HUMAN SPIRIT AT WORK
V. Nilakant
A cognitive psychologist, poses the following problem:
Please count the number of F’s in the following paragraph:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED
WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
How many F’s are there?
Did you, as most people do, count only three? There are six! There are, perhaps, credible
scholarly explanations offered by cognitive psychologists as to why people commonly make
this mistake. For me, however, the phenomenon illustrates a common human tendency
among people for selective attention. We usually pay attention to some things and ignore
others. I believe that most of us pay attention to concrete, tangible things and ignore
intangible aspects of the world around us. We find it relatively easy to focus our attention on
things that are perceptible, apparent, visible, manifest, and discernible. Intangible refers to
those things that are not visible, apparent or manifest. It includes things that are hidden from
our senses. A story from an article in the Harvard Business Review (Kim, Chan W. and Mauborgne,
Renee A. (1992) “Parables of Leadership”, Harvard Business Review, July - August, p. 124) illustrates this idea:
A prince is sent to the great sage to be educated on the basics of being a good ruler. The
master sends his young student to the forest and tells him to return after hearing all the
sounds of the forest. At the end of his assignment, the prince enthusiastically recounts the
sounds of the cuckoos singing, the leaves rustling, the hummingbirds humming, the crickets
chirping, the grass blowing, the bees buzzing and the wind whispering and howling. But the
master is not satisfied with the answer and sends his student back to the forest to listen
more intently. For days and nights on end, the young prince sits alone in the forest listening.
But he hears no new sounds. One fine morning, he is able to discern some new sounds, and
the feeling of enlightenment envelops him. He returns to the master and tells him about
hearing the unheard -- the sound of flowers opening, the sound of the sun warming the earth
and the sound of the grass drinking the morning dew. The master nods approvingly and
says: “It is necessary for a ruler to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hear their feelings
uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, complaints not spoken of, in short hear the unheard.
States start to decline when leaders listen only to superficial words and do not hear true
opinions, feelings and desires”. As the story points out, those things that are readily visible
and are convenient to measure quickly grab attention. There are underlying processes of
greater significance, but these are not easily discernible; they are also hard to measure.
This ancient parable has an important lesson for those of us who manage people in
organizations - if you ignore the intangibles, it is likely that you will loose touch with your
organization. Human spirit is nourished by intangibles. What constitute the intangibles in an
organization? The obvious answer is the culture of an organization. However, the culture of
an organization consists of both tangible artefacts and symbols and intangible elements. I
refer to these intangible elements. I propose that these elements are the values that are
practised by the organization’s top managers. Not the values they advocate, but the values
that they practise. As a manager, what you pay attention to reflects what you value. Many
managers value tangible things such as sales, profits, costs, productivity and so on that can
be measured and monitored. They are less comfortable with intangibles such as emotions,
feelings and values. Therefore, they create a context that emphasises efficiency, profits,
performance and productivity. They focus on incentive schemes and new compensation
systems when they should be examining the process of communication within the
organization. When you ignore the intangibles, you usually look for solutions in the wrong
places. Sometimes managers go a step further and mask their real intentions with the right
jargon thereby creating a disconnection between what they say and what they do. Not
surprisingly, many employees feel disengaged because they do not feel valued by the
organization.
Mainstream management training, education and research over-emphasises competencies,
abilities and skills and under-states the importance of values. For instance, popular
management books and countless training programmes hail the importance of listening
skills. Courses on active listening use clever experiential exercises to instil this crucial skill in
managers. If you really think about it, is listening a skill to be developed or does it reflect an
underlying value? If you don’t value your subordinates or respect them, would you listen to
them? You might demonstrate the right techniques of active listening, but are you really
listening? Isn’t it obvious that if you cared for others and respected them, you are more likely
to listen to them? In our achievement-oriented society, we often overlook the foundation and
focus on the superstructure. Values constitute the foundation and essence of organisations.
If the foundation is weak or shaky, the superstructure is unlikely to endure. If the foundation
is strong, the superstructure will survive despite the shortage of resources, inadequate
training and strong competition. The human spirit thrives in organisations that respect
humanity.
One of the more thoughtful and provocative books on organisational change to be published
in recent years is the one by David Hurst (Hurst, David K. 1995 Crisis and Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of
Organisational Change. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School). Hurst’s book is about renewing
organisations - changing a performing organisation into a learning organisation by restoring
the excitement, emotional commitment, and values, which he believes, are missing in large
organisations. Hurst questions the model of rationality and control that underlies modern
management thinking. We tend to view management action as based on purpose and
rationality. Yet, according to Hurst, rational action is only one of three forms of managerial
action. Hurst urges managers to expand their notion of action beyond rational action. He
argues that organisational change requires not means-end rationality but values-based
rationality. In values-based rationality action is taken not because it is a means to achieve
certain technical goals but because the action is seen as intrinsically valuable. According to
him: It is the absence of means-end rationality and “clear goals” from these other kinds of
rational activities that allows outcomes to be creative, that permits novelty to emerge.
How can we create organizations that permit people to be fully engaged? How can we
create contexts that nourish the human spirit? I propose that we start paying attention to
values that engage the heart – such as respect, integrity, tolerance, justice and compassion.