Football & Burgers!

When I teach Organization Behavior, I always dwell at some length over the Pygmalion Effect. I know I’ve talked about it earlier, but, the theory so fascinates me because it can make such a difference to a person and their lives.

When ‘Big’ Mike, in the Blind Side, asks if he can decide whether he can either choose to flip burgers or play college football, his mother (adopted) reluctantly says, yes he can. However Michael knows that she would be disappointed if he chooses to flip burgers! The theory tells us, what every one of us can be, only if……………………………only if the bar was set high enough for us. High enough to interest us to go for the goal.

Many years ago, as a young navigator, I had a deck hand, who had joined us after quitting the warships. The sailor was well informed, well read & smart. He was very good at his work and was fun to talk to. Sadly he was designated to assist the cook and ended up peeling potatoes & cleaning fish on a routine basis. As the years went by, I would see the sailor on and off and the deterioration was tragic. He had turned cynical and unfit and worse become a full blown alcoholic, beyond redemption. What if, he had had a superior officer, who could have helped him grow? An officer who would have set him peaks to scale and shown him the right path. An officer who would have asked him to stretch himself.

When youngsters leave college and get to industry, it is very important, that they get good and decent bosses. I think it is fundamentally more important than brand names and pay packages. People perform better when they are expected to perform better. It is important for mangers to understand that and realize that prophecies play themselves out, sooner than later.

An experiment was carried out at a British school into the performance of a new intake of pupils. At the start of the year, the pupils were each given a rating, ranging from “excellent prospect” to “unlikely to do well”. These were totally arbitrary ratings and did not reflect how well the pupils had previously performed. Nevertheless, these ratings were given to the teachers. At the end of the year, the experimenters compared the pupils’ performance with the ratings. Despite their real abilities, there was an astonishingly high correlation between performance and ratings. It seems that people perform as well as we expect them to.

The implication of the Pygmalion effect for leaders and managers is massive. It means that the performance of your team depends less on them than it does on you. The performance you get from people is no more or less than what you expect: which means you must always expect the best. As Goethe said, “Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.”

Food for thought & Big Mike did not flip burgers because his mama expected him to do better! She expected better!

Rise & Fall!

Many years ago, after a delicious meal, at the Saffron ( The Park Hotel, Kolkata , while strolling down the street, I chanced upon a book called the 'The Great Indian Story', being sold by a book seller on the pavement.

The book, looked fairly interesting, though by an unheard of author and I ended up buying it & carrying it back on board. The author Shashi Tharoor, wrote amazingly well. He had married current Indian politics with the Mahabharata, with characters being interposed, to produce an enthralling account of Indian politics.......

Post this I kept track of Tharoor's progress and was heartened to see him running for the UN Sec.Gen's position, which he eventually lost to Ban Ki Moon. Tharoor then surfaced as Minister of State, as part of the Congress bandwagon & a staunch ally of PM Manmohan Singh.

I think it was here that Tharoor got carried away & landed himself in one imbroglio after another before being eventually pulled down by Lalit Modi & the IPL. His life & times thus far resembles a Shakepearn tragedy, in the truest sense. A young cock, in all his splendour, with a powerful mentor, being culled down at his moment of glory with his mentor watching helplessly. What a story!

The greater tragedy is that Tharoor with all his intellectual prowess forgot that,the politics of the powerful is ruthless and relentless. He forgot that as a lateral entrant, his progress was watched with growing dismay and anger by many of his fellow politicos..........He forgot that, he did not have the experience or the chutzpah to deal with the politics in Government circles.

I believe that Tharoor was a narcissist. I use the term rather gingerly because I like the man too much.Supremely talented, very articulate, handsome...the list was endless. His strengths became his weaknesses & he paid the price for being situationally unaware and being intensely self absorbed.He was not incompetent, but was naive in a corrupt system which is a veritable snakes pit.

