Are organizations conditioning employees to lose?

This is the time when employees are supposed to do ‘more with less.’ This is also the time when organizations come to terms with ‘productivity and efficiency’ that could have been and so prune resources leaving the rest to address clients clamouring for ‘more with less.’ The situation reminds me about the story of an eagle that was brought up with chickens. The story has it that an eagle’s egg was placed in the nest of a prairie chicken. The egg hatched and the eagle grew up thinking that it was a prairie chicken. It did what the chickens did. One day it saw an eagle flying majestically in the sky and asked the chickens, “what is that beautiful bird?” The chickens replied – “Oh! That’s the mighty eagle, who flies very high. We are prairie chickens – we cannot even think of flying like the eagle.” The eagle didn’t give it a second thought, completely trusting the chickens. He lived and died as a prairie chicken. Born to win but conditioned to lose.

Cut to the corporate nest. With ‘uncertainty and doing more with less’ as the focus, employees behave like the eagle. Am yet to hear someone talk about how organizations should be focusing on how it can make the most positive, possible difference in the future. Implying the future of employees, existing clients and itself. For this to happen, they should think beyond the present. With everyone discussing ‘downturn,’ most organizations today seem to have an installed base of thinking, a myopic view of opportunities – present and future- that compromise investment towards client satisfaction, employee satisfaction and there by growth.

Look at the pressure on listed companies today. It has become imperative for them to focus on numerator growth rather than tinkering their denominator-led strategy. As Wall Street makes it clear to them, “Go ahead, squeeze the lemon, get the inefficiencies out, give us the juice (dividends). We’ll take the juice and give it to companies that are better at making lemonade.” The point is that the focus should be on growth – of employees, clients and the company and that will certainly not be a result of doing ‘more with less.’ Management gurus say that the bus should have right people at the right place at the right time so as to move. Who would want to be in a stationary bus?