Can an organization’s human resource policies be so designed as to facilitate a bottoms-up approach to leadership? In other words, can it encourage and enable people at the lower rung to automatically assume a leadership role without anyone else egging them on to give their best?
It is well known that leadership is a function of at least two factors. The individual traits of an employee surely play a role. Another is the situation which could be such as to produce a leader. But for all the employees to spontaneously respond to a situation in an empathic manner in the face of an unforeseen crisis goes on to show that a share of the credit must also go to the design and implementation of conscious human resource policies.
Consider the Mumbai Taj Hotel terror attack on the 26th of November, 2008. Not even a single Taj employee abandoned the hotel and ran away, but stayed right through the attack. They helped the guests escape. In the process, many employees died.
Eventually, this became an important psychology case study at Harvard. The result was a deep insight into the way in which the company’s recruitment policies had been designed. Three of the major factors which stood out have been as follows:
1) Taj did not recruit from big cities; instead, they recruited from smaller cities where traditional culture values still holds strong.
2) They did not recruit toppers; they spoke to school masters to find out who were most respectful of their parents, elders, teachers and others.
3) They taught their employees to be ambassadors of their guests to the organization, not ambassadors of the company to their guests.
For some details of what transpired during the terror attack and the Harvard study, please check out the following:
“The Ordinary Heroes of the Taj Hotel: Rohit Deshpande at TEDxNewEngland.”
The Tata group is well known for the values, integrity, transparency and fairness it practices while dealing with various stakeholders across all its business verticals. The response of its employees to the terror attack is merely one of the many manifestations of its enlightened human resource policies.
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