ADMINISTRATIVE CULTURE
Posted by bmhegde on 1
Culture is what one does when no one is looking.Administrative culture, therefore, is what the administrator does when no one is looking. What are my qualifications to write this piece? I have no MBA from India or abroad, nor have I been to any administrative training programmes,which abound around us these days. I have trained myself as a physician- a doctor that needs to unravel the mysteries of the human mind, if he wants to help people in distress. Most of the time the distress, physical or otherwise, arises in the human mind. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician-teacher turned great American writer once wrote that “to be a good writer one would be better off being trained as a doctor since it is the doctor that gets to understand human nature almost bare.”
I have been at the bottom of the ladder when I joined the teaching faculty in a medical school and was at the receiving end of my superiors’ good and bad administrative fallouts. This was my best training to be a good administrator as none of the MBA programmes could give one that many years of hands on experience in receiving the wrong end of the administrative stick. After decades of that experience I got an opportunity to be an administrator myself at the junior level as the Head of a department to begin with and later as the head of an institution with a large staff and student body. Concurrently, I was at the receiving end of the management’s dictates. This is a very special position where you have the experience of give and take both ways. Eventually, I have been the Vice Chancellor of one of the prestigious Indian Universities in India for the last four years. I have also been the Chairman of India’s greatest institution of culture, the Bharathiya Vidya Bhavan’s Mangalore Kendra, for the last thirty years.
I feel that I have a large pool of personal experience, anubhooti, in the field of administration in the last four decades. I would like to call it anubhooti instead of anubhava. Anubhooti is one’s transformation with one’s experience good or bad. I have always been true to my conscience in trying to correct my faults all through my life. Faults I had plenty but hope that I have improved over the years. This morning, after having had the President of India visit us in our campus, I had an urge to put my thoughts on administration into words so that someone else interested in it might get some benefit from my joys and sorrows. This could help shorten the learning curve for others that all of us go through in all walks of life, administration being no exception.
Good administrator has been a good sub-ordinate:
The best training to be a good and humane administrator is to have been a good subordinate worker for a good number of years either in the same organization or elsewhere. No one, howsoever intelligent he/she is, or whatever training one had, would become a good administrator de novo in any position. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches and only a worker knows where it hurts to do that hard work. Even large family concerns like the Fords and the Tatas have this rule. Their heirs would have to have training on the floor like any ordinary worker before they climb the ladder as administrators in their family empires. This, I feel, is the best practice. I have been a strong advocate of a new practice in medical schools where every newly qualified doctor is admitted as a patient in the same hospital to undergo most, if not all, the tests that he/she would be ordering for the hapless patients all his/her life. If, on the contrary, the medical student falls ill, he/she could be exempted from the above fake encounter with illness. The student would then have first hand knowledge of being a patient: he/she would understand human pain and suffering much better. How could one understand pain in the setting of medical teaching that we give in the conventional set up as pain can not be seen but only e felt? Pain, like God, is never seen but always felt when in trouble. Trouble over, God is forgotten and pain slighted. This analogy fits the bill well for administrators as well.
Manage from the heart as well:
American training for administrators makes them hard-headed robots without any compassion for others. This is one of the reasons why many American corporations have been found to use unethical means to make money. Drug barons, tobacco giants and the alcohol manufacturers come into this net.A recent report in the leading medical journal, the British Medical Journal reveals how large drug companies “buy” doctors to invent newer diseases to sell their drugs with dubious track records and then plant their own new definitions of diseases and their need for drug treatment. They have been shown to invent newer wrong indications for older drugs to enhance their market share. This is representative of American business management style that is taught to students of business management!
If India wants to progress; Indians will have to get out of this American mindset in every walk of life. While Americans want to look to eastern cultures, mainly Indian and Chinese, to solve their problems and their epidemics of suicides and divorce, we Indians are aping them in their methods to suffer the same fate in the not too distant future. It is estimated that an American child sees crime, on an average, ninety percent of the television time that the child is permitted. That is one of the important reasons why even high school kids settle their daily quarrels with their parents’ guns. One thousand serious crimes were committed by school children against their peers and teachers in one year, with more than a dozen homicides in addition. This kind of heartless culture permeates into their management training as well in no small measure.
