Finding the Right Balance and Spirit in Management

There is an art to management of people within a company, department or section. Those who are tasked with undertaking this responsibility frequently find it challenging to get the exact right balance to both motivate their team members and keep things moving smoothly forward. If they are too severe or demanding, they breed a sullen and obstinate form of either active or passive resistance, a layer of negativity that permeates the workplace, makes people unhappy and thereby reduces both attentiveness and efficiency in the use of time. This result then contributes to the vicious cycle of increased severity. At some point, people quit the job or find ways to retailiate for the negative energy, or else, it affects their health and they suffer from various conditions that both decreases their availability for the job and their concentration and ability to act when at the job.

On the other side, some managers try to become cheerleaders for the team, dispensing excess praise in an attempt to encourage and lighten the atmosphere. This approach has weaknesses as well. Artificial praise not only gives people the sense they are succeeding when they actually need to improve in their jobs. It also, however, tends to demotivate those who are strong performers when they see mediocre or poor performance being encouraged and rewarded, as they can see that it is not real, and it increases the burden on them to carry the weight the others should be shouldering. Such artificial praise also lets people know that the management is not paying attention and is employing a form of falsehood to try to make people feel positive about themselves.

What is needed is for a balance to be struck between intensity of focus, discipline in the actions, and needed support and encouragement, based on actual performance. In other words, an approach based in truth, good will, respect and harmony, generally a manifestation of the quality of Sattwa, without slipping into either rigid severity or anger, generally a manifestation of Rajas, nor into a lax and weak management style that papers over the failures with a ‘closed eyes’ approach of artificial praise where it is not actually due, generally a manifestation of Tamas.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “To discourage anybody is wrong, but to give false encouragement or encouragement of anything wrong is not right. Severity has sometimes to be used (though not overused), when without it an obstinate persistence in what is wrong cannot be set right.”

“It [disciplining the subordinates] has to be done in the right spirit and the subordinates must be able to feel that it is so — that they are being dealt with in all uprightness and by a man who has sympathy and insight and not only severity and energy. it is a question of vital tact and a strong and large vital finding always the right way to deal with the others.”

“In dealing with others there is a way of speaking and doing which gives most offence and opens one most to misunderstanding and there is also a way which is quiet and firm but conciliatory to those who can be conciliated — all who are not absolutely of bad will. It is better to use the latter than the former. No weakness, no arrogance or violence, this should be the spirit.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 2, Looking at Oneself and Others, pp. 48-49