By D.C. Pathak

A corporate house, a government establishment or a professional agency - all represent an 'organisation' run on a set of principles that makes it an integral body performing as a single human unit.

The organisation is a collectivity of human beings working with or without a hierarchical order but sharing a commitment towards achieving what the organisation stood for.

Five paradigms are essential for getting the organisation to measure up to the definition of a single entity in terms of efforts and goals that it perused in a planned fashion. These include a multi-body leadership that set the strategy of the organisation, the workforce that executed the plans of the organisation under appropriate guidance wherever this was required, an understanding of the working ethics that would among other things, provide for a transparent system of credit sharing, formal or informal arrangements for garnering the tacit knowledge that members of the organisation carried with them about the workplace that could help to improve productivity and a style of management that fostered organisational loyalty.

It is ironic that despite this clarity, organisations so often ran into internal disorder and consequent failures - not connected with the basics of 'funding', 'profitability' and 'compliance with the law' of the land. The failure is always attributable to flaws in adhering to one or the other of these principles.

Leadership is easily the most important determinant of the success of an organisation for it sets the agenda, direction and time frame for achieving an objective with awareness of its accountability for the results.

The leadership 'packaging' can be described in the mnemonic DRINKS which stands for Decisiveness, Reliability, Initiative, Nerves, Knowledge-based approach and Saving of time.

An indecisive person can never be a good leader and in the 'Age of Information', knowledge-based decision-making alone can bring in success.

A leader has to be trustworthy and to gain that position he or she must be given to acting on reliable information - not rumours - and be free of tainted thinking which will be made possible only when a certain value system was practised.

To be a leader means taking the lead in deciphering the way forward and this means retaining the initiative. Again, personal courage is the hallmark of leadership - there is a saying that 'courage is the love affair with the unknown' - which is why a leader rides a challenge not merely copes with it. Finally, in the highly competitive world, we live in today, time is a new resource and the leader makes it a point to ensure that the organisation understood that.

A competent leadership would not by itself be able to ensure the success of the organisation unless it had the benefit of a workforce comprising persons who were trained, who felt inspired and who were loyal to the employing entity.

Since efficiency is a measure of output in relation to time, an employee who worked with concentration and an awareness of the value of time will in all likelihood produce the best results.

The trait of efficiency in an organisational setting travels down the vertical hierarchy and the weak spots are easily detected - for whom constructive guidance must come from the supervising senior.

Organisations run the risk of failing if they did not have a strong tradition of participative supervision and if they allow a culture in which bosses were believed to be there only for passing orders.

Leadership and the workforce are linked somewhat like the brain-body relationship in making for an integral organisation - it is a division of labour and not a case of subservience of one to the other.

Taxing the brain for evolving the right strategy and carrying out the implementation of that policy are both equally important for maintaining 'profitability' or 'advancement' - that was the final goal of the organisation.

For organisational coherence, the next important factor is a clear awareness down the line of the do's and don'ts that the ethics of the organisation would prescribe. These range from an outright violation of legal norms to unacceptable interpersonal misbehaviour borne out of malice or the desire to score over others.

Leading corporates assign the role of overseeing organisational ethics to one of their Directors. Orientation programmes, briefings and a functional Vigilance cell are provided for, to smoothen this function.

Ethical conduct is an outcome more of self-discipline than a fear of punishment. It is fostered by the sense of unity within the organisation on doing what was prescribed and also what was right. The stamp of ethical working is defined by the transparency that exists in credit sharing.

The employee has to have confidence that he or she would receive appreciation for showing a level of dedication to work that was out of the ordinary. A senior does not have to usurp the recognition due to a junior because part of that credit implicitly went to the supervising hand in any case. Somewhere an ethical body inspires a sense of being part of a family that the organisation came to symbolise.

Providing such an environment is an unstated responsibility of the leadership. In the unsafe world that we live in today and the distracting influences playing on the employees outside of the workplace, a recognised working principle of management is that the top man of the enterprise should also consider himself as the head of security and vigilance function even as the actual day to day work in this regard would be delegated to one of the seniors of the organisation.

In the age of knowledge, a successful organisation makes arrangements for keeping itself well informed on matters relevant to its objectives and activities. Well-established business houses invest in creating an 'Intelligence & Analysis' unit to study the external environment, analyse the situation of the industry and access information that would bring in competitive advantage. What they often miss out on is the fact that a significant amount of information was available with the employees of the organisation - high or low - that by and large went unutilised.

It is rightly said that 'nobody knows everything but everybody knows something'. In the days of 'machine learning', it is ironic that the tacit knowledge acquired by the men at work about the operations handled by them remained unavailable to their organisation because a system might not have been created by it to gather this information at least informally. This is a new task of management that can be usefully assigned to HRD people who should be logically interacting with employees to ascertain their well-being, morale and aspirations. They should in any case do this during the conduct of re-skilling and up-skilling programmes which are now considered an important segment of their charter.

From all this, it is clear that an organisation is a total of its interdependent parts and functions and it would succeed only if it organically and operationally linked them.

Organisations represent coordinated human activity and it is no surprise that a business body could even be called a 'Corporate citizen'.

All aspects of human behaviour come into play here - team spirit, honesty of effort and play of Emotional Intelligence becoming the key factors in the smooth running of the organisation that set the pace of productivity.

A live human entity, an organisation is sustained by the sense of loyalty with which its members worked for achieving the common goal. By following the five-point mandate referred to here, any organisation could hope to stand on its own against the competition and cope with any setbacks to resume healthy working and restore an environment of happiness around its members.

The destiny of an organisation draws a parallel to the life cycle of a human being and logically, therefore, it would flourish so long as the collectivity that an organisation denotes, keeps up all its members in a state of optimal health, enthusiasm for work and a happy mental mindset. All those who lead the organisation or work for it in any capacity should try to have this broader outlook and a higher approach - the leadership no doubt would have to flag off the effort that this would require in the first instance. In one word a progressive organisation is sustained by the sense of loyalty of the members - to the integral entity not to an individual- pervading through its length and breadth.