Hi Boss, are the doors of your room open?

Mr. Zavera was trying to meet his boss for quite some time. He could not get the appointment. He rang up several times to the personal secretary to his boss. Every time he got the reply the boss is busy. Mr. Zavera decided to make a personal effort and went all the way to the Head office where his boss was seated. He got back the same reply. Finally, with the help of a common friend, he got his way through. When he entered the room of his boss, he was surprised to see the boss reading a newspaper!

“Normally, Mr. Zavera, I don’t meet people, I see them only through their reports. That itself speaks volumes of what they do and what they have to say.”

And the boss is not always right!

Playing a boss, is increasingly becoming an outdated culture. In most work environments, there is an increasing thrust on participative management. The relationship between the cadres is expected to be supportive, scaffolding and articulated on strong professional practices and ethics. Ivory tower approaches and top-down approaches are not always inclusive and hence make the shared vision of the organization elusive and defunct.

Peter Drucker does point out “I am the boss” syndrome as one of the major roadblocks to the professional health of an organization. Authority has to flow from decisions taken and strategies adopted which convey the much-needed meaning to the members of the participating team. An excellent work culture would slowly but certainly indicate the flow diagram of the latent authority.

Leadership in an educational environment has to be far more inclusive compared to other corporate fields of activity. Educational organizations focus on human resource development and hence need to model concepts in practice. The challenges from the stakeholders in educational organizations are varied both in their styles and approaches. The leader in the educational environment, therefore, has to be highly sensitive to human needs, emotions, and diversities. This calls for a high degree of emotional intelligence. Closed door approaches have often resulted in mid-term and long-term failures though in some cases they might have given short term benefits.

Rigid and authoritarian approaches in leadership are usually negated as they sow fear and frustration among the stakeholders. This shuns voluntary participation that facilitates generation of ideas and team building. In an educational set up, founding and funding fear among the stakeholders is unhealthy for the holistic profile of the organization. Such organizations will not only lose their brand if they have one, or would sow seeds for a negative branding.

In a technologically evolved work environment, personal interactions with the stakeholders need not always be necessary. Opening the windows of communication through other portals may provide the initial access to generate understanding and build positive relationship.

Refusal to interact to a desirable level with the stakeholders in the system might sometimes reflect poorly on the quality of leadership as an escapist mechanism or a display of arrogance. Hence ‘the doors’ of the room where the boss sits, needs to remain open. Well, One can always schedule the work to accommodate the timings for such interactions. But a clear message from the boss that the room is open to suggestion and participation, is a positive indicator of the performance profile of the boss.