The Light of Other Days

I have a sense of urgency in writing and finishing this article that I have not experienced in earlier ones. I want to complete this one before I start my new assignment in a couple of days. And the reason is simple - I do not want to have my thoughts and emotions at this juncture tainted by my experiences in the new job. I want to diarize my thoughts as of today, so that a few years down the road, I will understand and maybe refresh the motivations and drivers which led me to disrupt my life so immensely. To add to that is also the fact, that I do not know when next I will get the time to pen a few lines and post the same. What follows is a dump of many personal conversations, and contents of my farewell speeches, which to a large extent addressed the questions revolving around my decision to leave my previous employer.

I did mention in my farewell speech in the office on Sep 11th that this was probably the single most difficult decision I have taken in my life. After almost 14 years in an organisation, and especially one so benign, it takes quite a bit of courage and maybe a bit of madness to voluntarily take the leap. Over the last 3 months of my notice period I have vacillated from excitement about the future on one end, to abject fear and disbelief at the other. And as my thoughts have fluctuated, so have my responses to queries raised, about any regrets vis a vis my decision. Some days I would have absolute clarity and conviction about my decision, and on others grave doubts.

As this continued, I gave a lot of thought to these swings, to better understand the underlying factors, and realized that working in any organisation, impacts two very distinct spheres in your life - the personal and the professional. And the consequences of my decision on these two spheres being very different, resulted in my confusion. On the personal front, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have regrets. To sever the ties and relationships built up over so many years, to walk away from the credibility built up, the knowledge base and the comfort zone within which I functioned would be difficult. To add to that were factors very important to me, like my lunch time exercise routine, the bi-weekly exercise classes, the flexible working hours, the ability to telecommute at will, and very little if no overtime, which would be hard to replace. Also difficult to replicate anywhere else would be the twice a day official tea breaks with the eclectic discussions ranging from cricket to politics, with colleagues who were more like friends, and the feeling of entering the office every morning as if I am stepping into my home away from home. The aforementioned factors, combined with the absence of work related pressure made it into a working utopia. All of these perks and many more would be difficult to wean myself away from.

I was always of the belief that friends were like wine - the good ones were of older vintage. My wife and I have disagreed on this point often over the years. She was always of the view that good friends come into your life at all times, and there is no minimum time commitment that forges a relationship. There is no de-minimus period required to grow the bonds of friendship. Reflecting now on the friends that I have acquired in the last few years, I know that I was completely wrong. In the last few years I have been privileged enough to have developed relationships that I would hope to nurture well into the future. And it is not only the depth of these friendships, but also the quantum that surprises me. To have touched so many people and to be touched by so many back is no small feat. The affection and support extended to me has been overwhelming, and having basked in them in the last few days, reminds me of the old Julie Andrews song - somewhere in my youth or childhood; I must have done something good - to deserve the same.

So from a personal point of view, taking the above into consideration, it was pretty obvious that I would have grave doubts about my decision to move on.

Then of course there is the professional sphere, the more I think of which, makes me realize that I should have walked away a long time ago. I had been treading my way towards a professional dead-end for a long time, and continued to do so despite knowing this. There is no one to blame but myself. My subconscious decision earlier on, and a very conscious one now, to stay on in Dubai, which is home to me and my family, has cost me dear in terms of career. Mobility and a varied geographic experience are highly valued (rightfully so) commodities in a multinational organisation, and having neither, does put a brake on ones progression. There was always the option to coast along, to carry on doing non-jobs till I decided what else I would like to do. But the problem with that is that though one can reconcile one’s self to career suicide, what becomes difficult to accept, as time goes along, is the feeling of becoming irrelevant. As newer and younger talent comes along, you start to be perceived as a has-been, a unique entity, more to be tolerated and endured rather than respected. You become the veteran, the old timer, the keeper of corporate trivia. You are seen as a repository of information, to be accessed at will. As the fount of historical information, it becomes convenient to direct every question at you, and your own questions, more often than not, are also left to you.

As I tried to plot my (corporate) life ahead, I foresaw only a graveyard of my career in the future. I saw a long sequence of uninteresting, tedious and unchallenging roles taking me all the way to oblivion. Retirement would also be a pipedream as the company’s patience with my ilk would get thinner by the day. Retirement is not a feasible option anymore, it is an anachronism in this day and age, and the number of people who will be able to enjoy that luxury is dwindling by the day.

Organizational changes over the last few years have made it almost impossible to envision interesting jobs in the future. Outsourcing of IT, Finance and HR jobs, frequent business restructures, cutbacks, disposal of assets and facilities, increases in specialist roles and silos within functions, all now converge towards tedium. Upcoming jobs are attractive to a certain type of personality, but not to professionals who cut their teeth in jobs that demanded a wide variety of experience and skill sets. Senior management quite vehemently deny staff’s pushback that in the new world their jobs will be narrower in scope and content and hence uninteresting. In point of fact their continuous propaganda about a future with very challenging and interesting roles only heightens the uneasiness in the proletariat. Personally, I have found it increasingly difficult to identify any roles that would whet my appetite, and keep me motivated.

