A 25 year old with technical and business degrees from IIT and IIM, the top Indian colleges and working for McKinsey, the world’s best consulting company. Everyone would say what an amazing guy. The mental pressure around the two statements is in itself unimaginable.
It is generally accepted that at least 3 years of work experience is required to take up an advanced or Master’s degree and in the case of an advanced business degree more experience is preferred. Academic institutions should assess the work experience and the candidate’s exposure and knowledge of the business side of things before granting admission for business degrees. The guy came straight out of IIT at 22 years and landed at IIM. What exposure does someone at 22 have of business and the ones who have will definitely not take up a business degree, not at 22 for sure. Out of IIM and straight into McKinsey. It is nothing less than maniacal.
It is clearly not just the work pressure that drove him to take his life. The deadly “pressure-to-perform” comes from downstream a long way back. Suicides among students preparing for entrance exam to get into the IITs and among students studying at IITs have been rising alarmingly over the years. That is 5 years of academic mental stress with the added stress of cracking the CAT exam to get into the IIMs and then 2 years of even more academic stress during the MBA program. When he joined for work, he had already spent 7 years of his life in the pressure cooker of intense academic stress.
Work pressure and micromanagement are common in most companies now but would depend largely on the ones managing the projects. Companies like McKinsey hire the best graduates from the top colleges and then the pressure to perform and the toxicity in the work culture is thrust upon them. Now the question everyone would have asked is, why didn’t he just quit and move on rather than drown himself in the mire? Because of social and peer pressure. Can’t someone who has gone through the grind of JEE, IIT, CAT and IIM absorb work pressure and continue performing at his peak? No one would have understood, not even his family. The problem with peak performance is, no one can stay at the peak forever and down the peak could become a free fall very easily and quickly. He was way too young to manage work pressure, push back micromanagement and survive office politics and toxicity.
It took me 10 years and enough exposure of working with international clients to understand how a MBA can add value to my profile and MBA from an international college would be the best to prop up my international work experience. With age and experience comes maturity and the ability to work smarter and manage all kinds of stress. Consulting is no easy job and consulting with McKinsey means working with the top companies in the world. It is impossible for anyone to live in sustained mental stress for a long time and the younger one is the more vulnerable they are to capitulating sooner.
From the time I heard the Dire Straits classic “Private Investigations”, a narrative of the daily life of the not so scrupulous private investigators, two lines have stuck with me.
“What have you got, at the end of the day
What have you got, to take away”
What we will all eventually take with us is knowledge and experiences and not the names of academic institutions where we studied, the names of companies where we worked and the expectations of people around us. Our well being is something only we understand the best. The stress and suicides created by pressure to perform will stop when we realize these simple facts.
LinkedIn has been inundated with posts about employees quitting jobs because of bad managers for quite some time. While this is true and I have done the same in my past jobs, a good amount of introspection coupled with plenty of reading has helped me understand my experiences better.
The origins of bad managers lies in the history of management itself. Industrial revolution gave rise to manufacturing and we started producing a myriad of items as our needs increased exponentially. Soon we realized that tasks are repetitive in manufacturing and we came up with processes to streamline the tasks. This in turn helped us to create documents which we call as manuals. Workers had to simply follow the steps mentioned in the manuals. This literally meant there was no work to be managed. When manager position was created it was to manage the workers and drive them to increase their efficiency and in turn the factory produce. Deming’s model or the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle embodies this culture of management.
When technology improved drastically and disrupted all industries it too adopted the same form of management, the best example of which is the waterfall methodology in software development. As technology matured it became evident that creating a software product and manufacturing nuts and bolts are as different as chalk and cheese. Also, unlike the erstwhile factory workers who were largely uneducated and followed the manuals and orders of their managers, technology professionals are educated, know what they are doing, have the ability to solve problems and can think out of the box. So the need changed to managing work and getting products out into the market as quickly as possible so that they can be monetized. This has given rise to the Agile methodology. One of the pillars of Agile methodology is self organizing teams that are absolutely clear about what and how much work can be completed in each sprint cycle. Such teams do not need managers, rather they need someone who can minimize/eliminate disruptions to work and can communicate clearly with the team members. In SCRUM, this is the role of Scrum Master.
