Operating Without Standard Operating Procedures

When I started working in 1981, Indian organisations were evolving. The evolution was largely by trial and error though companies had begun to hire consultants for setting organisational and individual objectives (MBO was the ‘in-thing’ then), for conducting aptitude tests on its employees – both existing and aspiring and time and motion studies were done to ascertain manpower needs, and so on and so forth.

From the management school campus, I got my first job with a cable manufacturing company that was head quartered at Kolkata in West Bengal. It was an old company with a culture that was close to being feudal, although a young Managing Director who had recently joined was trying very hard to change things around.

To get a perspective on the era under discussion, the most advanced method of calculating large sets of data was to use a comptometer. This was before electronic calculators came in! Using a comptometer needed specific training and comptometrists were valued in organisations specially during account closing time. Without them no accounting could be done.

My organisation had one such comptometrist. He was also the Head of the Trade Union at the Head Office of the company.

Another fact of that era was aggressive Trade Unionism specially vis-à-vis Bengal. Communism in India took roots in Bengal and handling unions was a skill that was a large part of the job of the then Personnel Managers.

My boss who was designated as the Personnel Manager was a home grown-talent who had joined the company about 20 years earlier as a clerical staff and by dint of further studies, his loyalty to the promoters and sheer hard work had risen to the rank of being a Personnel Manager. Many other functional heads had also grown in the organisation similarly.

Although my boss did not have formal management education and training, he had immense commonsense and an ability to come with effective solutions to issues using what we would today call ‘thinking out of the box’. Above all, he had an uncanny ability to size up people.

I think I was lucky to get him as my first boss. He was a great teacher and would patiently explain situations, rules, regulations, challenges etc. And he gave a free hand to work. He allowed his subordinates to make mistakes. And I was always sure he would have my back.

Two incidences come to mind when I reminisce about my life and learnings with my first boss.

The first involves the comptometrist. As the General Secretary of the Union, he had for long been a thorn in the flesh of the company and my boss had told me time and again that he would love to suspend him if he caught him doing something wrong.

Because of some long standing unresolved dispute, The Union, under his leadership had formally informed the management that they would ‘work to rule’ till this stalemate is satisfactorily resolved. Among other things, ‘Work to Rule’ in communist Bengal meant that the employees,  would not do any overtime. This was the account closing time and people needed to work beyond office hours in practically all companies.

The comptometrist Union leader refused to do overtime when he was asked to stay back one day to finish pending work. The Finance Head came and informed me verbally and I realized that this is the opportunity that my boss was looking for. Everyone had gone home for the day as it was after office hours. I asked the Finance Head to write out his complaint and give it to me. This memo came to be in quick time.

I went to my boss and asked him if we could hand him the charge sheet first thing tomorrow morning. After some thinking, my boss agreed and since all the typists had gone home, I volunteered to type out the charge sheet on the Remington typewriter that was used by my typist.

The charge sheet was handed over to the Union Boss when he came to work in the morning.

Charge sheeting the head of a union was generally not done and therefore the reaction of our union boss was predictable. He charged into my boss and asked him why he had done this. And my boss cooly told him that he was forced to sign the letter because of me and my new-fangled ideas. He felt that the best learning for me could happen only if I was thrown into the deep end of the pool! He advised the union boss to talk to me. And he did. That conversation was a learning for both of us.

Work to rule however continued.

The next day one of the managers took a pool car with a company driver to a client. On the way back exactly at 5.30 PM which was the end of his duty shift, the driver refused to drive the car knowing full well that the manager did not drive. The forced the manager to get off and take a taxi while he himself drove to the company garage and parked the car.

This matter got reported to my boss who did not drive a car himself. He called and asked me if I could drive a car. I told him that I did.

A couple of days later, my boss booked a pool car to go to the factory that was located about 40 kms. away in the suburbs. The roads were bad and public transport practically non-existent. He made sure that the same driver who had offloaded one of the managers, was allotted this duty. We left for the factory early morning.

On the way back when we were on a deserted highway at 5.30 PM – the end of shift time for the driver, my boss asked the driver to stop the car, get off and hand over the keys to me so that I would drive the rest of the way. He did not want the driver to go against the diktat of the Union! 

I did not dare to find out how this driver got back home from this dark and deserted highway that had little public transport. Thank God, the Human Rights Commission was not so well known or active those days!!

The Union decided to withdraw their agitation.

I realized that practical working in an organisation was so different from what we had been taught in our MBA classes. Our learning was theoretical. It gave us the bandwidth to think differently and the ability to analyse situations and data critically. It could not have been designed to cover all situations in working life as is evident from the two incidences narrated above.

Solutions need to be tailor made for situations. Different managers will find different solutions. Some solutions would be pedestrian, others would be imaginative and therefore brilliant. The word intrapreneur gained ascendancy in this era where employees were encouraged to think like entrepreneurs. This meant that while following the laws, we may circumvent a few rules, constantly challenge existing practices to find innovative solutions that were hitherto not thought of.

All large corporations today have standard operating procedures. There is little room for innovation or for pursuing a different line of action.

Even in this ‘straightjacketed’ scheme of things, you will come across managers who display the ability and have the chutzpah to think differently, to inspire people to have the courage of conviction to leave the beaten track every once in a while, and come up with new thinking and approach that leads to imaginative solutions. Intrapreneurship is not dead! Managers who display these traits will be emulated while they are in service and will be remembered long after they are gone.