I am Reborn

Dhaka Diaries /29th Nov/2018

Many times, we encounter a situation where a close friend or a family member is seriously sick or meets with an untoward incidence. We put all our heart soul and efforts to get our close one to recover from situation of pain and agony. By the virtue of your prayers and God’s mercy hopefully you see your near one recover from the illness and becomes fit and healthy. We say he is Reborn! Yes, it is reborn from the biological sense of our body recovering the shock. The body in illness was inactive for a long period of time and now it has recovered and got back the charm ang glory.

But many of us since ages are suffering from another terminal illness. This illness has got evolved over a very long period. Our own efforts have given the strength to this illness to become stronger and stronger and take you completely in its grip. Most important we have never realized that we have the illness. Unlike the earlier case where the family and friends have taken care for your recovery from illness, through deeds and prayers; this time they missed out. The missed out because this time the infection was neither visible to you nor to the external world. This is the illness of an “ordinary behaviour” or “ineffective behaviours”. The beauty of this illness is that it will never make you realise you are sick and dying. You will never realise you are performing below your potential. What it does is it leads to another deadly disease” I am right, and you are wrong” syndrome. This is so much of hypocrisy flowing around us that we regularly and angrily criticize others for doing something, while doing pretty much the exact same thing ourselves.

Last week I got this life changing experience, an experience synomous of being Reborn. No, I did not suffer from any terminal illness nor had a un warranted casualty! it was a 6 day of Yajna that I went through at the Fariyas Resort at Lonavla. An intense training Programme under the Relationship Management Guru. Homi Mulla.  A six day of well-crafted scientifically developed tool, delivered in the form of “Experiential learning “. A Program that demonstrate that how sound relationship have direct; and in Homi’s words – “indisputable bearing on your Results, both in the corporate world and your family life “. It was six days of understanding the fundamentals of sound behaviours, practicing and learning to apply them when alone and in groups.

The basic objective of the training was to make us understand that it is the stakes that governs our behaviours. The higher the stakes, the sounder the behaviours. But it demonstrated that it is not the high stakes situation that defines what you are, but you are how you behave when the stakes are low.  And I can absolutely relate that when a fifty-slide presentation to MD goes without an error, but I often miss out buying two or three items in my wife’s half pager grocery list.

The skeleton of the Programme is based on a book- The New Managerial Grid, written by Blake and Mouton, both Member of the American Psychological Association. The book was first written in 1964, a good 54 years back. A question can always crop up, what’s the relevance of this now?  Does it not have an expiry date.  Well it does not, because sound behaviours has always been a scare commodity in the history of human civilization.  And that is exactly what the book deals with. If Lord Rama and Krishna are remembered thousands of years later, it is because of the sound behaviour displayed by them at every situation.

Behaviour is everything we do from birth till death, and this is what we do every second of our life. But apart from few Moral science lectures in the school, I do not remember learning about sound behaviour in a structured way. Behaviour is said to be the function of personality and environment, where personality is constant, and environment is variable. Hence environment has the clear linkage to impacting behaviour. Environment often seems like something that happens to us rather than something we have control. It also says, “Our assumptions guide our behaviour”. An assumption is something that — is usually unspoken — you believe to be the truth, but there is no evidence. When assumption becomes belief, you want to spread the belief. A set of belief held by the influential members of the society becomes a Culture. Behaviour is impacted by all the above – personality, environment, assumptions, belief and culture.

Any organisation that exist has compulsorily two elements – it has a Purpose and it has People.  The effective management of these two elements is the condition of efficient production through sound organisation. This also leads to the third attribute of the organisation that is Power, wherein some people are bosses and others are being bossed. In the book – The New Managerial Grid, writer talks about two assumption that guides the leadership behaviour.

Concern for task or production & Concern for People. 

The way the three-concern mesh is represented graphically on a Grid as a nine-point scales .1 represent minimum concern, 9 is maximum and 5 represents intermediate.

*Blake & Mouton Managerial Grid 1962

The manner by which the two-concerns are linked together by specific manner defines his use of power. The important point is that when a leader or manager confronts a situation in which work is to be accomplished through people, he has a range of alternatives to go about managing.

9,1 Orientation:  The manager acting under this assumption concentrates on maximizing production by exercising power and authority and achieving control over people through compliance 

1,9 Orientation: Primary attention is placed on promoting good feeling among colleagues and subordinates

1,1 orientations: A minimum concern for both production and people, does only the minimum required to remain in the organisation.

5,5 Orientation: “Middle of the Road Theory “or” I want to look good syndrome “, going by the past precedence, and practice and majority

9,9 Orientation: This is a team approach. It is goal oriented and seeks to gain results of high quantity and quality trough participation, involvement, commitment and conflict solving.

Which of the above managerial style is dominant for any given person in any situation may be influenced by the culture of the organisation, the situation itself, the managers individual beliefs and values and his personality traits.

The above grid styles are not related to our office and work space, but they are part of our daily life at home with family friends and relatives. A father to a daughter, a husband to a wife and son to his father, in all these interactions you will see that these grid styles will come into effect. Also, it is not necessary that we display the same grid style all the time, but we keep switching in between these styles.

A father who succumbs to the pressure to buy a ice cream for his son who is sick (1,9), a boss blaming the subordinate for all the shortfall his targets (9,1), a coalition in politics  trying to form a Government (5,5), and the worst is being like a Dhritrashtra in Mahabharat  (1,1)

Apart from the grid, another important component of the programme is to learn the six elements of leadership. They are as below:

1. Initiative:  Being proactive in our action and intervention
2. Inquiry: The ground work that is needed to strengthen the initiative 
3. Advocacy: Ability to soundly represent, plead support and assert one’s point of view or position. 
4. Conflict Management: The practice of recognizing and dealing with disputes in a rational, balanced and effective way
5. Decision making: Process of choosing the most appropriate alternatives or solution that helps deliver the desired results 
6. Critique: Constructive and supportive feedback on a chosen issue or behaviour, “how your behaviour has impacted me or the outcome“

After learning the various grid style and the six elements of effective behaviour, what do I do?  I continue to be like the sheep in the flock as I have always been? When one sheep decides to go somewhere, the rest of the flock usually follows, exactly what I have done. Like a sheep find safety in numbers, requiring the presence of four to five sheeps when grazing, maintaining a visual link I have always looked for that comfort with people around me. When faced with a challenge or danger the sheep have the instinct to flee and not fight, have I not displayed similar characteristic when I left many of those unfinished battles in my personal and corporate life.

Today it is the time to Rise up and say, I am going kill the infection of “ineffective behaviour “from my life. I can do that my taking the rightful initiatives at every opportune time in life. Taking those calculated risk to demonstrate that I am alive and kicking. I derive the power and stamina to move through these unchartered lanes with the power of Inquiry. I develop the Advocacy to stay on course by the groundwork done in Inquiry and hold firm to my belief and convictions with persistence. I resolve all the Conflicts by testing the validity of my arguments with the right amount of heat and spark. I improve my quality of Decision making by allowing the various alternates and choices to generate and be open sound reasoning, beliefs and perception of others. And above all I am open and thankful to people who give me Critique, because when I know how my behaviour has impacted others, only than I can course correct myself.

Today is the time to be Reborn and embark on this journey to becoming a 9,9.

Best Regards

Robin

Read more from the author at https://rkd-diary.blogspot.com/