Indians should learn the ancient methods of management where the heart gains superiority over the head in matters of decisions about subordinates. It is said that a good administrator must be like a pregnant woman. Pregnant mother would take even a bitter pill if it were good for the child in the womb. A good manager should be able to do the same for the good of his subordinates. It is not a tall order if you understand the benefits thus gained on the long run. This would make the administrator command respect while the American method only demands respect. I have enjoyed life as an administrator with this strategy. Of course there are many that would mistake this kindness for weakness and try to exploit the situation. Administrators should be shrewd enough to recognize this and be on guard against that kind of exploitation. Jesus Christ had a good administrative formula for his disciples. “Be ye, therefore, wise like a serpent but harmless like a dove.” It is the best combination of humility with militancy for administrators. I follow this dictum as the real mantra of administration and have benefited a lot from that habit. Administrators should combine a strong head with a large heart to enjoy all weathers of life-the heat of summer, the warmth of winter and the cold of winter!
Enthusiasm is the key to success:
En theos, God within, is the root of the word enthusiasm.Man likes to be appreciated to be enthused to work better in any field. The essence of the Gayathri Mantra is prachodayeth (encouragement). The soul that has lost its enthusiasm is the biggest liability to any organization. Many administrators do not learn to have this good habit of encouraging good workers and motivating them through that. They are trained to find fault. Human psychology is such that a pleasant “well lit” engram of someone patting you on the back is preserved carefully in the association area of the brain while the unpleasant “ill lit” engram is stored away not to be seen again. In practical terms this boils down to getting better quality work from a sub-ordinate when the administrator makes it a habit to appreciate even small contributions of workers instead of finding fault at every step. Mistakes we all make.The pleasant engram gives more energy and happiness to man and makes him repeat similar action to get more such encomiums. The administrator should know this human physiology to enthuse his/her workers to do better. My experience has been that most of them use the other method of criticizing people for petty mistakes and very few that I have met in life have understood the value of enthusing their colleagues. I have personally used this technique to get better results.
Vishaye Vasaakthaha:
This is the beautiful motto of the mother of all medical wisdoms, Ayurveda, to preserve health. The literal meaning of those words is to post-judge any issue. Many administrators, in my opinion, take knee jerk decisions only to repent later. I used to do that in the past when I was still young both in age and administration. I have learnt this trick, by painful anubhooti, to sit back relax, take a couple of deep breaths before taking any decision. I was surprised how easily this method gives a newer perspective to the whole issue and makes decision making easier and the end result beneficial to the organization. To cap it, it gives peace of mind to the administrator himself.
Altruism:
The name “mankind””is derived from the concept that man should be kind to another man is my opinion. I have not analyzed Samuel Johnson in that regard. In my long experience I have learnt one thing. If an administrator were truly kind to his sub-ordinates he/she would reap the benefits in very large measure. Of course, many bad elements, who are there in every organization, would try to misuse this kindness as one’s weakness, but if one is on the guard one could easily make a distinction and spot such people. The added benefit in that is the ease with which an administrator could separate the wheat from the chaff.When one is genuinely altruistic one could easily be firm at the same time. To succeed in this one should not laugh at, weep at, or hate human action, but try and understand human action. Understanding gives the administrator an insight into the colleague’s problems.
Authenticity:
Authentic human beings are God’s gift to society. They are becoming a rare breed these days and are even threatening to be extinct like the dinosaurs. However, an administrator should try to be authentic in all dealings with colleagues. Authenticity really shows one’s culture. It reveals the person’s deeper recesses. Many administrators, in my long experience, have projected themselves as authentic but their inner core was anything but authentic. This added to their misery. For quick gains administrators have been using the time honoured British technique of divide and rule policy. This would hurt the administrator as well as the organization in the long run. A good administrator is one who should have no gulf between practice and precept. He/she should have the same yardstick for measuring his actions as also that of his subordinate’s. Decisions must be based on the principle that one should treat others, as he/she would like to be treated by others. This is the best way to handle colleagues, superiors as also sub-ordinates.
In conclusion, the best practices for a good administrator are the same that society believes to be ideal qualities of a genuinely good man. Honesty, kindness,