Management Lessons from Poet Uncles (part three)

 

As I said in the last blog post on the subject, one must spend the initial months in spreading a message of love and empathy while checking out and modifying the HR ethos of the organization. For example, as the General Manger of Integral Coach Factory (ICF), I began my tenure by adopting some simple leadership principles, facilitating openness, discarding all meanly protocol and hierarchical straitjackets, gradual dismantling of the stifling bureaucratic systems, building a culture of trust and empathy, welcoming ideation from all levels, stressing importance of rectitude and probity, recognizing those who worked well with purpose and meaning while coming down hard on those who did not. And many other measures in a similar mould.

But all this with a caveat. I did say earlier that a leader must contrive, fabricate and improvise to treat everyone with love. But since your love is contrived, you must continue to have control over it. At times, famous words of great poets make you think and you realize that the opposite of what a character says should be your guiding light.

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Helena’s unrelenting love for Demetrius says, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is wing’d Cupid blind”. Caution! A leader must look more with the eyes.

Your love for all cannot be allowed to become a weakness. You have to come down heavily on the incorrigible one, who would usually form less than 2% of the workforce. The shirkers, the uncouth, the undisciplined, the absentees and the proxy-users, the sex and gender based offenders. These are the bad elements which are too far gone in some vice or disposition to be reformed. There is usually no use giving them merely some harsh punishment; they have to sacked, or if they volunteer, sent on premature retirement. The unwritten message to suchlike, therefore, should be loud and clear that they have no place in the organization. The process of disciplinary action has to be monitored by the leader personally and no dilly-dallying should be tolerated. In my leadership roles, I always practiced it. In senior positions, I took an unconventional step of declaring that for delinquent staff which were proven to be guilty, the power not to sack them was withdrawn from every officer and if there was a deviant case deserving some mercy, it must come to me, the leader, for a decision.

One senior Personnel officer at ICF told me that propriety demanded that the DA (Disciplinary Authority) should be free from pressures of unwritten directives from top and that they(DAs) should exercise their judgement independently. I told him that his sense of natural justice was good in law but unfortunately, I was not some esteemed justice at law; I was an administrator and given my way of working, this was the right way to go. I remember an instance when the Chief Mechanical Engineer (CME) of ICF, himself a hard taskmaster and a disciplinarian, walked into my room rather bemused. He told me he wished that a case be dealt with leniently but the concerned Office Superintendent from Personnel branch told him, “Sir, if you do that, nothing will happen to you. But the GM would chew me alive.” The case, of course, was settled in a manner that the CME wished but it showed that the missive to all concerned was unequivocal.

We also used an existing provision for summary dismissal of an employee (commonly called 14(II) in exceptional cases of indiscipline, harassment of women employees and gender-based disrespect after satisfying ourselves that an enquiry in the case would be impractical. We used this provision to dismiss four employees during my tenure at ICF. My instructions would be for the Chief Personnel Officer to satisfy himself that any complaint of this nature be verified through informal means and if an employee appeared to have erred, he should be sacked the same day; no demeaning enquiries and indignity of reliving the harrowing experience of sex-based impropriety for any woman employee. It worked. The message to a handful of such delinquents was clear that they must desist or lose their jobs. As for the offences, during my tenure at ICF, some 165 employees were sacked, following the proper Discipline and Appeal Rules.

Sympathy and mercy, I always said, should succeed, and not precede, strong action.

The great Hindi poet, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, has given us these powerful lines:

Kshama shobhti us bhujang ko jiske paas  garal ho

uska  kya  jo dant-heen   vishheen  vineet  saral  ho

(Forgiveness is quite becoming of a venomous serpent, no one cares for a toothless, poison-less, simple and gentle snake.)

A leader should show mercy in deserving cases but for this benevolence to be respected, first the resolve and toughness of the administration must be clearly demonstrated. Demonstrate your fangs first before migrating to compassion. Some of those sacked were taken back after thorough review by the Chief Personnel Officer, who acted as a single window. He would review cases on recommendation of senior officers, or through his own interactions, but it became clear to everyone that the administration would not hesitate to crack the whip on mischief-makers. The underlying idea was simple, start invariably with love but, “Don't waste your love on somebody, who doesn't value it.”(Juliet, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare).

You need capable people in your team to turn things around. The Chief Personnel Officer, mild-mannered but assertive, was the fulcrum in all our endeavours towards exploiting our human resources to their full potential. He was going to be the mainstay when we decided that the time was ripe for ICF to adopt a universal biometric attendance system in ICF. Biometrics for attendance for all factory workers? Simple, yet complicated, both at once.

