If Giraffe started to graze....a HR message

The senior leaders and CEO’s in every corporate should do what is defined or appropriate to their profile. Anyone who breaches the above rule/profile, will be punished is the law followed by nature.

Look at the way the giraffe is being created in nature. Giraffe has long neck to eat leaves from tall trees. Giraffe is evolved only that way and only for the above life style. Imagine, if giraffe starts grazing along side of zebra or buffalo or deer?

What will happen if giraffe defy its evolution and become an active grazer? It will certainly create stiff competition for other grazing animals. But beyond that, the purpose of evolution of giraffe with long leg and neck also would go defunct and meaningless. To avoid such possibility only, the nature has created an absolute limitation and danger to giraffe if it attempts to graze.

For a Giraffe, if wants to graze, it has to stretch its legs far apart and has to bend down badly. Such recumbent position is dangerous as giraffe cannot quickly get back from its recumbent position when predators attack. More than its predators, giraffe knows its danger if it engages in grazing. Hence, giraffe seldom graze. Besides the danger, the energy expenditure of giraffe while grazing will be higher than the energy gain.

The message is clear. In many organizations, the top leaders and sometime even CEO’s do engage in menial work just to prove to their managers how capable they are even in doing some menial job. Imagine, a CEO with such high salary is doing the job of a manager means, how much resource of the organization they are wasting? Sadly, the owners of many family centric organizations engage in such work style.

If an organization takes pride in such culture, it is a clear indicator of how definition-less the organization is. Only the organization that does not have vision, objectives, growth plan and strict mechanism to measure the effort versus result, effort versus leaning and learning versus future plan, you will find the owners doing all odd jobs despite having adequate number of employees.

Such organizations functions on daily basis as they plan the activities every day based on the requirements. They lack future and long term plans.

Such organization continues to struggle to meet the past than forecasting and working for the future. Always they will be busy completing the backlog than anything else.

Because of the continuous commotion to meet the past than gallop to the future, every one, including the CEO’s and Directors in such family owned organizations would engage in every activity. They further claim that they are highly skilled and have versatile exposure, knowledge and experience.

Only due to such struggle, they seldom evolve to next level. Look at the beauty of giraffe, its advantages and limitations. Use your advantages not your limitation, is the message, nature conveys through its creation of giraffe.

Definitions are not to differentiate or to just understand things but to create order and distinctive contributions.

Senior leaders and CEO’s have to be definite contributions and therefore, they should engage accordingly. Unfortunately in some one man lead organizations and organizations that are run by family members, work differently due to the lack vision and role clarity. Because of the above confusion, people engage in different activities just to keep busy and ensure they contribute.

Dr S Ranganathan, ClinRise Derma Pvt., Ltd., Chennai