LEADING WITH CARE

By Abhinav Kumar, CEO

In the corporate world today, we are working in a hyper environment. Targets, deadlines, and performance have become the three buzzwords that our corporate life seems to revolve around. Meetings, conferences, conclaves and even personal interaction with bosses have only one central theme – performance, performance and performance. Competition has unleashed its own unintended consequences. Infatuation with performance has created widespread anxiety in managers. Without performance, no doubt, no organization can survive, let alone succeed. But high performance culture without compassion and care can be dysfunctional as it can lead to alienation, withdrawal or resignation. We can never hope to get the very best from others unless we have feelings for others’ pains, agony and distress, with a caring and helping attitude in their difficult times. Even mere empathizing has the potential to soothe and comfort those in distress.

Many studies have revealed that most people leave the organization due to the uncaring and unhelpful attitude of their immediate bosses. Compassion in highly result-driven leaders and managers is today not only desirable, but is necessary for sustaining a high performance culture. It can no more be discretionary. If the top leadership shows compassion, it tends to flow down the hierarchy. How do we build compassion into the DNA of our leadership? How do we identify result-driven but uncompassionate rising stars and mentor them? Employee caring policies would need to be well-woven into the corporate HR programs.

If people are the primary drivers for the success of a business, it is only fair to expect that this resource is carefully nurtured through both intellectual development and caring.

A caring and compassionate leader is someone who communicates openly, is flexible, is not afraid to show emotions and leads by example. The question is: Do our leadership grooming strategies focus on these or they excessively focus merely on intellectual development?

High focus on performance is but natural in the times of transformation, particularly in crisis-laden organizations. We expect people to walk an extra mile, spend longer working hours and demonstrate an adaptable behavior. When we are on an organizational transformation journey, we also need to fire on all cylinders and that too, many a times simultaneously. This is bound to cause anxiety, tension and even fatigue.

CEOs have to move around the organization, meet employees at all levels to get the first-hand knowledge as to how our employees feel on the ground, see how existing HR machinery is working or faltering, how employee’s problems and grievances are resolved and what are the bottle necks if any. Leaders who connect with people’s problem proactively, are able to bond emotionally and invariably win their confidence. This is fundamental to seek higher performance with greater commitment and reduced anxieties. In modern corporations, CEO–employee connect is far more important to create better alignment of employees with the organization. My own experience is that a high performance culture can be sustained only in a caring and compassion driven organization. It is like a balm that restores a sense of balance in the organization.

We needed to create a performance driven organization with accountability built at every level. Moving from a complacent culture to a performance culture creates its own tensions and an employee-caring culture can absorb these tensions and eventually help employees to transcend to high performance culture. In a hierarchy oriented service organization, with vast geographically dispersed branch network, mobilization of human effort has been the central theme of our transformational agenda. While developing high performance culture, we also introduced employee-care programs that provided confidence to the employees across the country that they could expect to get solutions to their problems within 24/48 hours.