Curse of Kingship - a corollary

I site Devdutt Pattanaik’s excellent Corporate Dossier article titled "Curse of Kingship" (23rd April 2010). [http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/features/corporate-dossier/Curse-of-kingship-It-is-the-boss-who-created-yes-man/articleshow/5846762.cms] Devdutt has hit nails on their heads while describing aptly, situations in organizations where the head of the company or even middle level managers face similar issues of their direct reports smudging information to suit the mutual perspective between them and the managers. There have been several personal experiences where employees extracted unnecessary piles of data or conducted meaningless analysis which added little value to the actual investigation, just because their managers needed to see a particular data point that they were familiar with.

As Devdutt has rightly mentioned, leaders often forget that they are responsible for the image they portray to their subordinates. Reading about kings employing disguise to investigate the reality, I am reminded of another story from mythology. There was once a sculptor who presented a sculpture of the king in the king’s court. The king looked at it and commented about it being a bad replica. The king’s courtiers immediately criticized several aspects of the sculpture and put down the sculptor. After several weeks, the sculptor returned with the exact same sculpture and secretly requested the king to praise it. The courtiers followed suit in saying how magnificent the sculpture was. The sculptor then admitted that he had not done a single change in the sculpture, thus exposing the “yes-man” attitude of the courtiers. Another classical example of how a king or a leader, by employing the right kind of checks and balances, can challenge the analysis of their subordinates and rationalize them in order to prevent reports and analysis from being too much in agreement or in disagreement as the perceived norm may be.

I believe that most of these analyses & reports lead to decision making and hence to company profitability (or the lack thereof). Although results are sometimes unpredictable, long-term and untraceable, in an industry like investment banking, incentives for decision-makers are often linked to the decisions they take. However, the fundamental issue in a fast-paced corporate scenario is the lack of time for a king to don a disguise or for the company to wait for results. Thus, in a world of increasing accountability and traceability, the essential factor that could prevent the curse of kingship is the building of trust.

One could look at trust in two different paradigms. First and more obvious is looking at the trust that a leader should have in his subordinates and vice versa. However the other and the less obvious paradigm is the perception of trust in the organization. What Devdutt had described in the article is merely a perception issue, where leaders want to be perceived in a certain manner, but are perceived differently by their subordinates. Although a presentation is often a tool to convince a leader of a certain course of action, the course of action would eventually impact the company and every individual therein.

Once this aspect of mutual trust is perceived uniformly by every individual in the company, once every individual understands that his perspective of the market and his analysis eventually impacts himself, he becomes his own king. Once this perception of trust penetrates every level in the company, a leader is reduced to a mere intermediary or a facilitator. Once this happens, decision making becomes rooted in trust and the curse of kingship can be very much reduced, if not completely eradicated.

Niranjan Srinivasan