Jobs are not meant to satisfy us. Jobs are not animate things that have knowledge of who we are, what we are seeking and what our special needs could be. You may say that I am just making a philosophical statement. To the contrary, I believe that it is the most practical and rewarding way of looking at many things in a professional career. When I see scores of successful people around me, I believe that their achievements are largely because of such a perspective. It also occurs to me that developing this perspective is eventually beneficial in every way possible.
Let me go back a century and tell you a story. My grandfather was a medical practitioner in the Bihar of 1920s. He had a brood of children who were orphaned due to his untimely death. Two of my uncles had just about finished high school when he moved on. Their older brothers could not afford to send them to college. The two had to be gainfully employed, somehow, as soon as possible. They were taken to Tata Steel, an hour away from where they lived. Tata Steel and the government of Bihar were the only two employers you could think of in a five-hundred mile radius of my uncles’ hometown. The possible work one could get at Tata Steel was that of a technologist-engineer or of a manual worker. So, what could be done with the two boys with their high school qualifications? They were neither fish nor fowl. “Take them to the lab,’’ someone said. A German technician who ran the place was looking for a few hands. The burly German took a hard look at the two. Then he showed them a broom standing at one corner of the lab and asked them to sweep the floor. By the end of day, one of the two just ran away. To him, it was too much to handle. The one who stayed back retired as a chief foreman of Tata Steel. The difference between the two? The one that stayed on was not trying to seek ‘job satisfaction’. Instead, he focused on satisfying the job.
The more prosperous the industry, the higher the number of people looking for this elusive thing called ‘job satisfaction’. Similarly, the more qualified some people are, the higher is their need for ‘job satisfaction’. Sometimes, it is as elusive as seeking ‘true love’. There are times when we get lucky deservedly or otherwise. But we also get used to it and conclude that it is the responsibility of the organization to maintain a continuous supply of job satisfaction.
Whenever I think of job satisfaction, I remember all those who have to work at night—policemen, airline pilots, nurses and doctors, ambulance drivers and hotel staff, and of course the sentinel of the snow and the desert and the mountains. Do their jobs ‘satisfy’ these people or do these people satisfy the jobs with which they have been entrusted? Are jobs living things that can ever ‘satisfy’ us?
In the corporate world, like any other place, when we open the bonnet and look under it, we find a whole bunch of tough, dirty but strategic tasks that must get done for the bacon to come home. Sometimes, they are so tough and so dirty that they overshadow the strategic nature of the job. So, all such jobs have to be ‘sold’ to prospective incumbents. More they are sold, fewer buyers they attract. Often, the man who takes up the job is either a loser who has no other choice, or someone who just views it as a transit camp. For many potentially high-performance individuals, a false sense of survival, desire for glamour or just the need for creature comforts make these jobs undesirable. “I would rather be in Kolkata than be posted to Mungher.’’ “I rather have the corporate planning job than be collecting bad debts.’’ Or, consider this one here: “Give me a cerebral job, I do not enjoy handling transactions...’’
Few of us ever ask the boss to be rewarded with a tough and dirty job. We only look for the ‘plum’ ones. Yet, there are people, who given a tough and dirty job, make it strategic: they transform the job in unbelievable ways. In a typical career span, there must be at least four such solid stints in one’s life to make the person a solid professional. All the great people I know have been in the trenches for much of their lives, and their inventory of bruises outnumber the commendations they have received. The occasional commendations stay on the wall. It is the bruises that these people carry with pride.
Happy reading!!
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Fake Encounters
The Times of India’s Bangalore edition had it on its front page a few days ago—Intel’s India operations had asked some of its people to leave for forging their leave travel allowance (LTA) claims. Intel refused to furnish details except that it affirmed its standards of integrity were sacrosanct. I can well presume what would have happened there. A few people would have made a seemingly innocent conclusion that if an employee fudged an LTA claim to deny the Income Tax department their dues, as long as such an act did not hurt the company’s cash flow or bottomline, there was nothing wrong with it. We all know when the concept of LTA as a tax-exempt perk came up, in New Delhi travel agents sprang up. For a small fee, they gave people fake receipts for travel not undertaken with which they could submit a claim. It is quite commonplace in some organizations for someone to claim airfare while they travel by train. What’s wrong with that? After all, some politicians and film stars, cricketers and businessmen and bureaucrats routinely falsify their income tax returns to save on taxes? Well, companies like Intel do not agree with that reasoning. To them, both the means and the ends must be justified when it comes to workplace ethics.
