Nothing amongst Everything

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Amravati, Capt. Bana Singh

My country India, continues to shock me with its paradoxes. Two stories that made the news recently.

For his valiant conduct in capturing an enemy held post in freezing Sialchen glacier in 1987, Capt. Bana Singh was awarded the nation’s highest military honour for gallantry- the Param Vir Chakra. Today he gets a mere Rs. 166 per month paid by the J & K Government for his gallantry He poignantly asks: “A militant gets Rs 2,000 when he surrenders and I get Rs 166 for serving the nation. I am insulted. I am helpless. If the government does not react, I will return my award,” said Capt Singh.

On the other end of the scale, the Government of Maharashtra is planning to spend over Rs. 400 crores to build an airport in Amravati, home of the President of India, Smt. Pratibha Patil.

President of Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, Kishor Tiwari told CNN-IBN that he will speak to the President regarding the matter.

“Vidarbha and Amravati has lakhs of families in deep distress. Over 3,000 families have been affected by farmer suicides. But the state government is not spending Rs 50 crore for food security but is ready to spend Rs 400 crore for a new airport. This is very unfortunate. We will talk to Pratibha tai and then take to the roads,” Tiwari said.

Just two of many such stories that abound every day. In one sense we have everything yet in another we have nothing.

Roadside banking for Mumbai vendors

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, low cost banking

A live webcast from NDTV caught my attention.

It speaks of how Mumbai’s roadside vendors now have banks come to them at their place of work and encourage them to save. Innovative thinking and a convenient means of banking now helps some 10,000 vendors, who ordinarily would not have gone to the banks, develop the habit of thrift.

Keeping money in tha bank helps the vendors to save as otherwise money kept at home is more likely to be spent. Likewise the banks gain by getting deposits in a low cost manner.

A truly win-win approach beneficial to both the vendors and the banks.

Are you better off than your neighbors?

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motivation, rewards

A new neurological study suggests reward mechanisms in the brain depend on how well you think other people are doing says Laura Blue writing in Time.

The findings, published in the journal Science are the first to lend physiological proof to a longstanding theory among contemporary economists: that people are affected not only by their own achievements and income, but also by how they stack up against their neighbors.

Cognition experts and economists at the University of Bonn in Germany looked at the brain regions that process reward. “In a sense it goes back to Aristotle,” says the paper’s senior author, Armin Falk, an economist. “The fact that we are social beings is a well-known fact.”

The idea that rewards are context-dependent challenges a key assumption behind most traditional of economic theories: the premise that humans are essentially self-interested, that they care about their own work, income, achievements, and purchases, and that whatever other people do is, if not irrelevant, at least not going to have a consistent or predictable effect on decision-making.

According to Falk there’s a lesson here for company managers.

It turns out the negative response to earning less is usually stronger than the positive response to earning more or as Falk says, “The pain of having less is much stronger than the joy of having more.”

Workers who discover they’re earning more for the same work may be happy, but those who earn less can quickly feel slighted, killing motivation and often the quality of their output. It doesn’t take a brain specialist to understand how that affects a business.

Motivation- Key Drivers

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A Step A Day, leadership, motivators

“I had to fight hard but I managed to get your promotion through the management committee” said the senior manager, Raj to Suma, one of his Project Managers. “You must be very happy now. Congratulations on your promotion” he gushed.

“Who wants it?” she replied coldly. “Do you know what the additional responsibilities means to me? I am already struggling to manage my after work life. I have two young children to take care off. This promotion entails far more travel, at a time when it is the last thing I want. I may not work for ever. I am not gunning to become the CEO”

Here we go again. An age old mistake repeated by a manager. He thought that what motivates him the most should motivate everybody else. The world does not work that way. Each of us have key drivers which motivate us to perform. They are different for different people.

If higher responsibilities was a major driver for him, spending more time with her growing children was a major motivator for her. That does not mean she didn’t like her work or responsibilities. Of course she did – but she was in no frame of mind to have the odds further stacked against her in her ongoing battle to balance the needs of the professional career and her family. This is what a promotion to higher responsibilities would invariably mean.

For some, money means everything. For others it is job satisfaction. For yet others it is recognition. Some want status and a place in society.”I don’t care if my pay check is zilch” an up- and -coming manager excitedly once told me ” I simply must have a company car. My neighbours don’t see how much is credited to my bank account every month. But they do see the car I use every day”

Motivators are not static and do change over a period of time for all of us . What is most important for a bachelor at 23 may be well different when he gets married later, has a growing family and so on.

Meeting norms driven by social pressures can be a big driver for some. I find that in a section of our corporate  society, a honeymoon abroad is the done thing. These days, it appears that saying you went to a local hill station is in a sense infra dig. “Where are you going for your honeymoon” asks everyone excitedly. ” Not decided yet” he says sheepishly. “Considering different options” he adds, not wanting to say that they are actually going not very far away. Here the main driver is social recognition. Peer pressure also influences such decsions. It looks silly to go to Darjeeling when your colleagues are going to Switzerland.

Interestingly while everyone speaks of the huge powers of money as a motivator, money by itself means nothing. The driver comes from what you get by spending that money! Be it recognition by being a member of a snooty Club or having material wealth like houses and cars ( which you can’t get without money),

Remember, people are different. What is a major draw for one could actually be repulsive to another. Effective managers understand these differences in managing people and use this knowledge to adopt an appropriate leadership style with them.

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