Summary: Gopalakrishnan Subramanian shares that while businesses are quick to embrace technological advancements, their leadership style tends to remain old-school. He shares how organisations must move from a hierarchical to a self-driven culture to enhance productivity, sense of ownership and employee satisfaction.

Early morning you see the leaders of an organisation walking into the office. They put in long hours of work. Tasks are assigned and decisions are made. They are supported by a group of managers who have a workforce reporting to them for the day-to-day tasks. Does this sound familiar? You may wonder what about this requires a mention here. The fact is that this represents an (hierarchical) organisational structure that has been in existence for ages. While we seem to have adapted well to technological advancements, it is sad that our leadership mindsets have not changed at the same pace. We still seem to be stuck with hierarchy, irrespective of the industry sector.

The sad part is that this structure seems to be not working for people at the bottom of the pyramid and for those at the top. People tend to come to office more out of need rather than driven by passion. There are complaints of lack of work-life balance, stress, demotivation, lack of learning, insecurity and the list goes on. For those higher up in the hierarchy it is not a picnic either. They fight hard to run their teams, deal with internal politics, bureaucracy, myth of empowerment and so forth.

The question is that if the structure is not working for all, then why do we tend to follow it? What is required is an organisational model which allows individuals to pursue their passion, set their own goals and be committed to them and to the team, understand the evolving purpose of the organisation and make things happen, all without having someone to tell them what to do. In short, can people be self-driven in organisations?

Roughly 30% of a manager’s time is spent on tasks which do not yield the intended results -- preparing for meetings, having frequent meetings, tracking attendance and leaves, preparing reports instead of analysing, etc. Are the individuals happy doing this? Is there a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction at the end of the day?

By now I would like you all to think of the question how life will be if unproductive tasks are avoided. By some magic things have changed radically that when we enter office we see smiling faces, people greet each other, there is lot of work, but no one is complaining about work-life balance, people feel confident, collaborate with each other to get work done, personal and professional growth is addressed.

Organisations around the world are moving towards a self-driven culture which creates an environment of ownership, creativity and decreased conflict.

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