How social context influences human behaviour

Whether in corporate or in public life, errors will occur. It is what you do after the error that can be a disaster. You may not think you have erred, but others judge you through a social context. The accused at Nuremberg did not admit to error, but the world judged them to be in grievous error.

Embarrassing failures occur in companies. Decades ago, as a cocky, first-time director, I was embarrassed to detect a significant financial misdemeanour by my subordinate, career-damaging. More importantly, it could dent my company’s reputation. Luckily for me, I intuitively sought corporate help from my chief executive officer and chief financial officer, who sensed my vulnerable state. Over the next few months as we cleared the mess, I felt humiliated among (not by) my senior colleagues, but I saved appearing incompetent more widely.

When the Tata Finance fraud was discovered around 2001, it was Ratan Tata who blew the whistle. He immediately admitted the error and then mandated my colleague, Ishaat Hussain, to do the rescue act. These experiences made me think deeply about what a leader should do when faced with a serious error under his watch.

Swiss American, Dr Elizabeth Kübler Ross observed a five-stage behavioural pattern among life-threatened and terminally ill patients. First, denial about the onset of the disease. Second, anger, arising from, “Why me?” Third, negotiation — blaming others, and endless discussion about alternative solutions. Fourth, depression, because all alternatives look bad. Fifth and last, acceptance, leading to positive action. These five stages form the memorable acronym, DANDA. Regrettably, the first four stages hog valuable time before serious action begins.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) fiasco of 1990 offers some lessons. After a textbook launch, a highly technical team discovered that the HST had been launched with a flawed mirror. With a hefty $1.7-billion cost tag and public visibility, media criticism and detailed investigation followed. The error, it was found, was in adjusting the null corrector used to figure the mirror; astonishingly, the mirror flaw had shown up in tests at the Perkin Elmer vendor plant. The review board wondered why smart technical people had not rigorously pursued these.

They were astonished that the highly focused schedule and budget pressures caused everyone to move relentlessly forward. NASA’s management of its contractors had been quite hostile — if vendors could rationalise results, they would not report errors. They were simply tired of being beaten up. That is how a trivial mirror error overshadowed the accomplishments of thousands of dedicated people and was thought to have squandered taxpayers’ money. What follows is the big take.

The Review Board judged it as a leadership failure, not a technical failure.

As leader, the much-decorated Director of Astrophysics, Charles Pellerin, accepted responsibility and quit NASA. He joined a business school to research a leadership question: How does one factor in social context into management? He and some academics developed a team building process to help team members understand each other and to measure social context. Mature groups of people understand the impact of culture and team climate and create mechanisms to measure and monitor these soft indicators which practically impact everything especially fostering innovation.

HST type events also occur in public life. The social contexts may differ, but context plays a huge role.

Michael Lewis’s The Premonition, reviewed in Business Standard on May 11, is about how the Trump administration handled the pandemic. In America, firing a presidential appointee, like Robert Redfield, Director of CDC, is easy, but it is a pain to fire a competent civil servant, like Anthony Fauci. It is the opposite in India: Firing a constitutional appointee is difficult (CEC, CAG) but it is easy to deal with a civil servant — which is why Indian bureaucrats, even scientists, turn out to be lapdogs.

Many crises are leadership failures rather than technical ones. Leaders focus so intently on an agenda that they fail to factor in their team’s social context. A dose of healthy humility and empathy can mitigate the resultant humiliation. Then there was a leadership display of inappropriate Covid behaviour. Half-truths, both inadvertent and deliberate, were next irresponsibly deployed. Hyper-charged commentaries by media, courts, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and economists churned the pot of public opinion.

Leadership failure has not even been tangentially admitted. Purposeful action has been slow and muddled. The scale of the Covid wave may have been unexpectedly high, but the continued and horrendous mismanagement of the vaccine programme is far from an auspicious “tika utsav.” One redeeming feature was the brilliant response of our much maligned and neglected civil society: NGOs, religious, community and social organisations.

Many views exist on whether the devastation of the second wave was nature’s uncertainty, a planning failure or sheer hubris. However, if leaders admit an error with humility, then the current actions have a chance of being viewed less harshly. I know too many suffering families not to say this.

The writer is a best-selling author and corporate advisor. His latest book is titled “Wisdom for startups from grownups”. He was Director of Tata Sons and Vice-Chairman of Hindustan Unilever. rgopal@themindworks.me