From technology steward to people manager

DD Mishra, managing consultant, CIOSpecialist

We often hear good lectures in our corporate life on how to manage human capital. I will be extremely happy when I see them sometimes in practice. Most often the market situations and not inherent value system demonstrates the HR practices. Even if the value system adopts good practices, different people at different positions are guided by different beliefs and drive their own practices.

Many of us grew up living with technology. When people interact too much with technology during the initial phase, the possibility is that they may lack the human side. As we grow into people management roles, we have to unlearn and relearn a lot of things and in the process sometimes commit expensive mistakes. It is even more important in IT and some sectors as the dependency on human capital is very high. Some of my views towards a better work culture and a productive team are:-

Judgment: I read the story of a famous poet, when one day his most sincere and trusted servant came late on a very eventful day. The poet was so furious about his servant's lack of sensitivity towards his presence on time on that day that he scolded him badly for his behavior. Servant apologized repeatedly. When things cooled down, Poet enquired why the servant was late.

The servant replied, "I am coming straight from my son's funeral as he died last night. I was grieving and lost control of time".

In my experience, I have seen a lot of time I have jumped my guns to conclude as well but situation has proven me at times that I was wrong in judging the person with available inputs. When it comes to humans, inputs behave entirely different then when interact with machines. Sometimes my observations have been 180 degree opposite to the perception. I believe we should not jump our guns in judging people fast on a particular instance or event rather collect more facts and data around the same and try to understand things over a longer period of time and more holistically.

Trust: I have always been in a dilemma whether to keep or release control. I have done both and tried to see what happens. While the concept may vary for different assignments, on an overall basis, I have seen releasing control and empowering your juniors always help to build a better ecosystem. Trust is extremely important for engagement and you may fail few times in trusting people but ultimately it builds a winning and highly productive team. Be ready to own up mistakes and give credit to your team.

To me if you can run the show without your presence, you have achieved it. While some organizations will consider you as redundant if that happens, there are a few who will reward you for this achievement. In my view, organizations should promote such constructive redundancy and succession planning.

Fear: At times I see people are scared of being challenged by subordinates. In my view, if my subordinate demonstrates the capability of replacing me, it is a pleasure that endeavors have paid off. I know it is not easy but one must be ready to accept the fact that competent ones should be rewarded and ego is the biggest barrier. You gain from the ecosystem when you give. As you grow, you become more of a teacher or a coach who can guide people to find their way to the top.

Integrity: In private sector, you may have to command respect. One of the factors people look is your truthfulness and integrity. While many of us think appraisal is a tool of commanding respect, in technology and some other sectors where options are many, it may not work well. Even if it works, it does more damage than good. I have seen people leaving good organizations for taking opportunity to come and work for someone whom they liked. In my observation, people work for their bosses and leave them as well.

Even in the same organization, people would look for bosses whom they are comfortable with. If you are able to command respect, you can get commitment otherwise what you get is compliance. The ability to mentor and coach is linked to individual honesty and integrity. By commanding respect, one can avoid becoming part of SMS jokes or corridor gossips or grapevine talks.

Compassion: How often you have asked your team about their personal lives? We often claim that our personal and professional lives are different and we live in two worlds but my experience is that there is one life and one world. Very rarely the personal life of an individual will not impact the professional life. Quite often I discussed the life outside office one has and this has worked well in predicting the behavior patterns and connecting with the individual better.

Sometimes the demonstrated behavior, which you think is incorrect or inconsistent, has link with the other factors outside organization. Most often I had to deal with the constraints outside the organization to correct something in professional life and it works mostly. When colleagues become friends as well, you have winning team.

Passion: Humans are not robots and they are hired for a purpose in the organization. But to make them more productive, one must know about some of the secrets which do not find a place in the CV or job role. Aligning people's passion to their work will give amazing results. If someone has a habit of finding mistakes, why not think of making him an auditor? If someone writes lengthy emails, it demonstrates flair for writing and articulating his views and could be someone you are looking for as an editor of your department's weekly newsletter!

Failures: Quite often we tend to punish failures. Though my views can go against the popular belief, we can punish failures with rewards of a different opportunity for success. Very less people fail because of attitude and most because of circumstances. Sometime I see people who could have done well with sales has landed in technology and realized their skills are different.

They need rehabilitation and not punishment to realize dreams if that are possible. Most people do not fail; it is the situation and environment which brings failure. You need to change the situation and the same people will do wonderful job and if they can't, they will find another one.

In conclusion, the experiences could be different as man management is an art and not science and also available options vary from organization to organization. While all that is true, organizations will have to re-invent how they are managing their human capital. The larger is the organization; more important is engagement of its people for long term survival. I seldom see organizations recovering their position and market leadership once they deviate from people centric values for temporary gains. I believe in the thought process that businesses are ecosystem and organizations are communities.

Different people with different capabilities and attitude bring diversity which is important for our business and we must appreciate this and use it to our advantage.