This week I was speaking to Navin Kumar, who now works in London. During the conversation, one of the things that he mentioned, was the stark contrast in the way people work in teams in India compared to those in London. Navin now is part of and leads a team of three people. He was telling me how very professional the staff in his team were, which required the least amount of supervision. Though we did not speak about this, but I am assuming that they have a clear distinction between their personal and professional lives, and hence the amount of distractions at work are less.
After this conversation, in my mind, I was trying to juxtapose the same to an Indian work environment, which is very different. The workplace in India is, what I would like to call, a 'high maintenance' workplace. There are far more people issues to resolve than real business issues. As a manager, the people management component of your job seems to take up a considerable amount of time. Loads of inter-personal issues to resolve; a complex and irrational web of cold wars to contend with. Why is this the case?
I think there are many reasons for it. The first, but not a convincing, reason for this is the average age of the workforce in India. With the demographic advantage of having such a large population of young working people, comes the disadvantage of majority of this population being immature. Some are literally out of college / graduate school and the workplace to them, is probably just another place to hang out with friends. One tends to think and behave in extremes at a younger age, which is never good for human relationships. The maturity to understand relationships from a win-win perspective is largely absent.
This bring us to the second reason, which is competition. A large part of such immature behaviour is driven by competition. The sheer amount of population that India has and the density of it in urban centres is driving people hard to compete; compete at any cost, like there is no tomorrow. There are no age limits for competing, but it is very obvious that the younger age of the workforce makes it even more difficult as when one is young one tends to compete very hard, just to be able to make a mark as soon as possible.
The third and probably the weirdest reason is fear! The fear of a perceived threat from peers and others around us. We are finding it hard to trust each other. However, if we dig deeper, we find that most of our fears are simply irrational. Finding a couple of spare minutes to be with yourself and reflecting on your own personal fears might show you just that – that they are grounded not in reality, but in some perceived threat that really doesn’t exist.
The fourth and the last one might be the strange belief in everyone that they are the centre of the universe, around which everything rotates! The human ego! Having an ego is well and good, but the problem is,that everyone believes the same and has an ego.
So, what can be done to about this? How can we direct such large amounts of raw energy in the right direction without any distractions? One of the solutions could be to break the hierarchy of the organisation and make everyone an individual contributor! Make them work alone. However, this will not work as humans are social animals and prefer to argue and fight with people than bear the loneliness that comes along with living and working alone. I believe what can help is talking to each other, including open conversations about issues. This is the only way you can dissipate the emotional constipation that work relationships sometimes tend to create. The ability and intent to empathise with others will also help. It is very important to cultivate this quality in one and all.
Finally, it is important to accept the fact that any group of people working with each other will have it's own varieties of misunderstandings, misconceptions, perceptions and the resultant bickering and fights. It is however necessary to ensure that they do not impact the common goal of the group and the personal doesn't get mixed up with the professional, more so for us Indians, because we are by nature very expressive about their emotions.
Take care.
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