HUMANIZING PROFESSIONALISM – 05

Face Book COO Sheryl Sandberg was in news recently. She is a technology executive, activist, author and founder of LeanIn.org. In past she has worked in India for World Bank’s India Health Team on Leprosy Education.

In her 2013 book, Lean In: Women, Work and the will to Lead, among other things she advised women to form peer support groups as a result of which some 33,000 Lean In Circles came into existence. She also told women “to bring their whole to work”; and thereafter she had a personal experience about such an advice. In 2015, she lost her husband Dave Goldberg during a vacation in Mexico. And at the end of her traditional Jewish mourning, Sheloshim, she wrote a Face Book post where she wrote about her anguish and suffering after her loss and hesitatingly posted it. As her post became viral people began to once again connect with her. But when she went to work again, she found that “it wasn’t my whole self at work!” She got support from her boss Mark Zuckerberg and also consulted Adam Grant a Professor of Psychology to overcome her grief. Her latest book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy is an outcome of her efforts.

There are occasions when employees aren’t able to present ‘their whole self’ at work and that’s when Humanized Professionalism would work wonders, presumably create new bonds and growth cycles; evidence of which still remains to emerge. Laszlo Bock, an expert on Peoples’ Issues, who worked for firms like McKinsey & Company, General Electric and Google, has written about what organizational head’s focus in this regard does to the direction an organization can take. Jack Welch, GE’s Chairman and CEO during 1981 – 2001 spent more than 50% of his time on people issues. Everyone knows the growth GE experienced under leadership of Welch.

 It seems Azim Premji is somewhat closer to Welch in this part of the world. His firm was into mundane consumer products when he took over few decades back; and today Wipro is a world class and widely diversified High Technology Company. Such a transformation couldn’t have been possible without Azim Premji’s deep involvement into people building who built the businesses for the company. Infosys founder Narayan Murthy too has successfully solved this riddle by paying attention to the question, “How to get back the work force in top condition to perform, every morning, throughout the year?” Again, it is about them striving for bringing their whole self to work.

“Bringing one’s whole-self to work”, this has been the eternal challenge of employers. In time of Adam Smith, the original economist who wrote the classic Wealth of Nations, the issue was to develop team spirit among artisans, read workers. His book has a case study about division of labor in manufacturing of common pins used to keep a bunch of papers together. It demonstrates productivity improvement as a result of division of labor, and consequently the income of the team could rise. And perhaps that provided a purpose to workers to come back next day and repeat last day’s performance and improvise upon it. Today’s society is much more complex than Adam Smith’s era. Keeping employees engaged with firm is a challenge across the board.

If your past efforts did not yield desired performance, as a top shot of the organization, become a Jack Welch. Give all the time you can muster to people with a fresh perspective of making them more capable, approachable and team-happy to observe your other challenges doing a vanishing trick.