Importance of Voice and Dignity in creating a Successful team

Last week, I wrote on “Importance of candor” in creating a successful organization. Candor is great. Candor should not hurt dignity of an individual in the team. I will talk today on the importance of “Voice & Dignity” in creating a successful Organization.

Every person in the world wants voice and dignity and they.deserve them. This is a great philosophy and gives voice and dignity to an individual as a right. However, this phenomenon has a great implication on the performance. Voice and Dignity allows people to express themselves freely. Some people are smarter than the others. No one has proprietary on great ideas. Creating a culture where everyone can express themselves brings many ideas on the forefront. Few of the ideas will be great, some of them will be average and others may not have great potential. But it is important to have a culture of free expression. People feel empowered; they give their best under such culture.

It is good as long as the culture allows idea generation and a free expression. Managers or anyone who is accountable for the result has to get the idea and take a call on the appropriateness and its implementation. That’s what management judgment is all about; it’s a tricky game. The giver of the idea tends to have a great passion for their ideas. In the long run people have to trust that ideas are shortlisted on the basis of merits. There could be judgmental error and every system allows for such error. But fairness in short listing of ideas and its acceptance helps in creating an environment full of trust. This leads to better outcomes.
Being too candid sometimes might hurt ones dignity. This is a delicate balance and it’s the work of the manager to balance candor & Dignity evenly. One may have their own way to bring about such a balance. But a proper balance between the two goes a long way to create a positive environment.

I have been privileged to interact with customers from the western countries. They have always squeezed out their reservations on Indian resources thereby expressing themselves freely. I have realized that there are certain inhibitions towards creating an open environment for Voice & Dignity. Few of them are as follows:

• Cultural issues: Certain cultures are more expressive as compared to others. If you are from such a culture where traditionally being extrovert is not encouraged; you have to realize this and do an extra bit to overcome such an inhibition.

• A proper platform is necessary. Like in a Scrum meeting everyone is supposed to talk about his work, his challenges and his plan. If Scrum master manages properly, such interactions are bound to create a proper atmosphere.

• For a given problem, one may have multiple perceptions. Perceptions lead to solutions and since perceptions are different, solutions are bound to be different. In order to come to an understanding, communicating ideas, listening to others point of view is necessary. Communication corrects a lot of gap and creates a better environment. It gives dignity to the participants.

• Sometimes we are impatient for results. We see through our own eyes and start cutting free expression. I think attempt has to be made to listen and then a proper decision can be taken. This could be time consuming but a balance is necessary. It has tremendous upsides.

In order to bring this culture, one will need
• A Process
• A measurement how we are doing and
• Independent feedback

This is an important aspect for building a successful team, a successful organization which can sustain and grow under all odds.

Importance of Candor in creating a successful Organization

A leader energizes people, guides them to move on the path of excellence and finally helps the company to succeed. “Candor” holds a central position in leadership. Many a time leaders believe in giving positive feedback to employees and abstain from being straight and candid on difficult issues. Leadership is not mathematics. But if one looks at the success stories of legends like Jack Welch, one will find that Candor played a central role in his leadership style. It is worthwhile to look at a few quotes from his famous book: “Winning”.

“My bosses cautioned me about my candor. Now my GE career is over and I’m telling you that it was my candor that helped to make it work.”

“From the day I joined GE to the day I was named CEO, twenty years later, my bosses cautioned me about my candor. I was labeled abrasive and consistently warned that my candor would soon get in the way of my career.”

Leadership is based on trust. If you are able to create trust amongst your people, even a tough message is taken positively. Everybody is intelligent; he understands the positives and negatives of their actions. Sometimes, one might get derailed. If the bosses communicate straight and is concerned about well being of his manager; the message gets across. “Candor” is the key.

Candor leads to many positives in the team:

1. Builds Trust: I have discussed about the same in foregoing paragraph. I believe Candor is the key for creating a team based on trust. Sugar-Coating a difficult message does not convert a failure to success, or an unpleasant situation to a pleasant situation; it just creates a pseudo feeling of cohesiveness.

2. Candor brings more people in the conversation. This leads to a lot of thoughts and ideas. People express themselves.

3. Candor leads to quick action.

4. Candor creates transparency. We all talk about transparency.

5. Finally, candor helps reduce cost. Time is not wasted; expectations in the organization are clear. Decision revolves around facts and communicating the same straight. Hence it leads to savings.

If Candor has so many positives let us look at why it is not the most accepted “Word” in the corporate world. Some of the inhibitions are:

1. I think the first and foremost reason is our belief that respect comes from not telling unpleasant truth. We speak pleasant ones but shy away from the unpleasant ones.

2. Our upbringing plays important role too. We have been taught to soften bad news. It is hard to change the style once we come in professional career.

3. Candor comes from Confidence. Sometimes lack of confidence and perceived risk in being candid is also the reason for lack of Candor.

