No 'honking' at workplace please!

Dear friends, hope u r doing well. Here is something I wanted to share with all....I got this from some other sources but its a worth reading material.....Try to relate it with yourself....

  On A lazy Saturday afternoon, my wife and I were heading to Jahangir Art Gallery in town, to possibly acquire paintings for our newly house. The signal at Flore fountain had just turned red and I stopped. What I saw in the next 120 seconds, made me understand the rationale for why things often go wrong at the work place.

Traffic was smooth and people were waiting patiently for the light to turn green, when a BEST bus arrived from nowhere. The bus driver parked quietly in the leftmost lane and was sixth from the signal. For thirty seconds he did not do anything. He sat waiting for the signal to change.

And then, he started honking. First, he honked once. The five cars in front of him and even those next to them, got ready to leave. Hands on gear shafts, the drivers positioned themselves to leave the moment the light turned green.

And then he honked again and again. He went on and on for the next thirty seconds. It was as if he wanted the five cars in front to move quickly so that his bus could pass. The guys in the front started getting a bit edgy.

Haste creates waste

One car moved a few feet to the left, while the other moved a few metres in front. All the neighbouring cars followed suit.

And within no time, the entire place became a conglomerate of edgy car drivers trying to give way to the unbridled ambitions of the bus driver. Finally, the signal turned amber and then green. The bus driver started honking ever harder.

But what was initially an ocean of calm, which had cars parked right behind each other waiting patiently, soon turned into a motley jam. A jam, which took over, five minutes to clear. And in those five minutes, the bus driver could do nothing, but just sit and watch.... And do what he was best at HONK!

The reality of life then stuck me hard. The bus driver, through his constant honking, had managed to convert a perfect situation into a chaotic one. How often do we do that at our workplace?

As managers how many of us, give directions and then keep hounding our people even when we know that things are progressing at the desired pace, or when we know that the people down below cannot do anything constructive about it.


Let things flow at their pace

Often at the workplace we behave like the bus driver, by constantly honking for delivery or for results, without giving people direction and that results in chaos, wrong decisions, and incorrect execution. This invariably results in a jam like situation at the work place.

“My boss constantly kept screaming, that we need to cut costs beyond the realms of rationality, without really telling us how to. He kept constantly screaming and we came to a point where we started irrationally sacking people, cutting down essentials and eventually ended up cutting the muscle with the fat.

In the process we lost the competitive advantage we once had,” laments Rajshekar, a business leader in an MNC bank. Constant screaming and howling like the honking bus driver only creates chaos and panic in the ranks.

This leads to a team doing all sorts of incorrect and short term oriented things which create so much damage that it takes more time and resources to set that right, than what the original problem itself would have consumed.

Avoid being the 'Honking Driver' kind boss

As business leaders, we must step back and introspect as to what do we want our teams to deliver, guide them, put them on the right track and monitor progress. Constant badgering as some leaders do, doesn’t add any value.

It only irritates people and sets them on the wrong track.

Haven’t you heard of the age old saying, “Haste creates waste”? In certain extreme circumstances it even creates fear in the minds of subordinates, and no one ever achieved anything by generating this emotion.

Whatever be the compulsion, stay away from the “Honking Driver” syndrome as such drivers are hated by the system, the teams and eventually their bosses too.

So, whats your view on this..................