The general expectation from every employee is that they need to be at their maximum efficiency during their work timings. Employees have to be fully focused on their work for 8 hours. What this means is, employees have to turn off all other aspects of their lives in their minds as soon as they step into their offices. We know this is far from reality. Our professional and personal lives are not mutually exclusive rather they are intricately interconnected. When employees reach office their minds are filled with thoughts about different aspects of their personal lives and it takes time for them to start focusing on work. The exact reverse happens when they reach home after work. All body functions are performed using blood so when we have food blood is required for digestion. Depending on the amount of food we eat some part of blood from the brain is also utilized in the digestion process. This is why we feel sleepy after a heavy meal. Add to this all the conversations, meetings and other distractions. Taking all of these into account, out of the 8 hours, it is unrealistic to expect anyone to be fully productive for more than 5 hours.
Now, let me narrate why I quit two of my previous jobs.
I wanted to do MBA from my engineering days but didn’t have a substantial reason to embark on it. In a previous job, I joined a customer support project which had a security management system which I had to learn on my own to support and maintain it. In 2 1/2 years, I became an expert on it. After I was sent on an onsite assignment I won contracts for my company to upgrade the security management systems for two of its clients. The IT head of one client was a German and he put me through 3 hours of grueling technical session on the product. I also learned a lot about the businesses in different domains and business aspects of outsourcing in those years so finally I knew why I wanted to do MBA. I wanted to move into roles where I would be engaging with clients, solving business problems and making businesses streamlined and efficient. Meanwhile, a promotion would have made me manager and as the management sat for 5 years twiddling its thumbs contemplating if I should be promoted, they made two glaring mistakes. 1) They never asked me what I wanted 2) They did not define a career path for me in spite of seeing my capabilities and strengths so clearly. In the last project I did for the company, I went for knowledge acquisition to the client’s location which was outsourcing its IT operations for the first time and returned to India to set up an IT support team. The initial days were hard as the client needed support during non-office hours as well. I became sleep deprived and was on the edge of insomnia when I went to a friend’s place one evening after work and passed out after having a can of beer. Then, having beer to sleep started getting repetitive. It was at this point that I fell out with my managers. After working for 10 straight years without a break I realized I had to go do something else and the MBA was staring right at my face.
In another job, the company was known to provide work from home facility to most of its employees. My dad was not well at that time, my work location was far away from my hometown and dad was in no position to be relocated to a new place. Work from home was important so I didn’t mind joining at a lower salary. Precisely at this juncture, company changed its work from home policy, started forcing all employees to return to office and put a blanket ban on work from home for new joiners. The first two months I was on bench and had nothing much to do, third month I was assigned to a project, fifth month the manager changed and in another month the new manager had messed up the project. To add to this he targeted me and put me on Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) in just under two months after starting to manage the project which is unheard of.
In both cases, I did not quit those jobs because managers created adverse situations. They created the triggers which led me to decide to move on. My decisions to look ahead were not because I didn’t want to continue in those jobs or I couldn’t handle those managers and bad management. I already had enough to handle in my life, didn’t want to spend any of my time and energy suffering bad managers and had no stomach to fight to hold on to a job. I simply pulled myself out of the toxic environments they had created. Quitting jobs because of bad managers essentially means out of all the relationships and situations employees have to handle every day, a toxic manager is the easiest and least important one to get rid of. What is interesting though is, on the flip side, employees will brave every odds if they know they have managers with whom they can communicate openly and place their trust. Companies believe all employees can be retained by dangling the carrots of promotions and salary hikes before them. There will come a time in everyone’s career where mental health will assume greater significance than all other incentives.
These managers carry the legacy of factory management in their corporate genes where they revel in imposing themselves on employees and torture them in the name of micromanagement. Companies also believe employees cannot think for themselves, do not know what they want out of their careers and which career path to take so managers are assigned to decide for the employees. This is how employees get stuck in the promotion cycles and become disgruntled when they are passed on for promotions.
There are multitudes of causes and effects behind every employee’s decision to quit their jobs. Managers just light the match stick which results in the fire. Changing the factory worker management mindset is the most important step. Moving from people to work management is another crucial one. Employees spend 8 hours and more 5 days a week in office so they need someone who can manage their work load and be there for them to talk to. Manager mindset and management practices haven’t evolved with time which is what is required to control employee attrition because of bad managers and poor management.
Ranjeet Menon's Blog 