Saumyen's Pages
Rethink
Case 1: More than one billion people watched Kasav on the television killing Indians and India’s guests in a nightmarish evening in Mumbai. The government machinery spent our money to prove this obvious fact over two years before finally executing him!
Case 2: That the Chairman of a large Indian company with >75% stake will have his son as the next chief is an accepted phenomenon in Indian business context. But he tried to prove time and again that his son is a competent professional – interviewed by an eminent panel and grown through the ranks etc!
Case 3: The spurt of failures of the grand old Congress Party in recent elections reflects the failure of the leadership and possibly many Indians will support that view. The Party continues to defend the Central Leadership in the pretence of circumstantial temporary situations, failure of local leadership, negative impact of incumbency etc!
The examples and contexts are poles apart but carry a common message. Something that looks obvious or real are often pretended to be not so. In fact, what is real may often need to be deciphered from a contextual interpretation of Pretence. Pretence may have political, legal, social or other reasons or obligations. In the first example this is legal (constitutional right for the convict to defend himself/ herself), the second one is professional and possibly social and the third one is political.
Not in all cases though, reality can be deciphered from pretence and in such cases pretence look real and genuine. More information of the situation and/or deeper/lateral thoughts may interpret the reality, may be after passing of some time. Most of us, in our professional and personal sphere have faced such realities in disguise. We have either ignored or accepted them or been a party to the same. Some of the situations that I (and for that matter many of you) have witnessed in the corporate sector strengthens my above belief in the professional life too.
A large multinational company hired a batch of two thousand engineers – fresh from Indian colleges. The freshers were trained in different technology areas and test conducted before deployment in delivery. The business situation worsens later part of the year of 2007-08 thanks to the recession in the US and the Western world. The company decided to remove 500 freshers to cope with the reduced demand. A select group of freshers were called and informed of their individual poor performance in the tests taken 3 months back and accordingly were asked to resign immediately: “ The company of repute won’t be able to hold the poor performers”. The students were neither informed of this process in campus hiring time or at the time of joining! The real reason of business downturn was not even mentioned to avoid creating a negative image of the company in future campus hiring. The freshers with no prior experience were left unemployed in the middle of the year where there is likely no taker for them in the market. Leaving aside the debate around ethics, this disguises reality by pretending the problem differently.
Sunil was a consistent top performer in the practice in my past organization. His promotion happened on fast track and was expecting the next promotion to Manager that year. Rajat, his manager called him “promotion is now based on skills and some new softskills have been added for considering promotion to your next level”. He informed, “while I push your case to senior management meeting and this may go through, I would suggest you to decline the promotion as this may be a problem in your performance next year. You should first acquire or sharpen all the skills needed at that level and then move to that level.” The reality was that the Manager could not influence Sunil’s case in front of the senior management who saw more potential in some cases than that of Rajat. The Manager pretended differently to retain his top performer.
There is a strange similarity in the above two cases – though the context, parameters and the events are different. Both the cases the owners who pretend, hold information that, according to them, are not available to the impacted people. This assumption has been leveraged by many across the spectrum of our life to pretend in multiple situations. Some of our politicians have mastered this art!
Is pretence always bad? Should we look at pretence as a negative characteristics? The answer is no. In multiple situations, it is desirable and prudent to pretend differently from what actually exists on the ground. This may be needed in specific circumstances and for certain duration.
For Case 2 above, the company is listed and it must ensure an agreement of the shareholders for positioning a new future leader of the Company. A formal induction process and gradual growth across the hierarchy provide the faith and trust of the shareholders on the company where they have invested money for better returns. Apart from that, this will have a better acceptance of the new leader with the employees. It also improves the second generation leader’s ability to steer the company – thanks to his knowledge and understanding of the operations. So socially, ethically and administratively, the decision is justified.
In situations of war, the country often suppresses the real picture and provides encouraging information about the progress to motivate the soldiers and keep faith of the citizens. Often a relation staying far or an ailing person is not informed about death of his/her close family member for some time as the sudden news may have impact on the health. The Pretence is justified – on moral or ethical grounds atleast for short term – though the same may not be hidden beyond a certain period.
Bringing the right balance between pretending for logical or justifiable reasons and the reality is one of the pillars of winning trust from others. In our daily life, we compromise and moderate our expectations and trust by judging the events, conversations, speeches etc on our own way and behave accordingly. The same holds true in our professional life.
Rob was my client who led the delivery for all IT outsourcing for his firm from the US. It was a practice that his team would assess the profiles before the IT consultants were deployed offshore. Initially, he did an assessment of workload based on the skills and profiles of the resources (as per his experiences in US). But over time he lowered his expectations about the productivity. While part of the same was linked to his inadequate experience in estimating productivity difference between onsite and offshore delivery, he felt “the resources pretend differently from what they deliver and/or can deliver and the reality is that they do not question us at the time of work assignment. At the end of the day, the work remains incomplete”.
I was surprised that Rob could realise the issue sitting miles away, but it did not strike me hard earlier. Possibly because I have been brought up in the environment of “thoda bahut aisa chalta hai!”
(The view expressed by the author is personal)
Pretence and Reality
(May 2018)