So what could be so complicated about a system which should have been in place to begin with? All the workshops, factories and even maintenance depots/sheds of IR work on what is a so-called contract system between the shop floor management and workers. The work content for a day is informally, and at times formally in incentive-based units, fixed, and workers tend to complete the work in less than the duty hours, and then go home. So the units in IR have workers on duty from as low as three hours to six hours per day; a unit with assembly-line type working would have them working for six hours but in others it would be usually three to five hours. ICF was also not an exception and although not as bad as certain units in Punjab and Bengal, it was an open secret that workers worked for about four to five hours every day. When IR started introducing biometrics for attendance, they limited it to office and other desk staff who did not have the naissance value to stop core work. Feeble attempts to introduce biometrics for shop floor workers became a victim of status quoism, driven by convenience of comfort zone and timidity. I was always bitterly critical of our forefathers in IR who allowed the system to degenerate to this level. And now, here I was, the GM of ICF and now left with no alibi to point fingers at others while doing nothing to rectify this stark dereliction. I had to act, remembering Portia in Merchant of Venice, “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”

Yes, I had to act. But I was conscious, like Falstaff in Henry IV, that the better part of valour was discretion, and like the fool in twelfth Night, “Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.” This was not something you tackle by bulldozing; all those who made such attempts in the past at large workshops or factories of IR cut a sorry figure with nothing except commotion to show for in the end. We had to do it but gradually, without inviting a precipitous situation which would tend to derail the larger objectives and an avoidable drop in production.

The first job was to convince the key members of the team, and soon they were, that it was now or never. The more docile office and desk staff were already in the biometric regime and they were happy that it would be made universal. The unions would, however, come up with some objection or the other. Meanwhile, some unconventional build-up was being tried out; a large group of scouts and guides would gather at the factory main gate with placards saying, “Dear parent, Why do you ask us to go to school in time when you yourself do not report to work in time?” It did not help in getting the biometrics going, for sure, but certainly helped in setting the agenda loud and clear.

I learnt informally that there were nearly two hundred employees who never turned up for work and their attendance was marked through proxy. They had some business or other engagements and their job at ICF was merely like a sinecure. They would settle with the lower-level supervisors and colleagues to give up their incentive earnings, give out some occasional goodies and simply absent themselves with impunity. Invaluable information! I waited for the right time which came soon. I met the union representatives and they asked me, quite disarmingly, “1) Why go for this system when there is no stress on this from the Board? 2) Why only at ICF when no other unit is planning for it? 3) With increasing production and good industrial relation prevailing in ICF, why introduce a coercive system?” And so on. I did not want to get off on the wrong foot with the unions after so much ground work had been done. I told the union netas that our workers should have the pride of being the first unit on IR to implement it. The discussions meandered along the expected lines till I threw in the clincher,

“1)We would have some flexibility in the entry time to keep it in line with the current practice.

2) We would do it for recording presence and not insist on out attendance.

3) We would inform the Board of our initiative and ask them to introduce it in at least two other large units on IR and once they do so, we would go for a comprehensive system including out attendance.”

I then asked them if they knew of the nearly two hundred fellows who never turned up for work. As they huffed and hawed, I threw poet Kabir at them and explained the meaning:

Bakri paati khat hai,  taki  kheenchi khal

Je nar bakri khat hain, tinka kaun hawal

(The poor goat eats leaves and we end up skinning it but the men who eat the goat itself, what should you do to them?) 

Remember Dale Carnegie saying, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion”. I was going to use emotion and logic together. What I conveyed was that biometrics was not for all the sincere leaf-eaters who turned up to work, albeit a bit late, but for those who did not come at all, those who ate the goat. And that my aim was to get rid of these goat-eating fellows. This seemed to work as the opposition was reduced to requests for postponement and not implementation, apparently to buy time. “Of thinking too precisely on th' event, a thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward”, says Hamlet during his familiar bouts of indecision, in this case, just before a battle. He thinks he had been thinking too much; he thinks that thinking is only one part wise to three parts cowardly. At times, managers need not think too much and there is nothing wrong in following your gut feeling. One would soon learn whether it worked or not; if it did not, one can abandon his actions based on less thinking and more raw common sense. The team was with me. I was aware of the goodwill I had due to the some unprecedented measures to make staff happy. This was the time to consign the three-quarter coward to background. I decided to go ahead.

There were some hiccups. Some  senior supervisors found it infra dig, to record attendance along with the staff; they said that since they, in any case, worked extra hours, they should be exempted from this ignominy. I thought about it, called two senior principal chief officers, got ourselves photographed registering our attendance and put banners all across the factories with these photos and the legend, “The biometrics system is for one and all, do not forget to register your attendance”.

Biometrics for all, GM downwards

That did it. The system has been in place since. We awaited response from the Board against our offer but as expected, we did not receive a reply. After all, the man in question in the Board was a typical babu, busy sending meaningless missives and issuing purposeless transfer orders, never rising beyond his level of incompetence.

Summarizing, I must add that what inspired me was a couplet of Ghalib. How? If you hand exemplary punishment to the offenders, there should be a reward for those who sit, but do not cross, the thin line between good and bad behaviour. A good 20% of the employees are self-motivated eager beavers anyway and do not need any goading. Those on the fence may not get a reward for doing the right thing but punishment to the delinquents should act as a deterrent for this majority.

Nā-karda gunāhoñ kī bhī hasrat kī mile daad

yā  rab  agar  in karda  gunāhoñ  kī  sazā hai 

(If punishments are due for the sins committed, I wish there were plaudits for the sins I did not commit)

(to be continued with some more gems from the poet uncles…)