• You are here:
• Home
•  / 
• Gyan Gurus
•  / 
• Leadership
•  / 
• Story

Advertisement

Gyan Gurus - Leadership

Leadership – avoiding modern indentured servitude  (View Comments)

Vibhuti Jha is the President for the Human Potential Project, specialists in establishing Performance Based Culture in work place by instituting practices of commitment based management. He is also a faculty member in McDaniel College, Baltimore , in their graduate program "Leadership in Global Enterprise".

Posted On Monday, April 26, 2010 at 05:02:24 PM

In my last few write ups I have deliberately opted to share with you a simple thought – Leadership is not about giving orders , crafting “big” ideas , lofty goals,  unreachable promises and glorified positions. It is all about doing things right however small they might seem in the beginning – preventing waste , making and fulfilling commitments, designing the future and putting up the architecture for supporting that design. I am a believer in the thought process that “great people did not become great by doing great things but by doing those small things right”. All this and more by ensuring that the team he leads achieves its full human potential.

Today, let us address yet another issue of dealing with the “modern indentured servitude”. We live in a world of sharp contrasts. We have more choices, greater opportunities, more wealth and prosperity than at any other point in human history, regardless of the fact as to how much wealth has disappeared in the recent past due to the infamous financial meltdown. Yet at the same time people are more depressed, dissatisfied and despondent than at any other time as well despite the promise of economic well being especially in the Indian context. A key contributor to this malaise is the contemporary view that work consists fundamentally of an endless series of ‘things to do’ and that while these things may have commercial value for the enterprise , they produce little or no sense of value for ‘me’. As a result of the combined effects of the wastes, I listed in my previous write up; we have inadvertently created a kind of ‘modern indentured servitude’. We sell ourselves into service in exchange for money and have only fleeting ‘real’ lives after or outside of work.

In this modern malaise , many people appear as victims trapped by their needs to just make a living, prepare for retirement, support families and deal with the vagaries of that modern life. We ignore , diminish or distort the possible ways that work can bring meaning to people’s lives and can take care of features of life and the world that people really care about.  To have our work be seen as nothing more than modern feudal toil , saps all our strength and turns people’s working lives from a source of inspiration and contribution in life to a gray daily hiatus in a futile search for meaning of what it could have been.

Those who occupy senior management leadership roles may have trouble seeing or identifying with this phenomenon and we would caution against the paralysis that it could happen only in other organizations and not their own! The executive floors can get largely immune from this and at the same time be unconsciously responsible for it as they are the ones who design or tolerate the practices, processes, structures, moods and measures that create it.

One of the symptoms of this situation is the new mood of ‘overwhelm’ – a creation of our times – simply stated it means ‘there is too much to do, too little time and too many things pulling at me. I don’t have enough energy for this and it is never going to stop’! Overwhelm and the resignation and panic that it generates are great wastes and very effective and degenerative killers of productivity and profitability. There is no enterprise that can survive for long with an organisational culture that produces modern indentured servitude. This is clearly a vast source of waste and no amount of Lean, Six Sigma, Engagement programs or any other fads of miracle programs will ever attend to them. We are not naïve dreamers who think the transition from this situation is going to happen either on its own or overnight. It won’t come as a result of good intentions or a series of well written memos or a new set of offerings at the corporate training buffet menu! We also believe that many will not welcome the change but we cannot deny that we need to reinvent ourselves and our companies to be competitive in the new world , if India needs to be home to many world class companies in addition to those few that are already there.  

Most Searched Tags

Advertisement

Thought Pool

Here's your chance to be our 'Student Journalist of the Month', a contest for aspiring students to pool in their ideas and views on burning issues in the Human Resource space. It's simple! Post your article here and you could be the winner.

Topics of the month

• The need for CSR
• Role of EQ in a successful career
  

Terms & Conditions