It is quite ironical that an organisation that on one hand empowers its people so much on the personal front, can on the other hand makes it so difficult for them to get on with their work. Employees are allowed to keep their own timings, their expenses claims are self approved, granting of leave is unfettered, and no expense is spared to tackle any work related stress. But to get work done, the employee has to jump through all sorts of hoops and hurdles. Consensus building and convening meetings to take even minor decisions are the order of the day, and to implement a pragmatic solution involves getting buy-in from a huge multiplicity of stakeholders. Systemic incompetence and ineptitude are masked by a proliferation of specialists whose assent is required to make fundamental and basic decisions. Business urgencies are shrugged off, by citing other priorities, and if one is more insistent in asking for a decision, then one gets mired in a host of queries and clarifications to get the approval, thereby delaying the process anyway. Job authorities over the years have been whittled down, and with the break-up of the organisation into global business divisions and within those divisions into separate units, responsibilities are diminished in tandem. Just as an example within my business, to take a simple decision would require the assent of 4 separate Finance Managers, not counting my own line.

The focus on processes rather than on objectives, the lack of accountability, the creation of complexities to hide inefficiencies, make a great organisation particularly vulnerable. It was time for me to stop the petty griping, to stem the involuntary sarcasm at every new initiative, and more worryingly to cut off the negative impact of any corrosive influence on newer staff members. It was time for me to vote with my feet. It was time to leave with dignity rather than wait to get pushed out without grace.

Two Plus Two Equals Five

Dear reader, before you start reading this article, let me caution you that though this is one of my shorter articles (in words), the topic being rather dry, may make it seem much longer. I do apologise for that.

Serving out my notice period has allowed me a lot of time to reflect and think about terminations, resignations and corporate moves of similar ilk. Three months is a long time by any standard and as my email traffic slowly grinds down, my disposable time has proportionately increased. I have spent a good bit of that time talking and discussing corporations, human capital and organisations facing brain drain, with my office colleagues. What is commonly agreed is that just like its customer base, it is much more expensive for an organisation to replace people, than it is to retain its talent. Of course when we talk of costs, I had been thinking in (one-dimensional) terms of money and the cash cost of replacement. However, what I have come to understand, is that the real cost to the organisation is much more than just financial.

There are three types of leavers, the ones who evoke the “good riddance” emotion, some others who get the “who was he anyway?” response, and finally the ones who get the “Oh no” reaction. For good forms sake, I will be referring to the “Oh no” category from now on. Every time a good resource leaves a high performing team, it destabilizes the Team and the processes they handled. It raises serious questions in the minds of the people left behind, and very often creates a domino effect in terms of others also wanting or thinking of moving on. Even though they might not actually leave, there is a discernable tilt towards looking around them and outside, or weighing options, which then could lead to something more concrete. Team dynamics do not always follow corporate hierarchies and organigrams, and hence the loss of a valued team member or two, suddenly precipitates a sense of urgency in the others to join them in showing their retreating backs.

Then there is also the residual de-motivation caused by people moving and the consequential shift in the balance of power. Every time a person leaves, it creates a wake of turbulence in the delicate balance of power in the team. New people have to fit in, seniors try to jockey for more power, and alignments are re-grafted. People in the peripheries, who get caught in the eddies of these currents, very often feel helpless as they are tossed around. Work gets reassigned, and very often the weakest (most junior?) people bear the brunt of it. New members have to make their mark, show their worth and one way to do so is to question existing processes and practices. In their enthusiasm to prove their mettle they will take on more than they can chew, and if by chance they have staff reporting to them, then these poor people will have to step up to the plate, so that their line manager can preen in front of his boss, taking the credit for the home-runs. Quite often more senior members of the team, will grab the opportunity, created by the vacuum, to pass on work to the new unsuspecting member, with similar consequences.

Then comes the actual impact of the resignation, as the loss of intangible knowledge of the incumbent is difficult to replace immediately. Handovers in this modern age are a joke. Very often, they are just references to available reports and notes, and access to stored electronic archives, which if the new joiner were to actually try to read and digest, would probably take years. The built up store of information, the unconscious competence, which comes from knowing how things work and where the levers are, is actually irreplaceable. The longer the tenure of the person parting ways, the more the storehouse of information that walks out the door with them.

Relationships with internal stakeholders, customers, and suppliers that have been forged over years of association cannot be easily replicated either. Relationships are not about positions and titles, they are more about personalities. Relationships are the lubricant in the engine of business, and the coarser the mix the more friction and heat it generates. Beyond a point the engine overheats and the consequences are felt all the way to the bottom-line. Unlike lubricants however, where competing brands have more or less the same ingredients, human dynamics cannot be easily replaced or interchanged.

The other hidden cost comes from the fact that the replacement is almost never ever, like for like. I have seen this so many times in this organisation, that in my mind it is almost a rule. In their unfettered enthusiasm to foster talent and groom future leaders, the replacement is always a bit greener around the ears, a bit younger and also weighted far above his worth. Quotas for gender, race, color and nationalities adds to the overall cost of operations. The incumbent walking away was almost always, either more experienced or more qualified, making the change a steeper climb in organisation terms.

This is a far cry from the normal cost of replacement that we hear about. However the above costs are rarely, if ever, borne by the leadership. As the more senior managers play at being Gods, indulging their whims in changing structures and reporting lines on pieces of paper, it is the people below the change-line, who have to step up their game. The inefficiencies of having a new kid on the block or new reporting lines, are absorbed as they always are, by the mules in the organisation. The mules are the bedrock of any organisation, the ones who are neither high-fliers nor upwardly mobile. They provide the organisation with stability through longer tenures at each position. They are the silent downtrodden or overlooked majority, the grunts, whose only purpose is to serve as footstools for the upwardly mobile to step on, on their way up.

In management speak, the performance of good teams is more than the sum of its parts, i.e. two plus two equals five. But regular turnover and changes in the composition of a team results in sub-optimal performance, i.e. two plus two, more often than not, equals three.