I think there is a lesson in Tharoor's story for all of us in the Corporate World, as well.......................that is if you value your job!

Narcissists fascinate me, so here is an aside!

Despite tending to be exhibitionistic, it is very rare to hear a narcissist brag or boast. Instead, he (or she) tends to 'drop' information in the form of an ostensibly ordinary matter-of-fact report, which appears to be intended to elicit admiration without asking for it. For example, rather than say, "I was so please to meet our CEO, Peter Smith", he will casually allude to "...lunch with Peter", in a way that induces a sense of distance and inferiority in the recipient of the information; again maintaining his sense of grandiosity.

Human's are indeed amazing!

When the chips are down!

I remember a scene from a flick where this very drunk rich guy, staggers past his parked Merc, on to his beautifully manicured lawns to piddle, even while his PA ( these days fashionably called Executive Assistant ) attempts to get him to enter his house to do the deed!

What is that, which gets us to return to our more basic instincts, when we have lost our inhibitions or social conditioning is overpowered by other factors! A case in point definitely is the sinking of two ships, over the last century. Two great marine disasters- one the famous Titanic & the other a more staid ‘Lusitania’.
While the Titanic, has been made famous by James Cameron the Lusitania is a very famous ship, because its sinking, dragged the United States into World War 1.

Research into the two tragedies has thrown up the following:
Women and children came first when the Titanic sunk but not when the Lusitania was torpedoed, a study has claimed.

The difference in behavior was due to the speed at which the two maritime disasters struck, researchers said.

The Titanic took more than two hours to sink when it hit an iceberg four days into its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, on 14 April, 1912.
But the liner Lusitania sank in 18 minutes in 1915 when it was torpedoed by a U-boat during World War One.
The passenger ship was heading for Liverpool from New York when it was sunk by the German submarine off the Irish coast with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives.
Both historic tragedies involved similar vessels, passenger populations and death tolls.

But in the case of the Titanic, it was a case of "women and children first" in the best maritime tradition, according to researchers writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

'Selfish behavior dominated'

A study of the disaster showed that females, children and people accompanying a child were more likely to survive than males, adults and passengers without children.
Of the 2,207 passengers and crew on board the ship when it set sail, all but 690 perished.
Children on the Titanic had a 14.8% higher chance of surviving than adults and a person accompanying a child was 19.6% more likely to survive than someone without a child.
Being female increased a passenger's chance of survival by more than 50%.
In contrast, fit passengers aged 16 to 35 stood the greatest chance of surviving from the Lusitania disaster.
Among the 1,949 passengers and crew on the Lusitania, there were 636 survivors.

Time pressure seems to have been key in determining who lived and who died. The study says that on the Lusitania, selfish behavior dominated and on the Titanic, social norms and social status (class) dominated, contradicting standard economics.
"One of the major implications is that people really do behave differently when they are under enormous stress. Then the animal-like aspects and survival of the fittest really come to the fore.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg the norms upheld themselves surprisingly well. Many people think that when there is a disaster, a natural hurricane or whatever, everything breaks down, there is chaos and the norms do not apply any more.
"But it's only when they are under extreme duress: there's an explosion on the ship, the torpedo hits and you are in the water, then survival of the fittest becomes active but not otherwise.

Next time you feel 'uppity', remember that at a basic level & when the chips are down, we are all in the same boat, irrespective of your education or social standing!

A sobering thought pardner!

Morale!

I've said it earlier & will say it again. Losing a job is akin to death in India & must be dealt with sensitively by HR. Layoffs are the order of the day & a fact of corporate life. No organization worth its salt is going to tolerate poor competence & sloth and will get rid of employees who do not contribute, particularly in recessionary times. However, the process requires a great deal of empathy and tact.

More than anything it requires the 'Human Touch'.