Cut to MindTree. A young engineer applied for a job with us. He had a passable degree in engineering. But, he cleared our difficult-to-get-through entry test and started his work in right earnest. We found him to be as good as any other in the organization. Then the worst happened. When his past employment history was checked, it turned out that he had forged the salary certificate to show that the last salary drawn was Rs 20,000 a month whereas his real salary was Rs 9,000 per month. In reality, he did not have to do this because our salary fitment does not depend on it. We look at education, the skill and our internal equity and then decide the compensation based on a competence grid. We fired the man. This isn’t an isolated case. Last year, in MindTree alone, we had a dozen cases where people were asked to leave after a month or two of joining when employment verification raised traces of forgery. I understand that in larger Indian companies where intake is significantly more, the size of the problem is even greater. But if found out, the consequences are as severe. The question is, to what good use?
Why do people do things that bring them humiliation? Well, in the first place, no one told them that it was wrong. The truth is that a new breed of Indian companies are here who place value on integrity compared to the past. In addition, thanks to globalization, we are seeing companies like Intel coming to India who make no compromise on the seemingly small violation of workplace ethics.
Amartya Sen has called us an ‘argumentative nation’. On matters of workplace ethics, we can have particularly long arguments on what is right and what is wrong, who truly is at fault and dwell on the quantum of punishment. After all, should all these people have been warned and let off as against being shown the door? The truth is that companies like Accenture, IBM, Intel, Infosys, MindTree or Wipro and many others have no appetite for such discussion. Matters of integrity to them are always a black or white issue. The human eye is trained to distinguish between 108 shades of grey. The moment one gets sucked into analyzing the many different shades of grey, it becomes unending. So, to these organizations, white is white and black is black. You either play by the book or, you opt to stay out. It’s that simple.
So, the next time your nephew asks you to arrange for a fake experience certificate, tell him it is not a good idea. If someone tells you that no one would notice if you claimed first class train fare but travelled by bus do not submit a false claim. If someone says, “but, everyone here does it,’’ ask yourself, how comfortable would you be to explain your conduct to your own child if she ever asked you if what you did was the right thing? The concept of workplace integrity is going to grow in importance. However, it is not about policing people’s behavior. It is about making conscious choices based on conviction about what is fair, transparent and above potential scrutiny. It is about closing one’s own eyes in a dark room and listening to the voice of conscience.
Happy Reading!!!
Cut to MindTree. A young engineer applied for a job with us. He had a passable degree in engineering. But, he cleared our difficult-to-get-through entry test and started his work in right earnest. We found him to be as good as any other in the organization. Then the worst happened. When his past employment history was checked, it turned out that he had forged the salary certificate to show that the last salary drawn was Rs 20,000 a month whereas his real salary was Rs 9,000 per month. In reality, he did not have to do this because our salary fitment does not depend on it. We look at education, the skill and our internal equity and then decide the compensation based on a competence grid. We fired the man. This isn’t an isolated case. Last year, in MindTree alone, we had a dozen cases where people were asked to leave after a month or two of joining when employment verification raised traces of forgery. I understand that in larger Indian companies where intake is significantly more, the size of the problem is even greater. But if found out, the consequences are as severe. The question is, to what good use?
Why do people do things that bring them humiliation? Well, in the first place, no one told them that it was wrong. The truth is that a new breed of Indian companies are here who place value on integrity compared to the past. In addition, thanks to globalization, we are seeing companies like Intel coming to India who make no compromise on the seemingly small violation of workplace ethics.
Amartya Sen has called us an ‘argumentative nation’. On matters of workplace ethics, we can have particularly long arguments on what is right and what is wrong, who truly is at fault and dwell on the quantum of punishment. After all, should all these people have been warned and let off as against being shown the door? The truth is that companies like Accenture, IBM, Intel, Infosys, MindTree or Wipro and many others have no appetite for such discussion. Matters of integrity to them are always a black or white issue. The human eye is trained to distinguish between 108 shades of grey. The moment one gets sucked into analyzing the many different shades of grey, it becomes unending. So, to these organizations, white is white and black is black. You either play by the book or, you opt to stay out. It’s that simple.
So, the next time your nephew asks you to arrange for a fake experience certificate, tell him it is not a good idea. If someone tells you that no one would notice if you claimed first class train fare but travelled by bus do not submit a false claim. If someone says, “but, everyone here does it,’’ ask yourself, how comfortable would you be to explain your conduct to your own child if she ever asked you if what you did was the right thing? The concept of workplace integrity is going to grow in importance. However, it is not about policing people’s behavior. It is about making conscious choices based on conviction about what is fair, transparent and above potential scrutiny. It is about closing one’s own eyes in a dark room and listening to the voice of conscience.
Happy Reading!!!
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