In the previous episode, we had witnessed the continuation of Bhishmachaarya’s important accord on the “Aapad-Dharma”, which is part of the bigger discussion on the “Raaja-Dharma” with Yudishtra. In this, Bhishmachaarya is talking about the significance of “Mithra” (Friendship / Relationship) and how it is important for a leader to be successful. While talking about “Mithra”, Bhishmachaarya has categorized “Mithra” into four different categories and subsequently he is now talking about whom to trust and whom not to. In these lines, Bhishmachaarya explains that it is very dangerous to trust people blindly for anything. A leader should be very careful if someone is coming close voluntarily all of a sudden. This can mean several things – A person can be opportunistic upon seeing potential in us and he / she can use our situation to gain personal brownie points. While this might be common, a leader should be able to keep such highly opportunistic people at bay and not encourage them beyond a point. Now the question comes – How do we understand whether people coming close to us are opportunistic or not? For this, Bhishmachaarya explains that before we let someone come close, we have to test them for their credibility and efficiency. Only if they pass these tests, we should encourage them into our closer circle. Sugriva did exactly this with Bhagawan Rama Himself! We’ve seen this in our previous episode as to how Sugriva wanted to test Bhagawan Rama’s valour before accepting Him wholeheartedly as his “Mithra”.
Moving on further thus, Bhishmachaarya explains further – “Oh Yudishtra! You should ensure that a task should be given only to one person at a time. If you give the task to several people, nobody will do anything. Instead, people will be passing the buck on to the others and creating unwanted politics! Ultimately, your task will not get completed!” As Bhishmachaarya explains thus, Yudishtra gets confused. I’m sure all of us are getting confused here as well – Two episodes ago, we had discussed Bhishmachaarya explaining that a task should not be entrusted with just one person and it should be split and given to two or more people for efficient completion. However, Bhishmachaarya seems to explain things contrary to what he did earlier, isn’t it? Here he says that a task should be completely entrusted to one individual to avoid confusion and politics! Why is he saying both? What is the in-depth meaning of this contradiction?
As Yudisthra asks thus, Bhishmachaarya explains with clarity – “Oh Yudishtra! You should be very clear here – When I said that you should entrust more than one person for a task, I only meant “Monitoring” – You should only entrust a task to a single person, however, you should appoint people to monitor the progress of the task. If you have the time, you can also continuously monitor the progress. If that person is faltering somewhere or if he / she faces challenges at some point, you should step in immediately and resolve the challenge. However, you should not entrust the same task to multiple people. Delegating the task by splitting it is fine. However, there should not be an overlap of the same task with multiple people. This is where the confusion comes. You should give clarity to each of your people as to what exactly they are supposed to do!”
In Management, we refer to this as “Role Clarity”. Even in an organization, as a leader when we depute people to tasks, we should ensure that the role of each employee is clearly defined. For instance, if there is a task of “Hiring” new employee’s into the organization, the whole task of “Hiring / Recruitment” should be under the Director of Human Resources (HR). Under him / her, one person can perform the sub-task of scanning the CV’s, one person can do the next level of screening, arranging for the written test for prospective candidates, etc. The next couple of people can be incharge of conducting the face-to-face interviews with candidates, so on and so forth. The HR Director will entrust all his people under him with all these sub-tasks, however, it doesn’t mean that the HR Director will sit idle after this. He / she should constantly keep monitoring the process from end to end. Moreover, per Bhishmachaarya’s explanation here, more than one person should not be delegated the same sub-task. This would create “Job Duplication”, which would lead to unwanted confusion. For instance, if two people are made in-charge of CV scanning, one person will try to pass the buck on to the other and vice versa. Ultimately, none of them will take up the responsibility to finish the task. Only if the CV’s are scanned and shortlisted, the next sub-task can be performed, isn’t it? Thus, the “Role Clarity” for each and every employee in the organization is important. If this CV scanning exercise is not done, subsequently the work of other employee’s get affected as well. Hence, the leader (HR Director in this case) should constantly monitor the progress of the sub-tasks at all times. If there’s a challenge or a roadblock in any sub-task, the HR Director should immediately step in and try to resolve it.
Thus, the point here is very simple – While the leader should delegate tasks in such a way that multiple sub-tasks are delegated to multiple people, the entire task (Integrated) should be only under one person. Here in this case, if the Recruitment process itself is delegated to multiple HR Directors, it rakes up confusion, isn’t it? Hence, one leader per process is important. So for today, let us understand up to this point and we shall continue with this discussion further in the next episode! Stay tuned! 🙂
The Indian Dharma 