Category: Emotions/Relationships

Create Passion not Tension

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Employees around us complain of stress and tension. Some of it is self inflicted but most of it is imposed by their managers or leaders. Why do leaders create tension ? I have never understood this phenomenon. It could be due to genuine inability to keep their stress to themselves or their lack of self confidence. It could also reflect on their inability as a leader. Some leaders also believe that they can get the best output from their team if they create tension. The contrary may be true in reality.

What should managers do to get the best from their team members ? Managers should create a vision and then infuse passion in their team. The vision will give direction to their team and the passion will take them towards their common vision. So, managers need to realise that they can get the best from their team if they create passion, not tension.

What happens when you create tension for your team ? First and foremost, nobody wants to work for you in the long term. Second, your team will lose their self confidence and will falter at every turn of a project. They will dread failure and will run away from your team at the first possible opportunity. Nobody enjoys stress and that too from his or her manager.

Stress leads to tension and this in turn leads to negativity in the team. The environment drains the energy of the team and everyone ends up finding fault with each other. Most of the deadlines are not met. There is no positive vibes in the team. The attrition in such teams will be the highest. Most of the team members will look for opportunities outside and will ditch the time at the first possible instance.

On the other hand, what happens to teams, where leaders create passion. It’s fun to work in such teams. The leader generally raises the bar. They create a very enviable vision along with the team. The team is party to the co-creation of the vision. This ensures that every team member is passionate about how they can contribute to attaining that collective vision.

Positivity is the second name of such teams. Everyone around wants to join such teams. They are willing to sacrifice from short term benefits to work in such teams. Money, time or resources are never a constraint in such teams. We typically see this in start ups. The promoter or a leader shares a brilliant idea. Then they work with the team to visualise the future together. Once this is done, there is nothing which can stop the team members give their best to achieve the team’s success.

I am not one stating that it is absolutely not necessary to set stretched targets to your team. In times of crisis, an atmosphere of urgency is needed to deliver results. Army commanders at the front line command by inspiration. Their commitment is leadership by example. They do not put their foot soldiers in front and stay behind. Similarly, good leaders will lead from the front. Even when they create a sense of urgency, their team members are keen to contribute their best and do not reel under tension.

As in the photo above, if someone is passionate about cycling, they will do it every day and not consider it a tension to maintain their health.

All of us are or would be team leaders in the future. It is important to remember that stress and tension creates negative energy. Passion and vision creates positivity. As managers and leaders we have to create a positive culture infused with fun at the workplace. This may be easier said than done. But once we are able to create this environment, we need not bother. The team gallops even when we want them to walk. If we struggle to do it by ourselves, we can learn from the best leaders around us.

Let us try to live our passion every day.

S Ramesh Shankar

It’s good to cry too…

It is generally believed that men do not cry. It is mindset that if you cry, you are not a man. This gets reinforced by many life incidents. My father was a very soft spoken person and never cried. I have never seen him raise his voice or get angry at anyone. I had also never seen him cry. So, I also believed this belief that men don’t cry. Then, when my mother died and I was lighting her funeral pyre, I saw tears roll down my father’s eyes. I realised that crying is normal to humans.

It is a fact that all of us have emotions. Some of us express it, while others may not. My father never expressed his sadness and thereby his sorrow with others. He could neither be seen jumping around when he was overjoyed nor sulking in sorrow with tears rolling down his cheek. He preferred to keep his emotions to himself. My father has been a role model for me in my life. I always wish that I learnt to be half as patient as he was always.

Today, we try to inculcate in children not to laugh or cry aloud. It is ingrained in them as if it is bad manners. In my view, we should encourage our children to express their emotions openly. The more we laugh and cry in this world, the more we will be in balance. We will learn to share our joy and sorrow with others. We will learn to let go and also share the emotions with others.

It may be true that I have inherited this quality from my father. I have also cried only a few times in my life. But, I realised that every time I let the emotions pour out of me in the form of tear, I feel relieved. Recently my brother in law died and when his son was lighting his funeral pyre, he burst into tears. My nephew is a young lad in his early thirties and could not bear the loss of his father at such a young age. The priest halted the funeral and advised the young boy to cry aloud and let his emotions come out.

