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The future organisation will be intense and organic. It will be guided by chance and market forces. A cluster of such organisations may develop and form a larger structure. The sole propriety of this structure will be the knowledge produced by it as all work will be in the form of small but intense contracts, observes Hitesh Kaushal LEADERSHIP is going to be the most important issue of this century. It had become a talking point during the last decade of the century just gone by because more and more nations and corporates had come to realise that they were failing to motivate people towards productive work. They knew that the time had come when they had to take a hard look at the premises that had been formulated by years of conditioning in the mechanistic view of organisations. In fact, "getting the work done", by using either the carrot or the stick, had been the guiding management principle. It had outlived its utility and management in the future would have to find a different focus. For long, people were lured to work to satisfy their material needs. They spent their lives doing just that. A smart minority, on its part, managed to focus on achieving quality of life, and it kept this illusion alive for the others. This tapping into the greed of people by the smart ones satiated the explicit needs of those who worked but deprived people from achieving their real potential. In the future things are going to change and the life cycle of the organisations of tomorrow will be different. They may undergo complete changeover and it may become very difficult to pinpoint their birth and death ; as in quantum physics in which particles join to form new particles in a billionth of a second and again split to become two or more different particles. It is impossible to know which particle went where, and what it did.
What will bind people will be the value system of an organisation; the hierarchy of which may be different for different organisations. In the present form of leadership which focuses on positive attitude and positive thinking, a lot remains unsaid. The anguish and resentment is never brought out. Instead emphasis is placed on ignoring it. However, it always develops in the form of a general anxiety, apparently with no trace of its origin. |
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| The biggest challenge before the
leaders will be finding ways of communicating their
methodologies and the premises on which they are based.
What is presently happening is that a methodology is
practiced but the premises are withheld. Most of the
leadership in the past has focussed on this because of an
underlying personal power motive which is designed to
cover the origin of plans. Today, in many cases, followers conform because of their sense of awe for the leader. They feel that they are inferior to the leader in some way and that is why they are not able to find the premises for his actions. To overcome this inferiority they follow a leader , who may be successful just because he is an enigma for the rest. At the core he may be an impostor. The older method of leadership will give way to influencing through knowledge and methods based on rational reflective thinking and not manipulation. The winds of change have already started blowing. Motorola University, which aims to educate its workforce with a budget of over $60 million, is one such example. Other companies are sending employees who never left the premises, overseas on product development projects. The fun and joy shared by the people in cross-functional project teams were unthinkable in the highly structured recent past. The old structure is now giving way to an unstructured structure! This means less of imposed control on employees. People are realising the need to do away with attendance, time-charts and other forms of control. The controlling function has been changed to a more or less voluntary one at many places. This also requires understanding the problem of resistance in employees and realising that until people are in general satisfied with their life they will exhibit paranoid tendencies like obsessive over -work or obsessive non-work. The old systems had worked by focussing on the negatives and fears of people to produce action. The fears could be of insecurity (financial, social, and emotional ), physical damage, or humiliation. But this technique has been over-used and the realisation has dawned that work produced through fear cannot be of much value. The future leadership has to focus on dispelling fears and bringing out the maximum creative potential of an individual. This also means that the leader willl have to do away with the imposition of specific methods for a group. He would have to only provide information about the different methods and suggest a likely course of action. The task team will be left to decide on the actual process.
