Does Uncertainty, Volatility, Lack of Trust and Inability To Handle Challenges Drive ‘Farsighted Impulsivity’ At The Workplace?
Edition #074
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
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Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
‘Farsighted Impulsivity’ And The New Psychology Of Self-Control
In this very intuitive article in Psyche, Adam Bulley argues that farsightedness is not the opposite of impulsivity. He writes that countless academic articles and self-help books sing to the same tune – characterising immediate gratification as a short-sighted hitch while praising the virtues of long-term thinking as a means for overcoming temptation.
Here are some key points from the article:
To avoid future regret at missing out, consumers will intentionally shirk their savings to splurge on an exciting vacation, gourmet dinner-for-two, or fancy box of Swiss chocolate truffles etc. This is influenced by the motivation to avoid future regrets about missing out.
Wilfully prioritising the present is not only an emotional matter. An entirely dispassionate evaluation of the future can also encourage us to focus on present rewards and opportunities.
If you live in a highly uncertain environment or one where people tend not to keep their promises, a farsighted view of this bargain might well lead you to get what you can now!
‘self-control can and does also often involve conscious, deliberate attempts to become more present-minded’.
Farsighted planning and a careful regard for future consequences sometimes lead us to favour immediate gratification.
Read the article here.
How Digital Factories are Transforming the Future of Manufacturing
In the conversation, Sridhar Ramaswamy, a veteran in building digital factories and an expert in Industry 4.0, talks about a whole set of digital transformation happening to manufacturing industries and how he learned those skills, and he shares his experience in this episode.
Some key takeaways from this conversation:
The Importance of an Engineer Understanding a Business Problem
How to Handle Ambiguity
Asking Stupid Questions
Doing Your Boss’s Job
Mixing Pragmatism with Innovative Thinking & Business Reality for Digital Transformation
How to Solve for a Problem not Invented as yet.
Mixing Engineering Skills and Business Strategy – Key to Building Digital Factories
You can listen to the full episode on:
Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | YouTube
The Power of Yet
Carol S Dweck is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford and has also held professorships at Columbia and Harvard Universities and has lectured to education, business, and sports groups all over the world. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She won the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, one of the highest awards in Psychology, as well as six other lifetime achievement awards.
In this TED Talk, Prof. Carol S Dweck talks about The Power of Yet and how it can play a motivational role in believing how you can improve.
Here are some key takeaways:
She presents a fantastic idea that in a college course, if the student failed the grades that were needed to graduate, they were given the tag ‘Not Yet.’ - And how this gives them a sense of a path into the future and not leaving them with a feeling of failing and going nowhere.
She explains the concept of a ‘Fixed Mindset’ and a ‘Growth Mindset.’
She elucidates the difference between the ‘Tyranny of Now’ vs ‘Power of Yet’ and how it can affect how people see problems and challenges.
It was observed that the ones with the ‘Fixed Mindset’ who could not cope with handling challenges and the resulting failures either cheated the next time or tried to find someone worse!
When you look at the difference in the brain activity of the ‘Fixed Mindset’ and ‘ Growth Mindset’ students, the ones with ‘Fixed Mindset’ run away from the errors and don’t engage with them, unlike those with a ‘Growth Mindset’ who engage deeply.
She raises a pertinent question - ‘Do we raise kids who want to get ‘A’ grades all the time or ones who learn and want to dream big?’
She recommends some steps to embrace ‘Yet’:
Praise wisely - Process Praise, Intelligent Praise
Build Rewards for effort, strategy and progress
Encourage them to get out of their comfort zone; every time they do it, the neurons in their brains create stronger connections.
There is a need to build a new meaning for effort and difficulty.
Just click the above video and watch the entire talk.
Does Uncertainty, Volatility, Lack of Trust and Inability To Handle Challenges Drive ‘Farsighted Impulsivity’ At The Workplace?
The idea of ‘Farsighted Impulsivity’ and the ‘Power of Yet’ triggered many thoughts and reasons behind some of the behaviours that we see in people and workplaces today. Something that has not been seen over the last many decades. Many senior executives, owners, promoters, and entrepreneurs struggle to comprehend this and tend to blame only the people rather than the actions and environment they observe around them.
Looking at it from an Indian Perspective
Let’s take the great resignation wave we have seen over the last few years and the attrition that companies struggle with. More recently, there has always been a massive challenge for companies to retain people. Employee loyalty is questioned, but many fail to see why it is changing.
Let’s look at the Indian IT sector in India, which is seeing attrition rates of 16-17%, and it was as high as 20% a year or two back, and it employs 5 million people. Conversely, the MSME Sector in India has an attrition rate of nearly 35%! It employs about 110 million people across micro, small and medium enterprises, and this never gets the attention or headlines most of the time. Why is there such a high attrition rate here? In context, the IT sector contributed to only 7.4% of India's GDP in 2022 and is expected to move to 10% in 2025. However, the MSME sector contributes to 30% of India’s GDP with a large employment base and a considerable attrition base. The total labour force in India is about 524 million, and with such a high attrition rate, the questions to ask ourselves are, “Where are these people going?” and “Why are they leaving?”. In the same breadth, CII’s report discusses the lack of job growth & skill deficit in India.
