Food for thought

Research in management science shows that employees in the corporate world – at any level – fail to live up to their own potential and to the expectations of the managements they serve due primarily to two factors: (1) not giving more than what they get and (2) not accepting responsibility and, instead, choosing to find excuses. This holds equally true for government employees too, in fact more so.

Come to a deeper analysis of the first point. In his bestseller You Can Win, celebrity consultant and success guru Shiv Khera says: “If you look at the histories of successful people or organizations who have (1) succeeded, (2) sustained success and (3) maintained goodwill, they have all lived by this one principle: ‘I shall always give more than I get, to my family, organization and my society.’ If we live by this principle, you tell me where’s the competition? In fact, we become the competition. We have no competition.”

The fact of the matter is that once an employee begins to give his company a bit more, just a bit more, than what he gets as his salary and other benefits because he is genuinely interested in his work and in increasing his productivity so that the company benefits a bit more and so that eventually he too is benefited a bit more, there will hardly be any competition. For, what to speak of giving back a bit more, most employees do not even give back what they are paid for. Therefore, once one begins to give back a bit more than what he is paid for, he faces no competition at all! But how many of us think that way?

Secondly, to accept responsibility – 100 per cent responsibility – for one’s actions is equivalent to one being prepared to make amends by profiting from experience. But most employees – infamously, government employees especially – have no sense of responsibility and have rather mastered the art of making excuses and passing the buck on the other. To quote the famous American President John F Kennedy, “Our privileges can be no greater than our obligations. The protection of our rights can endure no longer than the performance of our responsibilities.” So true insofar as work culture is concerned – a culture that is so terribly short in this part of the country. Everyone is bothered about perks and privileges, and then rights. But where is responsibility? Almost nowhere.

So the second fact of the matter in the context here is that unless one begins to take or accept responsibility for all of his actions, and then begins to reinvent himself rather than invent and reinvent excuses, both performance and productivity are bound to suffer.

Isn’t it time, therefore, that we did some soul-searching for own betterment and then the betterment of the world?