Manjunatha K
What is an organization? What is an organizational culture? Who is responsible for the organizational culture? … Building, infrastructure, facilities,… are not seen as an organization. Employees see an organization only through their manager. A newly joined member builds perception about the organization through his manager’s actions. The Manager shoulders huge responsibility of building right culture in the organization.
A person works for an organization giving his time only because of the trust that organization will take care of his career. Employees work hard to meet the meaning for their position. They do not see the pay check, or compare with the colleagues while working hard or meeting a business schedule. Whatever may be the inequalities, when it comes to the team results, every employee works hard to meet it. This is only because employees trust their manager that he takes care of their career.
It is common that members move across teams very often to meet the business demands. Manager will not get enough time to understand fully to assess a member before the next assessment cycle. As market demands are very high!
It is unfortunate that managers too become busy to spend minimum time with the person who works for him to understand his capabilities and to coach him. They claim to be too busy with the business, which is running because of their own people working hard. It is very easy to quote the feedback during the assessment cycle rather than attempting to learn through their senses and take time off to coach.
When a member joins his team, manager must put an effort to judge by himself rather than taking feedback from the previous leader. It is human tendency that negative things always attracts and builds up curiosity and is easy to build up a wrong perception about a person and see him through that lens. If one sees the world through yellow goggles, everything looks yellow. Naturally humans find what they are looking for than what is there. Once manager develops a wrong perception about a member, always tries to look for the wrong things in him/her. As human brain is intelligent enough to link every activity to what he is looking for and generates feeling about a person based on what he perceives. Manager must understand that humans cannot hide their feeling/ perception about a person when he comes in communication contact. However professional one is and intelligent to put it across, the perceived behavior comes out in the body language; fortunately or unfortunately >50% of communication happens through body language.
As Edward de bono says, “Outside technical areas, perception is far more important than logic. But we have persisted in focusing on logic.” Manager must be very careful in developing a perception about the members. It is very easy and is the tendency of the brain to see others through someone else eyes. The behavior of every person with every other person is different. Behavior of a person cannot be explained but only be experienced. Humans are not machines where one can describe the behavior.
No one can give a feedback about the other member in this human world. Manager must understand that everyone must spend effort to learn by themselves rather than looking a person through others lenses, which most of the times give a tarnished image. If he cannot learn through his own experiences it is the incapability of the leader, which makes a huge impact on the employees who will be giving their time and effort by trusting such leaders.
Manager must understand that he is accountable for the people who work for the team result than the result itself. All his actions and attentions must be towards building a great team, nourish, and develop a result oriented culture. It is his responsibility to take care about every member in the team so that the team can give result.
Biased thinking and behavior of the manager creates a major misconception, which in turn will have a great impact on the trust level of the team members. Conspiracies among the members will creep in and unnecessary competition destroys the concept of a perfectly coordinated team.