Having discussed the inhibitions, let us spend some time talking about the steps in bringing Candor in a set up. Ideally, leadership styles flow from top. Sometimes bringing candor at a lower level of leadership chain can create a little bit of conflict. However, if one is careful and works towards bringing a balance one can bring a candid culture in a section of the organization as well. What you need to do is to align ‘Candor’ in your management style. It means:
• Reward it
• Praise it
• Spread it
• Declare winners out of people who demonstrate it.
• Keep on trying. Change takes time. Once people learn it and internalize it, change becomes self sustaining

There is a fine line between Candor and treating people with respect. I think a balance is necessary. To conclude, whenever you read stories of successful organizations, you will find “Candor” as the nucleus.

Align, Simplify, Contain and Push – You will always win.

Frequently, I have come across several success stories, and the way the success was achieved by different companies. We come across failure stories more often than the success stories.It is interesting to note that numerous companies which followed similar techniques have different experiences with the success rates. A few companies got success and others failed despite using the same techniques. Let us take for example, the success of GE under the leadership of Jack Welch- Of course his charismatic leadership was the most important factor for success. They made use of six-sigma as one of the tool for driving change in the organization. I have been associated with another company (name not important) where six-sigma was used as a tool to drive improvement. The result was not even closer to what GE accomplished. The question arises; what are the factors, which create such an amazing difference?

I would like to share my experiences on this subject. Following are my observations:

1. Leadership: Our famous Election commissioner, T N Seshan mentioned that the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle. Leadership is the most important factor. You need Passion, focus and drive to make things happen.

2. Alignment: The second important factor is aligning the initiatives. A clear goal, properly cascaded down the line with ample clarity (purpose) of the initiative is an absolute necessity. In the absence of alignment, there is hardly any progress. Employees put a lot of efforts and there are burnouts. Eventually, Results evade you.


3. Simplicity: Keeping the initiatives simple is a great power. Ram Charit manas (written in simple Hindi) became a huge success compared to Valmiki Ramayana (written in Sanskrit). The single important reason was simplicity. It is very clear from the acceptance and popularity of this literature in masses.

4. Containment: Containing the number of initiatives is of paramount importance. The number should be ideally three, certainly not more than five in any organization. Whenever, you come across increasing number of initiatives; use align and simplify to contain the numbers.


5. Push: A push from leadership, seriousness in implementation is the Execution Mantra of the initiative. One needs to talk about the initiative each time you see your reports. You need to take appropriate feedback and be willing to tweak the initiative.

Whenever I have looked at these factors, the winners and losers have stood out clearly. Therefore, before getting and implementing any big idea think of “Align, Simplify, Contain and Push”- you will win.

Do what you Love: Fame will follow you.

I happened to watch a short movie on a famous book – The 8th habit by Stephen R. Covey. The summary of the movie can be stated as – “Find Your Voice & Inspire Others to Find Theirs”. This is a great paradigm. I have realized this to be very powerful in whatever we do.

The 8th habit is: Find your Voice & Inspire Others to Find Theirs. The essence of this habit is that you will find your voice, when you can say that you are cent percent involved in what you are doing with your life. By cent percent involvement, what is meant is that your body, mind, heart and spirit are all engaged in the endeavor - whatever that is for you.

I read the convocation speech by Steve Jobs, Apple CEO. I found it thought provoking. The speech is available at the following link:

http://www.lifeofexcellence.com/audio/SteveJobs_StandfordConvocationSpeech.pdf

I am reproducing here an extract from the speech:

“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm
Convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love?”

One of the aspects the paragraph highlights is “Doing what you Love”. I think both Stephen Covey and Steve Jobs talked about the same concept. The convergence of doing and your Inner Voice makes you successful.

It is often hard to get into doing what you love. We get carried away with social, family, organizational and peer pressures. I do not think “success is copy able” One can achieve new heights in doing what he loves. Today’s society offers tremendous opportunities in each area. First you have to find for your “Inner Voice” before you start helping others to find theirs. Henry Winkler had once quoted: “Your mind knows only some things. Your inner voice, your instinct, knows everything. If you listen to what you know instinctively, it will always lead you down the right path.”

I will discuss some of the visible symptoms once you have found your voice. The process is iterative. Just keep on trying till you see some of these symptoms in your daily life:

1. You start feeling very passionate about doing the things you love. PASSION is the key word. You feel a high energy level.
2. Great ideas cross your mind on the subject. You bring or influence big change.
3. You live with the thought; you work with it; you sleep with it.

There could be many more, but I think these three are most important. These will be visible to people around you.

Let us spend few minutes on the timing of finding your voice. I think there is no rule. Someone can find his Inner voice very early in life, someone may find it quite late. One thing I like to mention here is pursuing something you Love is the key. It is never too late. You can find many more examples around you on timing. One thing which is common is the after effects it brings. And they are Success and happiness. Do what you love; fame will follow you.