Human resources – Experiences of Partha Majumdar

Mighty Mouse

The most powerful position to be as an employee is when the Management thinks that you have skills and knowledge required for the organisation and that you are cheap for your ability. All the employee needs doing is completing his/her tasks and working on his/her long-term plan. Keeping it simple in such circumstances can make life very enjoyable.

The Employee needs keeping a few facts in mind.

Whatever he/she is assigned will not succeed. The Management will make sure that none of his/her assignments will succeed. Though he/she will be blamed for the failure, he/she will not be normally touched otherwise. This is done so that the Employee will never ask for higher level of authority. This is best circumstance for most creativity. As there is no fear of failure, the Employee should keep no restraint and give it the best shot.
He/She will be given more and more assignments. This should not make the Employee feel that he/she is becoming indispensable. The fact is that in such a design, the Employee is most dispensable. This is because for all the tasks the Employee is assigned, there is a parallel team who is actually supposed to do the real work. The employee is given the task for creating a prototype and for testing the prototype. If the prototype works, the main team will do the real job. If the prototype fails, there is no loss as anyway it was not the Employee’s main job and thus all efforts were availed at no cost. This is a great reason of comfort for the Employee as (again) there is not an iota of fear of failure. This is a bonus situation as the Employee can experiment in a laboratory which he/she could consider his/her own and yet be a salaried employee.
The Employee should not spend too much time and effort under such circumstances waiting for budgets to buy needed tools and/or for hiring teams, etc. He/She will never get any of these. So, he/she should just get on with the job to the best of his/her ability. The mistake which the Employee makes is that he/she makes a plan and states a commitment under the assumption that all resources (man, material, money) would be made available. This is the biggest mistake on the part of the Employee because the Management will only remember the commitment and does not even look at the need for any resources. This stress is the best for the Employee as this brings out the best in the Employee. The Employee learns the most under these circumstances.
At every step of his/her assignment, the Employee will be criticised for whatever he/she does. None of this should bother the Employee the very least. This is because there are specific people in the organisation who have assigned to do this job and they are merely doing their job. The Employee should carefully analyse these criticisms nevertheless. The fact is that the critic has some stake in the assignments. So, the Employee should attend each such meeting for collecting other dimensions that need considering for the success of the prototype.
During such phases, the Employee will get invited to many high-level meetings. He/She will sit in meetings with the most powerful people in the company. The top bosses will tell the Employee that he/she is fully empowered and should escalate to that level if things do not move. The Employee should never get carried away by this. The Employee is best advised to keep his/her immediate boss informed of all his/her activities. The employee should never consider escalating to the highest level even though he/she would have been told to do so in front of all-powerful people. If the Employee cannot avoid such a circumstance, he/she should definitely keep his/her boss in the loop of such escalation. If the employee wants this comfort in his/her job, he/she first needs proving his/her loyalty to his/her boss. There is no better opportunity for the boss to put the Employee under real stress test in this aspect. The worst mistake an Employee can make in the Corporate World is to think that he/she knows more than his/her boss.