We need to learn to emote. We grow up being told not to laugh or cry. The conservative society labels young men and women who cry as not brave enough. In my view, this is not right. It is good to cry and laugh. It helps you to release your pent up emotions and let go. It may also help you to forget and forgive people if you are willing to let go off your emotions.

I was hurt by an uncle of mine during my young adulthood, when he declined to help me when I was in distress, while treating my ailing father on his death bed. I was very upset and deeply hurt by this incident. I almost stopped talking to this relative. Years passed by and while I was narrating this incident during a training programme, I burst into tears. I could not control my pent up emotions. After I regained my balance, I was willing to forgive this relative and even spoke to him later.

Emotions are an integral part of our being. We need to let it be and let it go as and when it is necessary. We may get overjoyed and we should jump in joy and share our joy with others. We may be overwhelmed with sorrow, when multiple incidents occur one after the other and we lose control. We need to share this sadness with others and cry aloud so that we can vent out our feelings.

In my view, laughing and crying should be an integral part of our living. We should laugh and cry every other day as we breath every day. It is good to laugh and equally sound to cry. Let us not be guided by age old mindsets that “Men don’t cry”. It is human to cry and we need to realise that we all are human beings. We all cry at birth and make others cry when we die. Let us also learn to cry in between birth and death.

Lets learn to cry.

S Ramesh Shankar

Social distress

What is the root cause of stress in society today ?

My hypothesis is the disintegration of “family” as a social institution. In India, family was the foundation of the social structure in society. It was the strongest of social institutions and mostly extended beyond the nuclear family into a joint family. Apart from brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts staying together, the neighbourhood also provided a natural extension to the concept of family.

Modernism and technological evolution has provided more wealth and convenience to human kind. However, it has also led to large scale migration of families from villages to cities and towns in search of better career opportunities. This has led to disintegration of family as an institution. The breaking of the joint family means that the kids of today do not have a social cover of the family and the extended family any more.

This gets further complicated by dual income families. This means both the spouses work and the kids are brought up in crèches and with home nurses or maids. This is inevitable in a city landscape and this means that the growing child depends more on the social support of these individuals than family members. Both parents need to work to maintain a sustainable living in an ever increasing competitive environment around us.

This leads to parents ability to spend less time with their children and thereby provide the necessary social and psychological support. This is then substituted by mobile phones, tablets and the television for support. This in turn leads to avoidable and sometimes undesirable influences on the minds of the children. Children get addicted to watching movies and playing games as they are not used to dirtying their hands in sand in a park any more or playing with other kids.

Many children enter a pre-school even before they are three years old as parents want to shift the daily care to a pre school as they neither have the time nor the patience to invest in them any more. This could be genuinely due to lack of time or for convenience. Either way, the children grow up in pre-school much before they deserve to be there. This leads to peer learning and habits, which may not be desirable or ordained by their parents in the normal course.

These kids growing up as millennials join organisation as employees. They are more sensitive for their age and depend on social media for all their socio-psychological support as the family has disintegrated and friends are virtual and not real any more. This leads to anxiety and stress which in turn leads to smoking, drinking or drugs when they are not able to cope with the same.

Thus “Social Distress” is a phenomenon evolving in society today. It is a complex phenomenon emanating from breaking of family as an institution and then the disappearance of real friends in society. It is time to realise that mobile phone and social media cannot be a real substitute for social and psychological support in real life. It is time to realize that technology should lead to better quality of human life and not the other way around.

The bees always remain in a well knit family. If they are disturbed as in the photo above, they are in social distress.

It is time for us to strengthen relationships all around us. It is time to spend more time in the family with our children. It is time to socially engage with family and friends in the real world. Social stress can be tackled in the real world only by strengthening the quality of all our relationships.

Time to wake ups is today.

S Ramesh Shankar