I thought of different ways to structure this. I have finally decided to write a letter to myself. From the me of today to the me a decade in the future.
Dear Satyaki of 2030,
I hope you are happy!
I distinctly remember you, sitting in room N204 of UCD Smurfit, wondering what success means for you. Have you been able to fathom?
You would always talk about how perceptions intrigued you. How the same situation and/or physical thing was interpreted and translated by every individual almost uniquely. Around the same time, you got hold of Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I am certain you are still trying to decipher between System 1 and System 2 thinking when you are trying to solve your problems. You might not remember the terms (such as priming, framing decisions, social context or dilution effect) but, you must remember shortfalls of stereotyping and dangers of self-fulfilling prophecy cycle.
You had experience in working in teams before you decided to pursue your Masters in Business Administration (MBA). You were very happy to hear that bringing high performers together do not ensure a high performing team. Maybe because you weren’t the blue eyed employee, and you hated star culture which you had experienced in your early life as a consultant. I recollect you being stupefied on learning how group thinking and conformity were huge factors as to how people behave in a team, and even in society. I am sure you remember Google’s Aristotle- Project on understanding team effectiveness; you had a smile on your face when you proclaimed, “I knew it, psychological safety had to be the thing for an effective team.” You were equally shocked to learn that factors like colocation of teammates, consensus-driven decision making, extroversion of team members, individual performance of team members, team size had almost no consequence on effectiveness of teams in google. While multiple other academic studies had suggested these factors do tend to affect team efficacy. But then Siún had reminded you that this was a study done only on Google employees and that every organisation has its own ethos and that the definition of effectiveness criteria is as subjective as the question on success that you were grappling with deep down.
Your team had presented on Global Virtual Teams (GVTs). The inimitable Anita, the enigmatic Bailey and the affable Robert- your teammates for trimester 1 of the MBA. One of the topics that kept coming up during your team’s preparation was, how can we make our audience empathize with the difficulties of working in a non-collocated setting. The Managing a Global Team- Greg James at Sun Microsystems case did put forth a very compelling example. The team believed that a live simulation might bring forth the pains like none other. That decision indeed proved right. The SPLIT (Structure, Process, Language, Identity and Technology) framework did make a lot more sense for your classmate, who had not been in GVTs before, because of the activity. You had worked all your professional life till then in a GVT. You yourself shifted bases multiple times from India to the UAE and back again. I could recognise you had experienced each one of the bottlenecks that rose from a GVT personally and wanted your fellow mates to be aware of challenges that lay ahead in a fiercely globalised market.
Before I tell you why I am jogging your memory back to the autumn of 2019. I want to cover one more piece. Perhaps the most abstract but the most discussed piece – that of leadership. Modern leaders, as we learnt, were to be enablers, connectors almost like the signboards on the freeways. They had to be authentic, empowering and always looking for the closest hierarchical node to ask for and offer help to. It logically did flow into the three pillars (Empowering leadership, psychological empowerment, and psychological capital) of empowering individuals to be leaders in their own right. Did you put them into practice?
So, my friend- perception, team dynamics, and leadership. Does this remind you of something? I am sure you are smiling right now. Yes, you are right. The uncertainty and therefore the apprehensions of working in a study group in trimester one of your MBA. All of you worked through your differences and boy, did you’ll love each other and therefore the ride by the end of it. So much so that Anita got her parents to call all of you over for dinner on her birthday.
In the beginning there were four disjointed voices, different opinions because all of you perceived things very differently. Soon you started recognising strengths and weaknesses of each other (even more than your own). The perceptions which made all of you alien was actually a resource to vet all your work through and make it better. After a point of time, each one of you even knew what the other(s) would say in a particular situation. So, when Robert said, “I am easy” he meant, he had lost interest on the topic already. Or when Bailey said, “I think I can live with this” she meant, she was very not clear and wanted us to explain more. More importantly, there was respect for everyone. Finally, all of you enabled and supported each other. Leaders are not born; they are fashioned by external stimuli and situations in combination with self-learning and development. The atmosphere in the team promoted all of you to be vulnerable and authentic. All four of you wanted to learn and grow. This is probably why all of you stood out individually as leaders but equally as members of a team NOT A WORK GROUP.
By the way, I only wrote this letter to invite you to my 27th birthday on the 19th of December. I hear that you have lost all your hair in the last 10 years. In order for me to identify you please carry the following picture (from Anita’s birthday) with you when you come by for the party otherwise the guards will not let you in.
Love and luck,
Satyaki of 2019
This letter encapsulates the journey of this semester, and why amongst all the hard business commandments Leadership & Organisational Behaviour would stand out. There is great complexity in understanding and choreographing- Why humans do what they do? What makes them do so? How do they go about doing it?
There is no one right or wrong way it is a combination of personality, values, perception, emotion, attitude, motivation that drives individuals. In an organisational setting, it gets even more abstruse, as it is a combination of all of the above plus team dynamics, leadership, culture and power subtleties that together might answer the questions of Why, What and How.
