors, Vice-Presidents or General Managers — are also in the same rut (or boat?) as the first, and are unlikely to appraise situations with a fresh mind, leave alone being capable of thinking beyond the dot. Also, at the higher reaches, it becomes a mutual admiration society, prone to indulging in back-scratching and trading palatable opinions. Noblesse oblige is the ruling principle. Not for them to blurt out, “Emperor has no clothes”.

That is why a CEO must constantly reach out to the outermost employee and seek out his version of what is going on in the organisation. There are three ways of doing this.

First is what has already come to be known as ‘walkabout’. The CEO and the Directors should make it a habit to make themselves accessible to the employees by visiting their work-places or shop floors, and encourage them to come up with their suggestions and complaints. An aide should take notes of what is being said, so that the CEO, immediately on return to his well-furnished and cavernous office, makes sure of timely follow-up action and intimates the employees concerned. The second is to gather the employees in periodical meetings, give them a performance report and invite their opinions on the future plans.

The third is what the CEO of IBM did some years ago: Ask all the thousands of employees worldwide to e-mail him their feedback, and reward and implement the best suggestions. In fact, it should be an annual feature, instead of being a one-time affair.

B. S. RAGHAVAN