If
we look into the corporate world today, then we experience
that the biggest challenge is to place the right person at the right place at
the right time. If you see the information technology world, it is visible that
the manpower turnover rate is killing. It is the greatest challenge to the
manager to understand and manage the people at work. It is very challenging to
train them in uni-direction.
Once, I was conducting
my firewalk seminar. In that the director of the company, Sanjay Bhatia,
narrated a motivational story. He explained that a company is like a boat and
all of them are sailing in it. Now the boat will go ahead only when everybody
rows in the same direction and everybody puts the energy that they have instead
of watching who is putting what kind of energy and in what ratio. This story was highly motivational, but do you think
everybody took it in the same spirit? No. There were many corporate executives
from all parts of the country.
Everybody
would have taken this story according to their own paradigm. If you refer to
Pareto’s analysis, who is an Italian Economist, you will find that 20% of the
employees contribute to 80% of complaints and dissatisfactionIf we focus on 20% of the employees, 80% of the
problems will be solved. Employee related problems can be tackled and
eliminated if we understand the pattern of working of every individual. If any
individual is posted at the right place or the place of his own interest, there
will be job enrichment and enhancement in efficiency. We must know that the
most important step is to identify an individual. Even the father of scientific
management F. W. Taylor clearly says that we must identify the efficient workers
and inefficient workers. Identification of employees leads to identification of
human behaviour. Therefore, it is our primary duty to identify the workers and
subsequently provide the work. Even parents must understand what their children
deserve. Sometimes parents become unreasonable with their children.
Every individual has different patterns of life.
Even in my seminars, when I crack jokes, some people laugh like anything, while
some don’t. Earlier, I used to be a visiting professor at the Institute of
Chartered Accountants of India. There also if I used to explain any concept,
then some people would be very happy while some would not. Several times I used
to think why there was a different response for the same action. It is because every
individual has different patterns of life.
Let us understand the
different behaviours of an individual.
1.
Process-oriented
Some
people are process-oriented. They go step by step. They believe in systems.
They believe in mechanisms. They believe in orientation. I am not saying if
this is good or bad. I am trying to make you focus on the nature of the person.
Accounts people are process oriented. Sales people are goal oriented. Law firms
believe that no work is complete unless the paper work is done. Human behaviour
varies from individual to individual. Let me tell you about one person who
believed in process and function and he gave the world a complete new mode of
transportation.
A twelve-year-old boy was going along with his
farmer father. He saw a train. He was so inquisitive that he went to the driver
of the train and enquired how the train worked. His process based mind thought
that if a train could work on a track, then why could not a chariot move on a
plain road with a machine and not by horses. This process was settled in his
brain. When his father used to think about seeds, soil, fertilisers, his mind
used to work on the instrument which could be used in ploughing the fields. He
worked in Detroit to repair various machines but there too he used to visualise
the process of making a machine cart. At the age of 25 he got married on the
condition that his first love would be the process of making a car only and
nothing else. Later on, this person used to work
in Edison Illuminating Company. He used to work day and night on the process of
car manufacturing. On 4 June, 1896 this process based man brought the first car
on the road and he was none other than Henry Ford. And today the whole world
respects and admires the incredible mechanism produced by Henry Ford’s brain. These
kind of people
must be put at
functional work.