Transcript
Edited for readability. This is an extract.
Go beyond ‘working’ and start ‘contributing’!
Contribution appears to be a self-evident idea.
However, if we look around us, we gain a deeper appreciation of what contribution truly means in our day-to day-life.
Let me begin with my friend Amit’s story. Amit was traveling from Mumbai to Chennai for an event, where he was scheduled to be the main speaker. The event was scheduled for 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon. He had accordingly booked the ticket to Chennai for 11:00 a.m., giving him adequate time to reach the venue ahead of schedule. At the airport, he was told that his flight from Mumbai to Chennai would be delayed by 2 hours. At the airport, I requested the airlines attendant at the counter if she could give me a priority tag for my luggage as I didn’t want to be late for the event.
She said that getting a priority tag would cost me Rs.500. I told her that it was the airlines that had delayed the flight by 2 hours. I had booked my flight for 11:00 a.m., so that I could account for all the last-minute occurrences.
The lady looked at me blankly and said that the rule for priority luggage was an additional charge of Rs.500, and that I should have rescheduled my flight for 6:00 a.m. after I came to know about the delay. I asked her that why couldn’t she give me a simple priority tag? However, she maintained that this was not the rule.
Would you call her a contributor? Think about it.
In one stroke, she has done damage to at least one customer relationship, if not many more (especially in this age of social media where irate customers can share their experiences across the globe). From the airline attendant’s point of view, she was just doing her job and following the rules – “I am doing what I have been asked to do by my seniors!”.
So, there are occasions where we do what we have been asked to do, but we may not be contributing!
It is also an example of how working is different from contributing.
Consider the following scenario: An old pensioner walks into a bank. He is waiting in the line for a long time. He wants to know if his money has come into his account. For him, ‘when’ the money arrives, and how he spends the money are important. Days matter to him. Given his age, he is also a little anxious. He goes to the counter and asks the man sitting there, “Can you tell me whether the money has arrived in my account? Can you please print my passbook?” The person behind the counter says, “The passbook printer is not working, come again tomorrow.”
From the point of view of the bank official who has given this response, he is absolutely right – the printer is not working and he cannot give the customer the passbook status. But is that the best he can do?
If we talk to some experienced bankers and really think this scenario through with them, they will give us at least 5 different methods (not just one) by which this person could have been helped in that situation.
The passbook printer may not be working, but the computers with personal data are still working. The banker could have written the person’s bank balance on a slip and given it to the old person. He could have therefore reassured the old man that his money has arrived and given him the relevant information. That is what the pensioner really wants. He doesn’t want to take the money away right now. He wants ‘reassurance’. He has an emotional & an informational need, not a technological need.
By meeting the pensioner’s emotional & informational needs, we are contributing to the customer. By sticking to the process and saying that the passbook cannot be printed, we may be ‘working’, but not contributing.
People who contribute matter to us. Each of us in this room have been taught by several teachers in school and college. All of them have not made a difference in our lives. Some of them have. A few of them have profoundly transformed our lives, while the rest have walked in and walked out like actors in a show. It would not have mattered if we had replaced them with one or the other.
So, a few people contributed to our life, the rest merely worked, performed their duties & disappeared from our lives!
This is the challenge at hand – How to get people to go beyond working & start contributing?
This is a multi-dimensional problem:
- sometimes it has to do with our emphasis on ‘process over outcomes’,
- sometimes it has to do with an emphasis on ‘technology over human beings’,
- sometimes it has to do with the ‘institutional power’ as compared to the individual in front of us,
- sometimes it boils down to plain ‘callousness’ instead of a little human concern & care, and
- sometimes it comes to a situation where we just don’t grasp what the other person’s real problem is, i.e., we are simply ‘blind’ to another human being’s issues or challenges.
Furthermore, it is also a widespread problem.
Let me share with you a conversation I had with the head of a major insurance company recently. This gentleman has 10,000 people working for him. Out of these 10,000 people, he says that he doesn’t think he has more than 500 contributors! It is these 500 people who make things happen in a large organization.
This is confirmed by our interactions, with people in leadership positions across diverse Indian corporations. On an average, only 5-7% of employees are contributors. The rest are mere workers.
By increasing the number of contributors and addressing the various issues that stop people from contributing, we could make a huge difference to these institutions.
The full talk is in the book Awaken the Contributor Within (Kindle).