BY BHEKILIZWE BERNARD NDLOVU
My first two articles sought to establish that there was a problem in the workplace and that the problem is traceable back to the past. My sense has been that we have had a case of failure to make hay while the sun shone. We have had favourable situations in the workplace where we could have built organisations that could, to a large extent, have survived the storms of our “pariah” like state that has come with huge economic challenges. Now a question that begs to be answered is, what do we do? Do we sit back and bury our heads in the sand waiting for things to change? A working person in a full-time job spends roughly over 70% of their time in the workplace. It would be sad if we gave up working hard and systematically to correct what has gone wrong in the workplace because we live there and only go home to recuperate and go back to work. We see and hear a clear clarion call to do something about this problem.
We don’t want to continue to use what a former lecturer of mine used to call the “cast the net method” where we just try stuff and wait to see what happens as if we were fishing. This would be akin to experimenting with poison, taking it, and waiting to see if it kills us or not, because if it does kill us then we perish. It is important to be systematic instead, and gather data using methods and tools that work, analyse the data and proffer working solutions. I am aware that when things get tough like this, most captains of industry love to talk about how they are surviving. They would most likely find it strange that anyone would suggest that survival is a lower form of existence and performance and that when we embrace survival as a mode of anything, we are going down and not up. When things go wrong we should be awakened in order to avoid perishing and the Zimbabwean situation is one such challenge.
Here is the problem with announcing and pronouncing survival as a mode; the individual or organisation that does that sets a very negative process in with undesirable ripple effects in motion, and we know that while organisations have a lot of people working as teams, there is an individual sitting at the helm and calling the shots. When things go wrong, this captain carries the biggest load and as the adage goes, the culture of an entity reflects the character of its leader. We are bound to see not only the captain’s character manifesting on the organisation, but his mood as well. If he is stressed that’s a recipe for many debacles or fiascos that become difficult to solve.
It is, therefore, imperative for us to establish the right from the beginning that the captain is an important cog of the whole process and that his character, learning, experience, mood, background, and belief are sound because they translate to the culture of the organisation. When the captain’s approach is that when the going gets tough we activate the survival mode always, then that means they have always survived. It means that the thriving mode for them is only possible when the macro environment is favourable. Well, that’s just easy is it not? Why do we need the captain if it all depends on the state of the macro environment? It would mean that we just need government and that’s all.
When the captain enters survival mode, he puts himself on a difficult footing because this triggers a lot of negative things in himself first. Let’s start with the thought process and see what we can establish. The thoughts that come to mind are that things are bad, we might go down the drain, government is bad and to blame, people might lose their jobs and I might lose mine also with all the perks I have enjoyed, this is trouble for us and, and, and… We now know through mental fitness and personal mastery training that thoughts create emotions. (Taranczewski 2018) I cannot be thinking right now that next year is going to be a good year and consequently feel sad. That is impossible. By the same token I cannot have negative thoughts flow through my system and expect positive feelings, that’s just not going to happen. You can imagine now what happens to our captain in question when he has all those thoughts flowing through his head. Not only anxious thoughts, but also resentment, grievances, pointless complaining, guilt and regret, criticism of self and others, perpetual discontent are ways in which we unconsciously create suffering for ourselves. (Tolle). In that case, most of the action taken comes from sadness and other emotions and the quality of the decisions and actions cannot be the best. It’s all survival.
Negative emotions as we have learnt, trigger bad neuro-biochemical processes in the body that are so bad that they affect our physical and mental health. (Chopra). Stress hormones, such as cortisol are excreted that affect the quality of the body and anything else that relies on that system. This means that we have a captain who is not happy, is thinking negative thoughts and having negative emotions, and in the process risking physical and mental unwellness. He makes survival decisions in that state and as we managed to establish earlier, this cascades down the stature of the organisation making it difficult to do business and thrive.
Shirzad Chamine, the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Positive Intelligence, argues, with scientific evidence, that happiness is key to performance. The further good news is that happiness is trainable through mental fitness processes that make deep scientific sense. When we are happy and fit mentally, it doesn’t matter whether we are in “hell” or “heaven”, he argues. This is good news for anyone in Zimbabwe who might be thinking that our economy is hell, and we need to move to heaven for us to perform well. Maybe we just need to embrace mental fitness practices and be happy enough to perform. Uncertainty and what might be viewed as hellish conditions is what every tennis player has to dance with every time they face an opponent in a game. They stand there with no idea where the ball is going to go, but they play all the same. As they grow in the game, they become more flexible and agile and in the process, through training and playing, become experienced and enjoy the game even more.
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There is a case for the importance and need for us to think about how we can make happiness an important variable on the performance equation. Am I talking touchy-feely crap? By no means, I am actually touching on the very heartbeat of performance and I shall endeavour in the next episodes of this column to walk with you through this important subject of happiness and performance. Thriving organisations are those with happy captains and a culture of happiness. I want to argue, with evidence that these organisations can go through hell and back again and get better and not worse.
- Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a South African organization as a Learning & Development Specialist, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for a number of blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on [email protected]
