Random thoughts – real observations

I post some points at random for a change. Yet they are from recent experience. Do post comments if you take the time to read this.

1.       Performance witch-hunts: I recently co-facilitated a World Café for SHRM India’s Knowledge Advisory group. When I heard the unadulterated vehemence with which seasoned Chief Learning Officers opined the destructive potential of Performance Management systems, I knew that short-termism had a thrill component for the few, for whom many pay the price today.

Capitalists are out for their pound of dough – their professional managements had invented the performance appraisal process to track down pliable culprits. Thousands and may be millions of employees get neither golden handshakes, nor any word of comfort to satisfy their bosses’ bell-curves whose depiction in board-rooms begs for more of such whistles. According to the latest Glassdoor ratings, only 20% of employees of such companies in India approve of their chief executives. Performance itself has no credibility, never mind the wizards and witches who summon its effects.

2.       Whole-person engagement:  When the word ‘human’ is mentioned, its embodiment is often a mystery. To be human is to err. To be human is to suffer. To be human is to be humble. The word ‘resource’ on the other hand signifies means to an end. Resources produce value. They defy simple arithmetic and leap to geometric progression. Resources are expendable, as they are limited. Human resources are therefore to my mind a wonderful contradiction. Getting the best of both words is like getting to know the depths of each connotation. The ‘whole’ person needs to immerse in the experience of knowing the other. Apparently idealistic, several who walk this planet cannot even hope to conceive of the feat that Felix Baumgartner did with his taming of claustrophobia to personally whizz past the speed of sound.

3.       Inconsistencies in leadership thinking :  Leadership is often construed as a way in which some unequal force will sway over or influence many others to do what they would not consider doing by themselves. What follows is that there is a certainty of followership. I am seriously beginning to wonder if what followership is – is a consequence of leadership itself. Confused? Well, put in another way, a construct such as leadership may be so conceived that other attributes of close association may in fact be so overlooked that we develop a myth in favor of a select few who subsume power that we need never have given them. What then, if this was not leadership, but the charity of the followers' perspectives? And if it were not charity, what if it were a spontaneous trust in the idea than the person(s) who communicate(s) it?

4.       Purpose Rising above Polarities : If the American presidential debate season in 2012 was something to go by, I saw a President tired from office, than tired of it. In his ascendancy in 2008, Barack Obama had a higher purpose coalesced from the fusion of Reagonomics AND Social Justice. Today, he finds it difficult to raise the level of the debate.

Office has ruined clarity in his perceptions. It has locked his perceptual field. A more ‘perfect' Union may still be underway, but the script belied the process in 2012. He may have done better by taking time to engage with the 4  Independents in the fray to keep the electorate hopeful for a fresh bout of his term. Having had to appear the ‘confrontationist’, the debate lay low and perhaps made the electorate less mindful of issues that needed intimate engagement.  

Well, what do you think?