The owners, promoters, entrepreneurs and senior management in companies in these sectors, be it the IT and MSME sectors, are seeing relatively slower growth and productivity issues. Having seen above-average growth, the IT sector is struggling to cope-up with uncertainty, volatility and disruption. The MSME sector faces intense competition in exports, quality and supply chain issues.
Looking at it from a Global Perspective
The World Economic Forum report outlines the decline in Employee Loyalty and the reasons:
The four generations in the workforce are all witnessing continued global disruptions from the pandemic, and everyone from Gen Z to Baby Boomers are tired of stagnant wages and looking for more security and opportunity.
Hard work and quiet dedication are no longer a reliable path to prosperity or upward mobility. As this reality has hit home, older generations are starting to behave more like those “disloyal” Millennials.
Organisations that successfully rebuild their employee-employer contract in line with the fundamental hierarchy of human needs – providing competitive wages (the foundation required for a sense of safety and security in today’s economy), a flexible working model (which allows employees also to address their mid-tier needs for connection, belonging, and leisure), and a sense of purpose and culture (the keystone that allows people to feel that they belong and that the way they’re spending their time is fundamentally worthwhile) will be the ones best positioned to win.
How have Industries responded to this environment?
There have been a lot of job cuts, salary freeze, layoffs, shutting down plants, displacement of manufacturing hubs etc. In a 1997 article that dates two and half decades titled ‘In the Age of Downsizing’, MIT Sloan Management Review wrote, ‘As companies have been downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering, the psychological contract between manager and organization has been broken. No longer can organisations guarantee lifetime employment to committed managers.’ This has created a sense of distrust in the workforce as their lives have been disrupted, and there is a lot of uncertainty about the future and assurance of jobs. Quoting from the same MIT Sloan Management article, ‘ In response, managers have become more loyal to their own careers. Many have adopted what Hirsch calls a free agent strategy; free agents are employees who take personal responsibility for managing the terms of their future employment. The result has been what Hall calls the emergence of the “protean” manager — one who is self-directed and willing to change organizations and jobs to fulfill his or her career desires and needs and to create personal satisfaction.’
Conversely, most companies believe they engage their workforce well with various HR initiatives, but there is a broken trust. There is a poor correlation between ‘Best Places to Work’ and a lower attrition rate -be in India and the US! In our Podcast conversation with Sridhar Ramaswamy, he mentions Alfred Mellowes - a family-owned steel business- Charter Steel, had a no-layoff policy. During downturns, they were paid lower wages, but they would come and clean the factory, work on new projects and prepare for the upturn!
Companies and policymakers need to ask themselves whether they need to rejig their compensation and workplace plans that reflect this new economic environment, as some of the compensation and workplace practices are steeped in industrial-era thinking.
The Broken Bridge - Trust and Economic Challenges
It looks like since the trust in the workforce has been broken due to layoffs, downsizing, reengineering and job losses - be it any sector - IT/MSME/MNCs etc., the entire workforce has decided quietly to display ‘Farsighted Impulsivity’ - Farsighted planning and careful regard for future consequences sometimes directly leads us to favour immediate gratification - when it comes to quitting, switching jobs or taking-up competing offers or looking at greener pastures as they have developed minimal trust with companies. Because a bad business cycle or significant client loss does not protect their jobs, and companies do very little to support them during their bad times or these slow business cycles. Hence, the workforce looks for instant gratification thro’ new jobs that help them gain in the short term to protect their long-term interests.
However, the workforce across industries must also understand that uncertainty, volatility, and economic challenges are facing their businesses or companies. They expect stable year-on-year salary growth when in reality, it may be hard or not be possible. Also, years of robust growth have not prepared them for tough challenges. They need to keep upskilling themselves constantly. The disruptions in the knowledge economy era will vastly differ from the industrial economy era. They need to prepare themselves for it. This is where the brilliance of the ‘Power of Yet’ theory comes into play - how people see problems and challenges and respond to them. Our current education systems don’t prepare them to handle these crises or extraordinary situations. They need to follow some of the steps suggested by Prof. Carol S Dweck - Praise Wisely - being diligent about assessing contribution and value, starting to accept rewards for effort, strategy and process, not just outcomes or results which may be significantly lower or higher year-after-year depending on the economic environment, and the need to get out of their comfort zone becomes vital.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
‘Farsighted Impulsivity’ - is a dispassionate evaluation of the future that encourages us to focus on present rewards and opportunities.
Mixing engineering skills and business strategy is vital for a successful digital transformation.
The ‘Tyranny of Now’ vs ‘Power of Yet’ affects how people see problems and challenges.