“Can businesses focus on people rather than performance?” – BK Shivani

Can businesses focus on people rather than performance? Sister BK Shivani started her session with this thought-provoking question.

In the NEXTECH India HR Summit I attended earlier this month, she was one of the eminent keynote speakers. Naturally, most of the audience (including me) were taken aback and remained mute.

Here are some of my key learnings from her:

1. An empathetic leader is the need of the hour

The role of a CEO has shifted in the post-pandemic world – it is NO longer ‘Chief Executive Officer’ but ‘Chief Empathetic Officer’!

Better still, if this role can be that of a ‘Chief Empowering Officer’.

2. Watching, reading, and listening is our emotional diet. And if our emotional diet is not good, it reflects on our emotional health.

An average person spends 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. Which is nearly one third of our life. And now other one third is taken by digital mediums. This directly impacts our EQ. Which is rather on the lower side these days.

Every day, we consume stressful content including news and political dramas, which inadvertently dilute our feelings. Whatever content we consume impacts our personality, and that will change our destiny either for the better or worse.

One concept that stuck with me – Stress = Pressure ÷ Resilience.

Pressure, for many people, will remain the same but with good resilience, stress can be reduced.

3. Generate happiness, not anger

Generating happiness is possible if we take control of our own life. The three ‘S’ that greatly influence the way we perceive our surroundings —

• Sanskar (nature/impression)

• Sanskriti (Culture)

• Sansar (World)

We feel that the world must change for us to feel better. But in fact, the opposite is true. When we feel better, our perception of the world around us changes.

It is important that we enable people to understand these things. For this, we (leaders) need to take charge and create an environment in which people can freely work on their EQ and not just IQ.

Coming back to the main question she had asked:

“With these attitudes, do you think businesses can focus on people rather than performance?”

What do you think was the audience’s answer?

Full video of the session below.

#ETHRNextech #Motivation #PeopleFocus #Leadership #Workplace