The Hindu Business Line : Board rage

Many of you are surely familiar with the scene. It is the end of the quarter, and there is a day-long meeting to review the performance and forecast the future. Preparations have an air similar to that of schoolboys brushing up before exam, except this time it is an open book exam – and the issue is whether one can face all the unexpected further questions that are sparked off by the answers to the regular ones.

Almost inevitably, the presentation starts with explanations, however weak, contrived or just plain irrelevant, for failure to reach the sales and profit numbers. If difficulties in the market place, or tougher competition for some of the company’s brands, are trotted out as the reason, some one mutters: “well that’s what we have you there for!” or even more pointedly, “if all we had to sell were products that had a ready and willing customer, we wouldn’t need so many highly-paid sales people or a whole department, would we?”.

This time the barb goes home. The failure has been personalised, to be soon converted into a failure of personality and character or simply incompetence. And the blame has been laid at the door of the senior-most marketing manager or the person in the room most directly responsible for sales results.

Board rage is the term I suggest (on the analogy of road rage) for the flare-up of tempers across the board room table, which reduces some meetings to monologues and tirades and others to a mutual trading of charges or a blame game.

Sometimes, particularly if the top management at the Director level is not represented in the room, someone makes a weak attempt at collegial humour, and tries to laugh the whole thing off. If not, there are strained silences, and shifting glances, as the audience gets ready for a proper dressing down. On the rare occasion when a junior person who is set upon by a few decides to defend himself, the conversation, if it can be called that, becomes more strident. Believe me; I have personal experience, in my salad days, of telling someone several levels above me in the organisation that he was being unfair in his judgement of my behaviour. “Well, if you don’t like it, you can lump it!” was the answer given in a rising and angry tone that actually said – how dare you even open your mouth!

Enough said, I think. One does not want to rake up painful memories; almost every reader who has endured the rigours of organisational life, would have personal evidence of such embarrassing scenes. And yet, in the same companies no doubt there are people who are most concerned about the health of the people who arrange classes at company expense on stress management, anger management, meditation, team-building off-site days, training in EQ and what have you. Life is both rough and smooth, would be their explanations.

Yet, in my view, this two-pronged and paradoxical action is avoidable. Much of the stress comes from such board rage, which in turn comes from an excessive emphasis on pinning down accountability and an equal anxiety to shake it off and preferably pass on the blame to someone else.

The reward-punishment mechanism is still based on a crude behaviourist philosophy of human behaviour, even after all the modernisation of human resources management in theory. Thus, sales blames marketing, both blame the manufacturing plant and all of them roundly curse the supplier who did not supply some part on time – as if that particular shoe-nail was the reason the battle was lost. And so the game goes on like a round robin with the one who sometimes has a major share (the topmost person who took the vital decisions on pricing or similar issues) going unmentioned — by tacit, and common, consent.

Why does anger play such a part in organisational life? To answer this, one must explore the real force behind anger – usually it is fear in some form: fear of consequences, inability to face the loss of face, fearing the loss of self-image or worse still, how one would appear to the other members of the Board, the CEO, or the shareholders. The only change is in the level of the meeting and the occasion – regular internal review, Board meeting or the Company’s General Meeting — but the sentiment is the same. Everyone wants to get away unscathed, reputation more or less intact, and sometimes, in the case of the junior level sales force, or other functionaries, their jobs intact.

One wonders, however, whether such anger does anyone any good. Perhaps the person who lets off steam and is at the top of the heap goes home feeling relieved. Yet, even that is doubtful. There is usually much mute gnashing of teeth, sulking, and extreme defensiveness. All of these tend to be counter-productive and seem to motivate no one. Yet, getting angry, flying into a rage or showing one’s displeasure in public is seen almost as a symbol of corporate manliness.

The worship of success and expectation of continued high hit rates and the boost given to the ones who have no negative variances against their name in the review all lead to totally unrealistic hopes. With the inevitable come down when the graph turns southwards, as it sometimes must.

Organisational life must take the damages wrought by board rage into account before it becomes too rooted in the character of the company. Often, the tone is set by the head of the company and every other department head begins even unconsciously, to imitate his manner and ways.

( sr.chander@gmail.com)

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