6 September 2018, Kathmandu
I have got fascinated, albeit painfully, by the captioned words aired on Twitter to explain the mercurial behavior and cruelty of late Steve Jobs, the founder, and CEO of Apple Inc., towards his first daughter Lisa Brennan Jobs.
These words also have value for explaining the cruelty of the owners, CEOs, and bosses towards their subordinates. The cruelty and abuse is the corporate world is very common and experienced by a large number of employees. it is a harrowing, yet true, reality which occurs at repeated and regular intervals in the career of most people in Nepal.
I vividly recall the plethora of incidents during my initial years in the corporate world when I and many of my colleagues were exposed to the mercurial cruelty of bosses, finally leading to abuse as time passed by, and we were taken very casually by them in the long term.
When will the people really grow up? Will the corporate honchos ever stop inflicting wounds upon hapless subordinates? When is it that people exercising power start to go evil? When will the present day management practitioners really learn proper lessons in organizational behavior?
These were some of the questions that got into my mind as I tried to rationalize and explain many past events that have happened in my life as well as in the career of many of my friends. As I continue the journey in the corporate world, I still see abuses being hurled at my fellow colleagues and subordinates by their bosses.
The common phenomenon which even a casual observer can note in the corporate world in this country is that respect, affection, true teamwork, and happiness at the workplace are alien concepts. Cruelty and abuses are the defining features in Nepalese corporates. Indeed sad, but true.
Work, that is the given tasks and assigned duty doesn’t seem satisfying. Gradually the worker starts to develop higher competecy and begins to derive kind of a satisfaction from the quality and expertise with which he executed the job. However, there is no respite for the worker even then. He has still hurled abuses for being “inadequate”.
Imagine the type of anger and resentment that such an employee feels when his or her pride and self-satisfaction are insensitively mauled by the bosses. Despite expertly carrying out work to perfection, the work by employees does not seem to be ever “adequate” to the employers.
Even though the employees like to conceal their psychological wounds of the past, the wounds move to the forefront of the mind time and again and in very strange sort of ways. It seems that the workers are fated to be shouted at or abused. Their abilities are perpetually questioned. Consequently, they just feel like rebelling or fighting back against those who hurl abuses unendingly.
For those in the lower rungs of the management ladder, they have usually no way to see the abuses felt by those people who are wearing the hat of a CEO. For the CEO, however, it is relatively easy to put himself in the shoes of the lower ranked employees and understand the abuse and pain.
“Be a little careful with the power you have” is the all I have to say to those who occupy top management positions. The words of Spiderman in a Hollywood movie are deeply etched in my mind when he is reminded of the character playing his uncle: “With great power come great responsibilities”. But I strongly feel and have been acutely aware that hardly anyone in the corporate world bothers about this sagacious advice.
It is a general human tendency to copy behavioral patterns. We tend to copy the ways in which we ourselves get treated. If abuses are what we have got and accumulated over a period of time, more often than not we ourselves become abusive to others, especually when we climb up the corporate ladder, or whenver we think that we have an upper hand in a transaction.
Worse, we beccome more and more abusive to people in lowest rungs of a corporate world. It has been observed that the learned abusive bahaviour gradually, and ultimately, trickles down to our family members at home.
Now the person finds himself totally enveloped by a vicious circle of abuse. The whole world becomes abusive to each other.
I wonder if the reader is getting the point I want to drive home? Are you already a victim of abuse or are you already an offender?
Just look back and see if you have been abused at regular intervals, or you are in a kind of heaven where you do not face any abusive transactions in various types of relationships at home, or in society, or at work-place?
No wonder if we take a vote on the best managers we have worked under in our lives, they must have the power to convert the moments of awkwardness with their staff into moments of humor or moments when they clear the mutual air by being may wee bit gentle.
I strongly believe that none should be abused or treated harshly in the corporate world. There are quite a few techniques which competent managers can deploy to pass on the messages or get things done by sub-ordinates.
The Nepalese corporate sector is marked by high turnovers of workers, both blue and white collars.
If the HR managers are begging to their sources to bring more new staff to their companies, you can figure out with certainty that the working environment in that particular company is abusive.
The news about such ill-reputed organizations in Nepal travels fast because, hey, it’s a small country. As much as you are watching us we are also watching you as well, and are continually bombarded by news of your organizational abuses through our kind and sharing friends.
If the working environment improves as I have seen in some the organizations I have worked for, the number of talented workers again goes up and also the turnover graph goes down.
It’s not that everything is bad in the corporate sector of Nepal. There certainly are some companies who want to improve but, at the same time, there are a large number of others who never learn any lessons and stay abusive.
To sum up, I strongly believe and would also recommend, that It is high time that the management practitioners in the Nepalese corporate world immediately start learning the best practices in organizational behavior.
(Nischaya Subedi is a Consultant Strategic Manager based in Kathmandu.)
