LE03

X or Y?

Today I learnt what actually makes managers so important and critical in an organisation during the course of the discussion on Theory X and Theory Y managers or in simpler words X can be treated as pessimists and Y optimists. X are the ones who consider their employees to be lazy and order them on everything they do without giving them any flexibility to decide what they want to do thereby crippling innovation while Y have complete faith in their employees and encourage them to achieve things which they otherwise think as not achievable.

Now, we realized 4 scenarios can arise out of this all of which I have witnessed before.The first two scenarios outline theory X managers

 

Scenario 1: Employees are lazy and manager thinks they are lazy

In engineering every student is required to do a final year project. A lot of students come to my previous company for the same. One batch of these students were working under my present manager and even after a month they weren't able to have any headway because they weren't spending enough time on the task and my manager realized the same and started commanding them to do things by spoon feeding them.

Scenario 2: Employees are hardworking and manager thinks they are lazy

A few of my friends in my previous company used to work really hard to meet the deadlines and complete the project but their manager saw it as incompetence in them for taking so much time to finish the task and used to constantly rebuke them saying they were not efficient enough.


The next two scenarios show theory Y managers

 

Scenario 3: Employees are lazy and manager thinks they are hardworking

The best example I can associate with this is the cricket world cup T20 win by India in 2007 and India's world cup win in the year 1983 when the BCCI itself didn't think that they could do much so here BCCI played the role of theory X manager while the captains Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Kapil Dev placed complete faith in the players, most of whom were inexperienced when it came to playing at an international level, and led them to victories so here they become theory Y managers.
Another example for the same is something that's happened with me. when I started my professional carrier my manager handed a complete functional development project to me and a couple of my other teammates who were all freshers. Normally freshers were given maintenance and testing tasks initially and then slowly given the complete functional development tasks. This is mainly because the managers don't think that the freshers are competent and hardworking enough to handle such tough projects. But my manager turned out to be a theory Y manager and placed his faith in us.

Scenario 4: Employees are hardworking and manager thinks they are hardworking

Towards the end of my tenure in my last company my manager had been changed and the new manager was taking up the role for the first time. Normally, when people take up the role of managers for the first time they get cynical about their teams abilities and always tend to underestimate them bu on the contrary my new manager continued to place the same trust and faith in us as our old manager.

After having observed all the above scenarios Scenario 2 looks the most dangerous because motivated and hardworking employees would get demotivated with a theory X manager and end up quitting the company so the company loses out on good employees.

GOALS

Goals are endpoints of something we desire. We then had an exercise on deciding which should be higher between goal set, potential, achievable performance or actual performance.

My order for the same was Goal set> Potential> Achievable Performance> Actual Performance
the reason being any compnay would set very high goals for the employees so that they can at-least accomplish a part of it. It's similar to the famous proverb, "Aim for starts so that you can reach the moon". Since the organization wants the best results they would ensure that the goal set is beyond the potential as well.
Ex: To set a goal of finishing a 100m ace within 7 mins for Usain Bolt even though human potential is a lot lesser. And then the achievable performance would be greater than actual because of wastage of time which might cannot be calculated accurately initially during planning.
But later after discussions it turned out that the order should have been
Potential> Goal Set> Actual Performance> Achievable Performance
which made sense because any persons potential is limitless.
Ex: No One had thought someone can score a 100 tons in cricket 20 years back but now it's happened which makes potential the largest.
Actual performance would be better than achievable because of managers who bring in effectiveness. And all these values keep increasing all the time after every iteration as people get better and better.
This act of placing very high goals is also known as Pygmalion effect. This was a term that even I wasn't familiar with until recently but we see this everywhere. Ex: Coaching Institutes expect their candidates to get 100 percentile in CAT so that the students perform better.

LE01&02

Here I am writing my first blog only because it's a part of my assignment which brings me to the topic for this blog, the class on Principles of Organisation and Management. Just when I was expecting a serious looking professor,meaning only business walk into the room I see a guy with a broad smile walk in. He starts off with a couple of jokes and then starts pulling out some toys which most of us have never seen before. And then he starts explaining physics using one of them. Now, I'm a little surprised regarding the course content and then he says that the toys are meant to be sold and talks about how everyone should be made self reliant even school kids. And then it falls into place, he was trying to emphasis the value of self reliance in us and was trying to motivate us to become entrepreneurs.

So far having been brought up with the sole purpose of being expected to study while studying this was a change in perspective i.e. being expected to earn as well to fulfill all our daily needs. After this he went on to show how much we really were investing over the next two years and that's when it dawned on me that what he was saying was true and we should earn what we spend. But the question is HOW?

Well, I haven't yet decided on the HOW yet but I'm motivated enough to take the risks and take up entrepreneurship. The session then depicted the need for teamwork, for it is only when we work in a team that the output of the company can be generated faster and multiplied while distributing the responsibility among everyone.

The session ended with a game to build a tower of cubes for which people were asked to bid money just to try, again the purpose, 'One should be ready to take risks as a manager'. Now, I was beginning to like this MBA course more and more. This was a huge change from what I saw in my schools and colleges where most of us are expected to just listen and there has never been enough motivation to participate in the class. The purpose of the game was to emphasis on the Excellence. By Excellence I mean, something that's extraordinary and everyone wants to have it and can have it.

This Excellence comprises two components Efficiency and Effectiveness. By Efficiency I mean the quality of work done by the doer which in this case was building the tower i.e. the tower should be stable, it shouldn't collapse after sometime. To maintain this Efficiency the person tries to limit the no. of cubes used but here comes Effectiveness i.e. the no. of cubes are made optimum while maintaining the efficiency. When both these components become maximum possible we get Excellence i.e. something outstanding and difficult to surpass. Relating this game to that of an organizational working, the managers imbibe Effectiveness while the other workers or employees are responsible for the Efficiency. Only when both these forces combine mutually can one get Excellence. Ex. During the initial days of Apple, Steve jobs brought in the Effectiveness and Steve Wozniak the Efficiency and today it portrays Excellence.

I always thought excellence came from the one doing the task i.e. in the above example Wozniak because it was his brains which implemented it all but after the session I realized that without Steve Jobs, wozniak would have never been able to do it. In the nutshell, managers are the ones who bring in Excellence and Apple would have existed even without Wozniak but not vice-versa.