The Hindu Business Line : Changing people: Myth and reality

It is a truism of a manager’s life that we are all called upon to pass judgements on our fellow workers in one context or another. As you go up the corporate ladder, you will often get questions like this: We are thinking of posting young Sundar to another region, and let him try his hand at institutional sales, which he has never handled. What do you think of the idea? You think he has it in him?”

The first time in your career you hear this, you might be tempted to wonder why you are suddenly asked this question, when you have no official role either as a very senior person evaluating Sundar, who could well be just a couple of years junior to you – and when you have so far had nothing to do with career planning or people related decisions. What do you do? Do you give a quick reply, a considered one, avoid an answer or try to parry the question? All these are ploys that many a young manager resorts to, in his confusion. The truth is that there may well be nothing to be alarmed about in such a question. Even the most seasoned of line managers have a habit of looking for confirmation when they are about to take a crucial decision.

The need for reassurance is peculiarly persistent even after years of experience. And one thing is certain when your opinion is being sought – it is simultaneously data for making a fuller assessment of two people – the one whose opinion is being asked for, and the other person. After all, making good and fairly quick appraisals of people, is an important ability in any manager. More than that the ability to sum up the impressions and take a position where necessary is also a good test.

Making judgements

Yet one of the common errors we make in such cases is to start with sweeping generalities, “He tends to be a little too optimistic with his forecasts. He could be a little short tempered with customers” and so on. I have learnt to make it a habit, although not as soon as I was taught to do so, to try and consciously find some way of putting the points in perspective. Start with a positive aspect before you go on to say something that might be construed as negative. Everyone is bound to have something worthwhile and even worth admiring. I have found this to be so true in so many situations in life – no man is so insignificant that I cannot learn something from him; and no man is so flawless as to justify uncritical adulation.

One of my Directors also used to tell me: Don’t judge everyone by your own standards of behaviour, however excellent though it might be. This is golden advice. We all tend to see the rest of the world through the lenses of our own experience, and therefore prejudices. We must as the senior of mine said so pithily, pray to God for the strength to know the strengths and weaknesses of people working with you, make the best of the good points, and learn to ignore the others or make the drawbacks irrelevant.

In general, it is futile to try and make people behave very differently from what they have been schooled to do for years. People do not really change all that dramatically, so it is perhaps easier on your own nerves, and certainly less painful to the organisation if everyone was a bit more tolerant of individual foibles – of course not at the cost of sacrificing any discipline in the processes. As the old adage had it, happiness lies in knowing how to change what I can, to endure what I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference. And yet, management literature overflows with techniques and methods prescribed for organisational change.

Introducing change

In today’s Indian context, almost every organisation puts change and implementation of company-wide radical change somewhere at the top of the agenda. Yet short of getting rid of some critical members of the group or making them see the light and change themselves in double quick time, there really is no safe and certain way to introduce change. Many eager young managers find this hard to accept, because it smacks of a kind of fatalism or an admission of failure on their part. Still, every wise manager and leader eventually concedes (as did Jawaharlal Nehru himself at the end of life) that any large entity, such as Indian society in his case, can simply not be rushed into change. This is a bitter pill to swallow for the macho manager, but the sooner we take it the better.

If you think this is unacceptable go into a room sit quietly by yourself and list down three really major changes that you have been able to bring about in your own basic behaviour or responses to the world.

Try it, and you will see any change has to begin with ourselves and at the best of times it is hugely challenging.

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