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.