The other day I was with a highly stressed general manager. “What makes you think you are the general manager of the universe?” I asked. He stretched his lips by no more than a millimetre. A man normally smiles like that when he pays income tax or when he has severe constipation. In his case it was down to a need to be in control of everything.
I pointed out to him: “You know, the office you’re sitting in is not as stable as you think. It’s hurtling in space around the sun at 50,000 kilometres a second. You’re like an astronaut in a space shuttle called Earth where your life hangs in as delicate a balance as an autumn leaf.”
I wasn’t just jesting; we quickly become prisoners of our positions and labels and tend to forget that our fancy titles are the stuff of play. They are simply labels that define our roles in a play called “Office, office”. Our general manager thinks he is the missing link between Attila the Hun and Jack Welch. Most managers are not legally insane. Yet they are truly nuts, trying to manage people like coins in slots machines.
The boss exclaims, “Good morning, Miss Drooping Chin!” Miss Drooping Chin raises her profile and feels like saying: “Good morning, Mr Boisterous Bull!” But all she ends up doing is opening her mouth in a plastic smile. Thus the exchange of insincerities goes on like verbal blank shots. We are obsessively caught up in the role and forget that work is play.
The trouble is that play has been replaced by entertainment in our offices and homes, but the latter is just a spectator sport. Entertainment puts us on a temporary high but eventually leaves us feeling like a drooping gas balloon as the party ends. It does not energise or engage us.
Coaches have their own role to play here; by helping employees to recall how to play and become fully engaged. In play, our imaginations run riot, our thoughts are liberated and our emotions are fully expressed. In play you can be more focused as your ego remains suspended in the fun of the moment. There is total absorption of the player in the play process. At play you are not a personality but a presence. A personality is stiff like a mask. A presence is creative, dynamic and playful.
Think of Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Mohammed; their presence lingers long after they are gone. Why? All of them knew one of life’s greatest secrets, which I can reveal here in a verse I scribbled some time ago:
We who are no longer children years
Mistake play as drudgery and not the mainstream of life
For we know not that in the larger amplitude of life
We are both the player as well as the play.
Debashis Chatterjee has taught leadership at Harvard University and at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), Lucknow and Calcutta, for more than a decade. He is a pioneer in the field of Asian models of leadership and is also dean of the Leadership Centre at SP Jain Management School in Singapore and professor of organisation behaviour at the IIM. dciiml@gmail.com
Volume 3, Issue 2