Egos and errors: Pride and prejudice across fields

Are we losing the game of progress at workplace in the name of pride and prejudice?

The world progresses with modern thoughts and beliefs. Companies such as Google, Marriott or even SAS Institute, changed the dynamic of working environment, bringing light to the fact that promoting healthy work-culture does not only let the employees’ grow, but allows the company to flourish.
In this result driven industry, are we forgetting to promote a healthy work culture? Are we neglecting the development of strong leaders who will eventually take over and build a strong nation? How do we acknowledge strong leaders and create them in the workplace, who hold strong ethical values and bring great results?

Leadership is an extremely important role in every start-up and multinational company. It is also important to instill values that encourage leaders to pass on their responsibilities to their deserving juniors, enabling continuous growth and preparing them to seize greater opportunities. A great leader is a good decision maker, good communicator, prioritises the team’s wellbeing, motivates others and calls attention to success. They don’t show pride, they keep prejudice aside.

A leader must have a mindset to rise and let others rise, leveraging skills at full potential without demoralising any ideas. A leader would distribute the task and give a deadline, giving full independence to the team to complete the task before deadline and only intervenes when the team stagnates. Acknowledging hard work of a good team player and pulling up the weakest team member defines a great leader.

A lot of modern workplaces lack strong values that can protect the employees from prejudice. The younger generation are caught in the rat race at the workplace. Many values are well documented but are not reflected in their action, resulting in demotivation and lack of dedication to their work.

Google claims that happy employees create better result because they focus mostly on employees’ engagement which consists of flexibility, healthy culture, strong leadership, keeping their employees inspired, focuse on creativity, career development and much more that keeps the trust stronger, keeping the working environment fun. Constant anonymous employees’ feedback is what makes the environment better and keeps it better.

When feedback stay anonymous, employees feel safer to put their unfiltered thoughts that gives a better insight of the company’s values and culture. This way companies can make constant improvements. This approach make the newcomers motivated and keeps them engaged to their work as they enjoy what they are doing and they feel accomplished after every task they complete.

For example, MasterCard shows their appreciation to their newcomers by accepting their job offer with personalised videos and access to many company resources. Managers there make sure that the important tools are prepared in advance to guide the newcomers and they can enjoy a smoother first day of job. This approach elide the nervousness and anxiety of the newcomers, prevents over information and build trust towards the company and its culture.

A strong leader encourages collaboration both internally and externally making sure each and every member of their team is utilising their strength. Whereas an authoritarian manager will often make a skilled team player doubt their own perspective, attacking their self-worth and demotivating them enhance their other skills. Toxic managers are controlling and their pride cannot make them take constructive criticism or provide constructive feedback leaving employees uncertain about their performance and areas to make improvement.

The intimidation, favouritism and unfair act towards the skilled player, shrink confidence resulting in work dissatisfaction. This act ultimately affects promotions and opportunities because rewards are based on personal bias rather than merit. This kind of toxicity stifles growth and development of an employee but decreases the productivity for the overall team.

Before Satya Nadella was hired as the CEO Microsoft in 2014, Microsoft was known for its competiveness and know-it-all culture. This adversely impacted on Microsoft’s growth as employees were focused to prove themselves right rather than learning experimenting or collaborating which discouraged innovation. This crisis was acknowledged by Satya Nadella who changed this ethos by implementing a mindset for growth and organization culture must align with empathy. This approach encouraged creativity, accelerate growth, improved employees’ morale and achieved a sustainable growth.

Many organisations received their recognition when they made such thoughtful changes to their working culture and environment. Is Bangladesh extending the same spirit of care and encouragement to the younger generation of workers? When deserving people are denied opportunities to progress, both the company and the employees suffer.

Traditional oppression is long gone but somehow the practice still remains in the mindsets, limiting growth and innovation. Employees will begin to feel inclusive when the organisation shifts towards an empowering organisational behaviour that has empathy and strongly values equality, ethical leadership and building a workplace that let everyone thrive.

#Syeda Maliha Huq is digital marketing officer at Ascent Group, Dhaka Bangladesh.

#The opinions expressed are of the writer's own.