Let’s move from formality to informality. Let’s start the discussion on Work Culture on an informal basis. What do you say? I don’t like to hide behind the podium. I think podiums were designed in the olden times when people used to shiver when they had to address an audience or a gathering. The podium used to help them hide their nervousness.
When you are at peace in life and you can create such an ease in your atmosphere, work culture will become better. How do you create such an ease, an informal atmosphere is what as managers you all have to think about. When you walk in & out of the office you always get a Salaam or a Pranam or a Namaste, Sat Sri Akal but do you read behind these greetings, is it genuine or is it superficial and most of these pleasantries that we exchange saying thank you, thank you very much or you did a good job andwelcome have a nice day….. all these come from a superficial level. It’s like the greeting that you get from an airhostess when you leave the plane…. They say “ Have a nice day”… they don’t mean it and the entire work environment is filled with such superficial, sometimes even hypocritical greetings… How can youexpect such environment to produce results which you are looking for? You know when the President of the World Bank met me, he asked me, “What is the secret of your success?” How can you have so much work done with so little money. I said it is not just money that does the job. Something more . It is the freedom in your work place. Just in one year’s time 3000 volunteers could adopt 21,000 villages in India the 5H programs and that also with less than 2 crore of rupees. It is something that nobody could believe but it happened. They could do the roads, they could provide proper drinking water and many things. It is the dedication, the inspiration that comes out. The difference between motivation and inspiration we should know. We can motivate somebody giving them a few hundred rupees but that motivation is short lived. It will stay for 2-3 months, again they want a raise. But if someone isn’t inspired from within, forget about having a good work culture. Work culture will need either inspiration or emergency deadlines and fear psychosis. If fear psychosis is created in people it works for sometime but it is not a healthy thing to do and many of our set ups run more on fear psychosis.
To achieve deadlines the insecurity has to drop rather than the motivation. The third thing that we need to attend to is the mind set. In the mind set. I think there are 2 levels. One is the labour union mind & the other, the authoritarian mind. The labour union mind is always pointing the fingers at the others and authoritarian mind also does the same thing. They say,“Only I can do it, nobody else can do this”. Do you see this happening. I am better, nobody can do anything, they are all useless, they can’t do any job. In this country, we are very good at delegating jobs from ancient times. Though God is one, we divided the God, creator, manager & transformer- Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, we divided them in three different allocation of jobs and all important portfolios were allotted to women. Finance ministry – Lakshmi, Education ministry- Saraswati, Defence – Durga, all are taken. We need to learn how to delegate and that can only happen when you step out of the authorotarian mind. Authoritarian mind finds everybody wrong….. only I am right, I can do better.
Nobody can do as well as I can do so one does not take responsibility for making others work. This is on the level of the manager…. They don’t trust anybody. Authoritarian mind does not trust anybody. If you do not trust anybody how can you motivate someone to do work , inspire them to do work . “Isn’t this the problem with you all, tell me, isn’t this the problem in your setup?”
The second type of problem is the labor union mindset that the manager is not good, or the senior is not good, he doesn’t let me function. “Are you all here 100 percent?” If your mind is in the present moment it will stop complaining. Your complaining is a product of your unconsciousmind.
It is very important to dream also but there has to be a fine balance between practicality & dreams. What we mortally feel is impossible, you give these tasks, and you see it will happens and it happens because of your Atmik Shakti, with your Sankalpa Shakti. What you call Sankalpa is your determination. You know I had announced I would go to Pakistan couple of weeks ago 10 days ago but till the last day I had no visa and everybody whom our people talked to, everybody discouraged….. It’s not good, don’t go now.. and just in a matter of couple of days, we got the visa….. because I was bend on it. The day I was supposed to fly, till 19th I had no visa , till 4’0 clock I had no visa and the last minute they found out I had an Israeli stamp on my visa. There is a policy in Islamabad, they do not give you a visa if your passport has an Israeli stamp on it. So we wondered what’s going to happen because there in Islamabad, in Karachi they had arranged a big programme, lots of people, thousands of people were going to come and I thought what’s going to happen? But it happened, I just said I got to go…….. and 4 o’clock we get the visa 6 o’clock I take the flight and go. And in Pakistan, the Pakistani High Commissioner and we were in the same place where the SAARC meeting was going on. He said, “Who gave you the visa?”
The human mind says “Only we are functioning, I am in charge of everything” – but there is something else that works, something else that works. Against all odds, you can move ahead and do what you want to do. You just have to have the faith with you. You know, yesterday only there was another incident. We had a satsang in Ambala yesterday evening in the big ground. The morning it rained till 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The organizer and all of them had the faith that if we had an evening satsang, the rain will stop. And with that conviction, it will happen – “there was no rain, there was sunshine and a great satsang happened. Not once – It has happened, over and over, again and again. It has happened. The nature supports you when you have the conviction. This country lacked for so long & it was Guru Gobind Singh Ji who gave back the culture to us. The entire country is so indebted to Guru Gobind Singh Ji, who told us to work like a warrior. It is the warriorness in your which us needed to achieve anything not just living in your own comfort zone. Unfortunately our corporate culture is clogged with that comfort zone and we like to live in our own comfort zone and not be adventurous. We do not want to stretch ourselves a little more than we think we can. We need to inspire people to push them a little forward and to make them do what they can do.
Are you all here still ? So, we need to get out of this authoritarian mind and this labour union mind. Labour union mind – which thinks I can’t do anything because so and so is incharge. It is this so and so which is responsible for me not doing my work. When somebody asks someone, “Why did you go wrong?” They will pass the buck and say, “ Because of that person, because of someone else” – and not take total responsibility. We need to teach our persons to take total responsibility and dignity of work- whatever the work is……
— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
There is the opportunity to ask you questions to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar during the Twitter Town hall with Sri Sri event on 23rd February 2014 at 10PM IST.
Bhanumathi Narasimhan 