Muhammad Armghan Aized

I remember one of my managers telling me once at a very early stage in my professional career, “We always complain about our society, but we cannot do much about it. We may not be able to change the world, but we can create an organization where individuals are being respected and rewarded fairly, and can create a non biased culture for people who come from different races, religions and genders.” It was the time when I was going through my orientation to professional world after finishing my school. I try to practice and preach this philosophy to others wherever I go. I have never found anyone disagreeing with me because everyone believes that this is the prime responsibility of an organization, yet I found only a few managers actually helping to make this happen.

One of the reasons why we remain at a failure to cultivate a culture of recognition and support in our organization is the behavior that we are adapting from our society. An organization is a society within a society. Whatever happens in the society affects different aspects of the organization. It affects its business arena as well as the organization itself. Unfortunately our socioeconomic setup does not allow us to appreciate many things which are happening around us rather we have a habit of becoming suspicious about things. We suspect our political leadership, our government, our media, our agencies, as well as our own fellow citizen. We choose topics as well as personalities just to criticize them. We find it hard to recognize the positive things and to appreciate people for the jobs they have done right.

Those managers/leaders who want to create a different organization around them, work intelligently. They care about their people, find time to appreciate them, provide positive feedback to the team and find reasons to celebrate small achievements of their people. They are leaders instead of managers.

Why HR Managers Fail To Deliver?

One of the main reasons that why most of the managers react fail to achieve this is that most of them believe that appreciation and recognition is organization’s job. They forget the old adage “people work for people” and not for the organizations.

There are certain psychological barriers which prevent an organization from building a culture of appreciation, such as:

Taking the credit syndrome

Most of the managers don’t allow their teams to take the credit. This is the most common weakness among all managers. It does not benefit the managers at all, it rather creates unhealthy conflicts. Managers cannot continue to enjoy this culture for a long time because it eventually frustrates the team and resultantly the performance of the employees goes down. The manager becomes a victim of his own style.

Someone else will snatch my job

This is the greatest fear that the weak managers have in their minds (quite common in this part of the world). I have supervised many people, many intelligent people indeed, without having any fear of this kind. No one could ever eat up my job. A manager is doing a big favor to himself by encouraging and developing his people because a developed and motivated team makes the job of the manager much easier. Many professional organizations consider a person for promotion only when the manger has developed his successor.

Appreciation is unnecessary

It’s not money all the time which motivates people; sometimes a simple “Pat on the back” does a better job. Not always does one have to organize a big event or bestow prizes and bonuses to motivate the employees. Appreciation and recognition should be a part of the corporate culture. It should happen spontaneously. If a manager has to make a lot of efforts to recognize an individual, there must be something wrong either with the culture of the organization or with the approach of that manager.

Bottom Line

It’s not the company brand, products, machinery, or the financial resources; rather it is the people who can actually make or break a company. Unfortunately not many organizations as well as managers are realizing the potential of this important resource (humans). Those organizations which have discovered the truth about taking care of their people have been excelling in all arenas, since their people are taking good care of their business.

Taking care of people is not at all difficult or complicated. The first thing that has to be done is to build an environment of trust and to believe in the people who work for you. Belief in the intentions as well as the capabilities of an individual is a must in building a winning culture. A manager’s job is to energize his team to achieve the best of the people working for him. People work better when they are empowered and motivated. The rule of ‘kick in the back’ does not work well in the business world any longer. By kicking people in the back one can push them away or make them move to another organization but cannot motivate them to do the task well. Managers are required to work more on creating an environment where employee feel self motivated to take care of the business.

Muhammad Armghan Aized is the Head of Human Resources at Ferozsons Laboratories Ltd

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