ashokbhatia

One of the professional hazards CEOs face is that of giving in to relentless pressure and becoming Road Rollers. Quarterly targets have to be necessarily met. Stakeholders have to be kept happy. Auditors have to be kept in good humour. Regulatory agencies have to be held at an arm’s length. Star performers have to be kept excited.

Amidst all this razzmatazz, CEOs run the risk of caring about results alone. They would achieve targets by ruthlessly crushing anything that comes in their way. Concern for Production gets the top priority. Concern for People takes a back seat. Concern for Ethics gets dumped. In terms of the modified Blake Mouton Grid, they end up being slotted at 9,1,1.

Such heartless hard task masters end up neglecting even the genuine needs of their team members. Employees have to be dealt with in a stern manner. Shorter working hours are held to be injurious to employee’s health. Trade unions have to be manipulated. Signs of a white-collar mutiny, if any, are to be handled severely. People are like spare parts in a machine, simply to be replaced at the first signs of trouble.

In their jaundiced view, someone asking for some time off to ensure her kid makes a successful bid to enter a prestigious academic institution simply lacks commitment to organizational goals. A person wanting to leave office one hour early so as to be able to celebrate her marriage anniversary is merely offering an excuse to shirk her responsibility.

In the pursuit of excellence on the bourses, accounting norms evolve to loftier levels. Window dressing of financial information becomes the norm. Customer billings get preponed and get squeezed into the last few days of each month. Hapless auditors are kept busy highlighting Receivables and Customer Returns which get deftly swept under the carpet. Auditors keen on not losing a prestigious client easily get persuaded to fall in line.

Since the entire focus is on quarterly guidelines being exceeded, the organization suffers from Corporate Myopia. Vision Statements remain a set of pious intentions and can be seen only where these belong – on office walls and on display shelves.

When it comes to complying with a plethora of rules and regulations, the regulatory agencies have to be simply ‘managed’. Records need to be fudged, wherever necessary. Testing software and instrumentation has to be rigged, so as to show results within the legal parameters. Liaison officers need to be appointed so the inspectors could be kept in good humour. Government seniors have to be molly cuddled, so that they look the other way when violations are brought to their attention. Lobbying for suitable changes in government policy invariably assumes top priority.

When Road Rollers rule the roost for a long time, organizations often end up sitting on a dormant volcano which could erupt any time. Attrition rates gallop. Key performers get burnt out. People lack focus and work merely to show off. A sense of lethargy pervades. The percentage of employees of the Y-kind plummets. Managements concerned about lack of employee morale and motivation keep calling in experts to cheer up team members, with minimal results.

Often, micro-managing skills are applauded. Thus, grooming of future leaders assumes a lower priority. This leads to an absence of succession planning.

When faced with smarter government agencies who either sense a loss of public revenue or a scandal which might sully the image of the political party in power, such CEOs often invite greater trouble for their organizations. In one stroke, financial gains made over several years get wiped out. The organization’s brand image gets sullied.

Most of the times, such CEOs behave like pilots about to press the eject button in their cockpits. However, their reputation precedes them. Parachuting down to greener pastures becomes a challenge.

Have you ever had the good fortune of working with a Road Roller CEO? If so, and if you survived for a long duration, sincere appreciation is in order. You have already developed nerves of chilled steel, a trait so very essential to success in business. What you need now perhaps is a crash course to boost your Emotional and Spiritual Quotients, so your organization and your team members can breathe easy!

Note: Inputs from Ms Somali K Chakrabarti are gratefully acknowledged. She can be found here.

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