So are we isolationist, mean and selfish beings by nature? We seem to be relatively better in walking alone than in walking along. It seems we cannot build and sustain a team. We are afraid, perhaps, that if we walk in teams but fail to reach the destination intact and unchallenged, we will be exposed for the ugliness of our failures.[break]
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And just in case we succeed, we fall to the fear of having to share the benefits with the rest of the team. The irony is that this trend is more noticeable in the public sector, where togetherness and teamwork are even more necessary.
I have increasingly felt that this inclination of walking alone is a national culture. Haven’t we noticed how many political parties have been registered in our country of 27 million? America, with a population of 313 million runs a bi-partisan system successfully, the UK with 61 million people is happy with its predominant tri-party status, and India with over a billion and quarter people has been struggling to limit the number of political parties to a dozen.
Ours looks like an exceptionally generous system with the number of registered parties already crossing a hundred. This proves that we cannot walk along. Neither can we think along, nor act along. We want to be on our own instead, driven by our overarching ego and super-confidence. There is little or no mutual trust amongst us to explore the commonalities of interests, abilities and constraints, and collaborate and cooperate on the basis of the same.
Like many other US-educated graduates, I too was fascinated at one time with the popular US precept, “even a single person can make a remarkable difference.” I was made to believe that this was indeed the case, and was shown several examples during my orientation at the US center as a Hubert Humphrey fellow. But as years of my professional career are a proof, it has been difficult to realize this adage in our socio-cultural milieu. In Nepal, individual ideas and thoughts will go in vain unless they are transformed into a collective thinking and action.
That is why I recently suggested Shesh Ghale, the newly elected President of the Non-Resident Nepali Association (NRNA) during an interaction at the Ministry of Finance, Singh Durbar that his “dreaming of Nepal’s prosperity” was fine, but if he indeed wanted to ensure that his dream didn’t turn to a ‘daydream’, he would need to embark on the journey of ‘collective action’ by working together in a team of like-minded colleagues.
A minister joins his new ministry with a preoccupied mindset toward his secretary and other colleagues. He begins to doubt their loyalty and allegiance when things do not turn out as he wants them to. He gradually dislikes those who critically appraise him and show him the way out of problems. He would rather collect cronies who shower false praise upon him but slip away in trouble.
A secretary in the ministry fails to perform efficiently mainly because he cannot, or he does not, want to make his team functional. He cherishes dreams, but cannot realize them because he does not have the ability or desire to walk along in a team. He may impress as a planner, may even have a vision, but if he fails to manage and lead the team, he cannot succeed. He is discredited for his fall, and transferred to another ministry to face a similar fate.
Nepal’s civil service has a glitch. Funnily, it retires its secretaries, who have been groomed over a long ‘gestation’ period with the government with huge fiscal and intellectual investment, just in five years of their tenure. Worse still, they are transferred from one ministry to another at least four times on average during those five years.
This tendency of unpredicted and inexplicable transfers obviously necessitates teamwork. Otherwise, how can they get anything done? Without developing and capitalizing on the team resource, performing collectively, and applying consultative and collaborative leadership practices, they will easily vanish into the morass of learning, unlearning and relearning, with no clear destination in sight.
Sadly enough, however, this realization has become increasingly rare in Nepal’s bureaucracy in recent times. There is hardly a feeling of passionate togetherness amongst senior bureaucrats when it comes to handling a common agenda of reforming bureaucracy. Coordination and collaboration become impossible unless there is good rapport and relationship at the personal level. A veiled sense of rivalry and remoteness reigns the subconscious of most senior bureaucrats. And who suffers from this syndrome? The institutions in the first place, of course, but the people who are their rightful beneficiaries ultimately suffer more.
Modern-day institutions run on the functional strength of three-layer harmonious relationship among leaders, managers and experts. In a government bureaucracy, these three layers are represented by ministers as political heads, secretaries as bureaucratic chiefs, and mid-rung officials as their deputies and subordinates.
The latter are undoubtedly the backbone of this chain, because they feed their expertise into policymaking through their ideas and opinions. If the secretary or the minister disregards their inputs and prefers to “walk alone”, the decisions will lack collective ownership. Often they cannot be enforced.
People as ‘human-ware’ are more consequential resources than the oft-focused hardware and software, and therefore, they need to be treated with necessary respect and responsiveness if the institutions want to deliver. Most often, decisions are not implemented because the people who are actually responsible to implement them are not involved in the decision-making process. The result will have no legitimacy if due process is not followed.
There is also a flip side, however, to teamwork. The field of organizational psychology is rife with the problems of collective thinking. Such problems need to be diagnosed and treated in time with utmost prudence. For instance, if the destination is not clear, or if the team is mischievously formed and maliciously mobilized, and if the leaders lack the ability to lead and guide the teammates, the ‘team’ turns to a ‘crowd’. This crowd can get misguided, confused, and even anarchic.
In such a situation, leaders and managers would prefer to walk alone for some time until a full team spirit and understanding is found. But the prolongation of such situation would be extremely detrimental for the institution.
The pros of team work outnumber the cons, and more so in the current context of Nepal. Let us therefore work seriously toward building, nurturing and mobilizing teams in order to turn individual dreams into tangible reality through collective actions. Let us learn to walk along rather than walk alone.
The author is a Secretary at the Ministry of Industry
kgyawali9@yahoo.com
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