Perspective — A Neglected yet Powerful Management Tool
Early Saturday morning, I was rushing for the store to buy a surprise gift for my kid even before he could wake up and present his first “tooth-fairy” gift. I brought the gift, put it next to his pillow, and was waiting anxiously for him to wake up. After he woke up, the first reaction was mixed with surprise and happiness but the next moment he said “Mom! The tooth fairy hasn’t done much of a good job. Yeah, I like that I got a gift for my broken tooth, but I already have so many action figures (Avengers to be specific). Why one more extra? Ahh, a game or a puzzle would have been better!”. The reaction took away all my enthusiasm, but after some time I realized my mistake. I thought he loved his Avengers, so he would love to get another one, but it turned out to be my fallacy. Although, I had the correct sense of idea to buy a “tooth-fairy” gift but still even with the best of my efforts I was doomed.
A similar situation can occur in an organization, where the perspective of motivation can differ widely between the employer and the employee. Even with the best of the efforts and intention involved, the employer may not be able to retain the best performing employees. So essentially it is vital to understand the “Perspective of Resources” when managing them irrespective of the process involved — hiring, retaining, and/or terminating. Let’s take another organizational example, where employees are made to swipe-in and swipe-out to mark their attendance and it is mandatory to maintain certain hours (9 hrs. mostly!) irrespective of the kind of project. This method works great when time plays a crucial part of the job like shift-jobs or when an employee had to communicate mostly with people in other time zones but it might not work for other sets of employees who associate this time-boundary as a factor limiting their potential to work. During the hiring process, if such critical factors are not informed to the prospective candidate or conversely if the perspective of the candidate is not properly captured it becomes tough to retain the candidate even when there are unmatched perks associated. And if a dissatisfied employee is somehow retained or they chose to continue then also it is not in favor of the organization. As the focal point of the employee will change from outstanding performance to time-bounded goal accomplishments. This will block them to out-perform or excel in their performances and thus would hamper the overall growth of employees, projects, and organization.
It is a popular belief that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so how the same object stays beautiful for one and does not carry much significance for another? Perspective changes it all. We all observe things, feel a certain kind in a certain situation based on our experiential learning throughout our life. It is of utmost importance for leaders to understand what kind of perspective an employee brings into the organization. This perspective is built upon the value system which they had been building and carrying along all through the way and on the belief system that they hold within themselves to prioritize those values. In other words, few employees hold a strong sense of loyalty value system and rank it the highest while others may rank learning, or growth, or promotion and/or money as the crucial factor. Although, it is not easy to decode nonetheless it is not even impossible. Today we know that many organizations have adopted in their hiring process where they quiz the candidate through certain applications, games, or answer to some questionnaires to help them understand the perspective of a potential candidate and how well do they tune with the organization’s value and culture. But do they quiz their present employee in a span of supposing every 2 years to understand if there had been any shift in their perspective? Like an organization can remodel itself in the context of changes happening in the market, customer demands, or even technological shifts, in a similar fashion even an employee can change their perspective in the context of their priority.
Here, we come to our next important question ‘Can Perspective change?’, and if yes, does it happen unknowingly, or can it be done on purpose? These are important questions and any organizational leadership should be aware of this fact. As I stated earlier, perspective is slowly built based on the experiential learning we live through our life. As we dive deeper into our experiences, our learning changes our perspective and so does our priority. For instance, the employee who was hired as a recent grad with learning as the most important factor for his career could have a paradigm shift from learning to money-making after gaining some amount of experience. Or there could be a big perspective change from career-oriented to family-oriented after a certain age so the work-life balance would rank at a higher priority than money. These factors should be considered, and this perspective shift should be always kept under the monitor and not only during the hiring process. This helps the employee to feel connected with their organization and empowers them to stay motivated during the entire tenure served within the organization. In such cases, Mondays are never blue.
Now, let’s focus on How to change our perspective when we want. Sometimes, an employee is satisfied with the culture, values, perks of an organization but still feels disconnected or does not find any motivating factor to progress ahead. In such a case, even the management will fail to decode the perspective of the employee. But still, it remains important for an organization to continue assessing the employee on a gradient scale of various factors to understand their perspective. This may not always bring the desired outcome, but a continuous effort could help to analyze the situation better — whether it is a case of few disjoint sets of employees or a common phenomenon exhibited by certain employees. Organizations should consider providing training, workshops, sessions about their business values to all the employees to make sure that they remain aligned to the organizational values. This should not be done to preach instead the keyword is Practice. The same values should be practiced across the organizations so that there remains a possibility that the experiential learning within the organization slowly remodels the employee’s perspective.
To summate, bilateral communication of perspective should always be maintained between the employer and employee. At the hiring stage — to hire the most appropriate candidate, at retaining stage — to maintain the employee’s same motivation and passion that was displayed during the hiring process, and at terminating stage — to take it as feedback from the employee.