Communication, in the form of meaningful conversations, will also be a crucial leadership issue. So often we see people turned off by the kind of impersonal conversation which takes place during official meetings and interpersonal encounters. Invariably this kind of conversation is focussed on work rather than on people. These structures are based on the mechanistic models of an organisation which calls for repair or replacement of defective cogs or putting some facilitating grease on them. It never occurs that a cog may be sluggish because it is angry, or is resentful. The resentment is because of not being treated as a living being with emotions. It is only when leaders realise the power of such softer issues can organisations develop radically. The future of leadership will be somewhat as described in the book "Contemplative Leadership for Entrepreneurial Organisations". It stresses the fact that we as human beings have the ability to choose our actions and not their consequences. If we accept this, it will go a long way in creating happiness in our lives. The authors suggest four ways of doing so: - APPRECIATE Learning to accept the present reality, what ever it is and to appreciate it thus. To find beauty and joy in what is, rather than trying to find it in what should be. To see the opportunities that each moment creates for us to contribute to this world. To realise that a constant craving for what is not there is self-defeating. A lot of emphasis is being placed on planning, but what happens when the plans do not work out? We quickly try to find the culprits who prepared the plans. No one realises the folly of such a methodology which is based on the premise that Future = Past x correction factors. We do not realise that reality has no reason to follow our well-made plans. What we can do is just to increase the number of tries and hope for the best. DETACHMENT Detachment from consequences. It does not mean dispassionate action but it implies indifference to victory or loss. It creates a very strong resilience. It helps us to fall hundred times and still try again. It is concerned with enjoying the journey more than the destinations. We can relate this easily to our lives by trying to find out how long an achievement helps us to remain satisfied. CREATIVE WORK To see work as a potential for creating joy and to experience the happiness of creating something totally new. It is immensely satisfying to do work, which contributes to the lives of others and creates radical transformation in the quality of life of those around us. Creative work, which creates a new form, which is original, is very satisfying. Work which is without an effect, or which can be done equally well by anyone else, never inspires us. We all like to give our special touch to whatever we do. This creates an interesting paradox; whether our responses influence the quality of work or does work influences the quality of our responses? The answer is to go beyond the dichotomy. COMPASSION Compassion is the ability to feel for others. The sharing may be of both pleasure and pain. It is to rise above the petty kind of selfishness and seek it in higher forms. It is to realise that a similar heart beats in all of us and that it can be reached if we really want to. Compassion also means to realise the anomaly in attributing the causes of every behaviour internally. With compassion we can see ourselves as having immense potential but limited only by some factors which are external to our consciousness. It also means that we see innocence rather than malice in all actions because even a con man acts on the innocent following of his convictions, which may not be of his creation. With the presence of compassion anger goes. A beautiful saying describes the essence of this as "Every form of interaction is either a cry for help or an expression of love". We will, therefore, be required to develop more holistic view of organisations and see them as single organisms.. Leaders of tomorrow will have to learn to live in chaos and accept the presence of opposites simultaneously. Consider the issues of new product realisation. We have moved from making products and then finding markets to finding markets and then making products. But each has its limitations. We need to see the advantages of both of them.. Placing emphasis on market gives us products like customised software but it may also create a rut if the market demand is presently not creative, thus giving us products like double flavoured candies etc. The leaders will have to rise above this dichotomy to realise that in future they may be required to hold two or more opposing views simultaneously. As the chaos theory, a mathematical model of explaining uncertainty, states that beautiful structures can exist in seemingly amorphous materials and vice versa. |
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The future
organisation, therefore, will be intense and organic. It
will be guided by chance and market forces. A cluster of
such organisations may develop and form a larger
structure. The sole propriety of this structure will be
the knowledge produced by it as all work will be in the
form of small but intense contracts. External motivation
will seldom be required.
Another
leadership issue is the futility of negative competition.
Competition is always self-limiting because it is a
reaction. It can never look outside the context of those
operating in it. Collaboration is what future calls for.
It is time to redefine our mindsets and see employees,
suppliers, customers and "competitors" as
collaborators of equal nature. There already is evidence
of a direct correlation between successful companies and
participative models of managing where even
"competitors" are seen as collaborators. Unlike
the leaders of today, who demand unquestioning following,
the leaders of tomorrow will give their secrets to their
followers and move on in search of greater ones. Like the
concept of network marketing, leaders will "grow
" leaders at every level in an organisation. This
proactive approach will require the leader to understand
the value of going beyond the self and connecting with
others.