Hanuman’s Seat and Associate Recognition

Most of us know this famous story from the greatest Indian epic Ramayana. As part of our company’s leadership offsites a few years ago, we invited Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik for a guest lecture and as part of the interaction, I heard an extremely fascinating interpretation of the story of Hanuman to the corporate context from the master mythologist himself. That interpretation stayed with me forever and I could continue to connect it to various aspects of the corporate culture.

Hanuman’s Seat

Lord Hanuman, crossed the mighty sea over to the island kingdom of Lanka in search of Goddess Sita, who was abducted by the asura Ravana. After finding the mother Sita and assuring her of his return with Lord Rama, he creates havoc in Lanka and allows himself to be captured by Ravana’s army. When he was presented before Ravana, Hanuman asks him to have the courtesy of offering a seat to him, as the messenger of Rama. Ravana and his courtiers laughed at him and mockingly asked him to sit on his tail if he so much wanted to sit. To that insult, to everyone’s astonishment, Hanuman elongated his tail, made a towering column with his tail, and jumped up on top of it. Hanuman took a seat higher than Ravana and looked down upon him. The very same Hanuman, who was comfortable to sit right at the feet of Lord Rama in the presence of everyone in Rama’s court behaved so differently in Ravana’s court.

Culture drives the behavior

What caused so much difference in the same person’s behavior and his concern or keen awareness of ‘his seat’ and its level between Rama’s and Ravana’s court? The need for demonstrating higher ‘level’ / prestige and the need to prove something to the other person has seen a sea of change between two environments. While the person in question remaining the same, Is the driver of this behavioral change, what is called the ‘culture’ of each court – Rama’s and Ravana’s?

Cause or Effect?

In that sense, all of us, as Leaders have our own Courts, small or big, don’t we? Our courts vary in size, format, level of authority, geography, nature of work depending on the leadership role we play in our organizations. We have several members on our teams, each one of them having a personality of their own, aspirations, dreams, and goals of their own choice to chase, but having one thing in common – a deep desire to succeed, to be recognized for their work and talent. Everyone is intrinsically motivated to do their best, in their own ways. Yet, we routinely see leaders complaining about having people on their teams with a ‘bad attitude’, ‘bad performer’, ‘uncooperative’, and ‘not a team player’ etc. Were they so, before joining these teams? Will they continue to be so, even after leaving these teams? Who knows, what determines the behavior of people in our teams? Is it the people alone, or is it the impact of the ‘culture’ of their respective courts? Is their behavior ‘the cause’ or ‘the effect’?

Associate Recognition

Moving away from the binary judgment of good and bad of people’s behaviors, let’s look at the entire wide spectrum between the two extremes. In today’s corporate environment, where teamwork is of paramount importance, leaders sometimes find it challenging to invoke the team spirit among their people. Despite all the motivational speeches of the well-meaning-leaders on why teamwork is superior and why people should improve their ‘team orientation’, some leaders continue to see no change in the behavior of their people. At times, there are acts of creating visible evidence of the presence of teamwork, rather than in its spirit and intent. I spent a bit of time reflecting on this phenomenon from my own experience.

Most organizations have recognition plans, rewards, and awards for the associates. When a really tough project is completed with heroic efforts, or as a ‘best practice’ at the end of every year, companies and teams do these ‘star performer’ awards. Top 2% or 5% of the team or company is identified for the star awards and leaders do their best by appropriately locating those ‘stars’ by rank ordering people with as much math-and-science applied as possible. In a situation where the team truly worked together as ‘a team’ to make the project successful, it will be interesting to observe the act of the ‘star awards’ being conferred upon those visible, vocal 5% of the people and it’s effect on the rest of the team. For all the ‘talk’ of the teamwork, the ‘walk’ is not matching the talk when it comes to recognizing those team efforts. An ‘unstated culture’ is silently set where individuals become more important than the team, no matter what was spoken by the leaders.

Individual Recognition or Team Recognition

I am not saying that Individual awards are not appropriate. They have a significant place of their own and they have an appropriate context of their own. Whether we like to believe it or not, there are certain highly motivated, smart, and committed individuals. There are cases where a couple of individuals have taken the most challenging problem upon them and driven it to completion all by themselves. Certain companies have a need to bring innovative solutions driven by the sheer intellect, ingenuity, and creativity of just a small set of individuals. These are clear cases of individual recognition. It is very important to recognize them as ‘individual stars’ for their individual contribution. Just because, the ‘star engineer’ is also part of a team, giving that team a ‘star team’ award just because that idea has become a commercial success will surely be a recipe for disaster in highly demotivating this bright individual.

The dangers of adopting other’s Best Practices

The problem is with following the ‘templates’ naively in the name of emulating best practices. If Google is giving ‘star engineer’ awards for its Emerging technology R&D division, it doesn’t become a ‘best practice’ for every company to do so. In fact, it might just end up being the ‘worst practice’ in its effect on the culture and teamwork where a couple of random engineers from every team are picked for mimicking a Google-like recognition program. As leaders, it is essential to understand the simplest act like a recognition note, an award, or an associate appreciation, the narrative of the appreciation and its subtle-but-sureshot impact on the team and people.

Actions speak louder than the words

Every organization and its leaders, individually and collectively define their ‘culture’ uniquely like the DNA of every human in a unique way (0.1% variation on a rather similar 99.9% base makes all the difference). All this is done mostly unknowingly and silently by the leaders with their actions. People do not pay much attention to the words, although they appear to do so deceivingly. Actions, indeed speak louder than words!!

Next time, I see people in my organization demonstrating the behavior of not being a team player, unnecessarily competitive and seemingly counter-productive, my first question to start with might well be

• Is this the Hanuman behaving the way he did in Ravana’s court or Rama’s court?

• What is my contribution to setting that culture in my team where these behaviors found my team to be a fertile ground?

I love to hear your comments, criticism, and look forward to learning from your insights on this topic.