Here are afew tips:

1. Be transparent. The first thing you need to do is to be more open with your employees. Start by exposing your employees to all of your major business and financial metrics, because laying everything out on the table builds employee trust. Not only will exposing employees to this information give them some warning about downturns, but it might also spur them to come up with some approaches to solve your business problems.

2. Over-communicate. Not knowing what’s happening always breeds fear.The best approach to minimize fear and speculation is to over-communicate—saturating people with information. Keep rumour mongers at bay. They can destroy morale.

3. Focus your retention efforts. Generally, rather than low morale, the biggest negative business impact comes from increased turnover. The best retention approach begins by identifying and prioritizing the most critical segments of your employee population that are at risk of leaving (i.e., top performers and individuals in revenue-producing and mission-critical positions).

4. Educate them about the consequences. Educate your current employees so that they realize that losing a job isn’t the end of the world. Start by letting all employees know what help they will receive from the firm if they are laid off. In addition, if a significant percentage of your previously laid-off employees have successfully found jobs, make your employees aware of it.

5. When I've laid off people, I take the responsibility of informing the concerned person that it was a decision that was made by me & why it was made. I also offer to help the person find another job if he/she allows me to.I also insist that the persons department head and HR are around. The occasion is a serious one and is not to be dealt with flippantly.


It’s important to realize that having no layoffs can actually backfire, because it can cause employees to develop the expectation of permanent job security getting them to rest their oars and drift. This isn’t a good result, because a reasonable fear of business downturns actually tends to keep your employees from becoming complacent.

Breasting the tape.....

Placement season is around the corner & with news trickling in that corporates may be looking to hire again, the interview is back in business.It is the culmination of their studies for many and in my view the part where a person breasts the tape at the close of a race. You want to do this part very well.

In an imperfect world the interview seems to be the best bet for a person to land a job, so it makes sense to give it your best shot.

The following may be some pointers......

1. Dress appropriately.A business suit is appropriate. If you're a man, wear a tie.For women it is not fashion day, unless of course you are looking for a job in the fashion industry.( being shabby is not being cool and most interviewers would show you the door for being poorly dressed)

2. Shut up. Did I tell you about the time someone came and told me his life story for 45 minutes and then allowed me 10 minutes to explain the job? I think you know how that story ends.

3. Listen. The most useful skill in sales is listening — and in an interview, you're selling yourself. If you say, "I think the best computers in the world are PCs and people who use Macs have more style than substance" after the interviewer mentions his iPhone, you could be left with your opinion and no paycheck.

4. Ask questions. You can avoid the problem above by responding to the question, "Do you think we should scrap all the PCs here and buy Macs?" by saying, "That depends on lots of factors. What would your requirements be?"

5. Show interest. This could also be called "sucking up." When an interviewee doesn't ask me anything about myself, she's not just saying "I've got pride in my accomplishments and don't need to pander to you." She's also showing me that she isn't good at showing interest in other people. Which means she's going to have a hard time politically in the company. And since that's going to reflect badly on me...no job for her.

6. Do your research about the company and the people who are going to interview you.

7. Answer the question you wish they'd asked.
How many times have you left an interview thinking, "I never got a chance to tell them about my achievements.So tell them............( however if your interviewer suffers from low confidence- God help you )

8. Be clear about what the interviewer want's. Do not assume anything.


One way of acing an interview is by correctly answering a very risky question that many interviewers ask and interviewees dance around: “If we hired you, what would you do to help us do ‘X”’. X can be anything from creating a new production process to slicing customer support time in half. This is your chance to show your experience, knowledge of the company, and its competitive challenges.

Most interviewers are not looking for a specific or right answer. They are looking to see how you would approach and solve the problem or the logical procedure you would adopt in getting there or there abouts.

Doesn't it make sense? As a manager you would spend the better part of the day problem solving rather than handing out SODEXHO booklets, unless that us what you are being hired to do.

What if I asked you, how many trees would there be in Bangalore's Lal Bagh ( a huge 600 acre park )?

Take a shot..............and tell me.