Harmony vs. Hierarchy - Talking to Janaagraha's Ramesh Ramanathan

Image: Mallikarjun Katakol for Forbes India

Ramesh Ramanathan, Co-founder, Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based not-for-profit organisation

Name: Ramesh Ramanathan
Profile: Co-founder, Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based not-for-profit organisation that works to change the quality of life in urban India
He Says
•You need conflict to grow. Whether it is at an individual level or as a collective, conflict is necessary
•Letting go is not abandonment. Letting go assumes, what has emerged does not have to have your fingerprints in it

Ramesh Ramanathan studied Physics at the BITS, Pilani and then took his MBA at Yale. He worked at Citibank for ten years and ran a $100 million business for the bank. Somewhere along the way, with wife Swati, he decided to return to his roots. Today, he is known as the co-founder of Janaagraha, one of India’s most talked about urban civic movements and Janalakshmi, an urban microfinance company that directly touches the lives of over a million people. Ramesh exemplifies leadership that delivers lasting change by engaging with communities.

Communities are complex; corporations are complicated. Yet, Peter Drucker would tell you, the salvation for today’s beleaguered leadership in bloated corporations is in looking at and learning from how successful communities work. Here I am with Ramesh, in his garden, to learn something about communities, leadership and the innate nature of conflict.

Should we see a corporation as a community of communities?
Absolutely. Because the community based approach is inherently organic.  It is like nature; it is the more responsive approach. There are, however, some fundamental issues that make traditional managers uncomfortable in looking at a corporation as a community of communities and enabling, supporting and engaging with internal communities. A basic insecurity stems from the fact that it is hard to see the strategic intent, as you so easily can, in a hierarchal system.  

If we think of the organisation as a community of communities, what is the critical leadership requirement to engage with them?
Authenticity. You can’t even begin this journey (engaging with communities) without authenticity. With authenticity, come many things; the ability to acknowledge, to listen, and allow collective decision-making. Authenticity starts with yourself; first you need to be accountable to yourself. Only when you do not have an inconsistency within yourself, you can be whole.  

An authentic leader knows when to listen, cajole and push. An authentic leader knows when not to listen.

The problem with corporate leaders is that sometimes they might have a vision, but they have not created the vision community to take them up there. Creating the community movement within the corporation requires patience, nurturing and an enormous amount of time. That is how nature works! It takes a lot of time to make the first ten steps to happen. But after that the rate of change is exponential. Because, the seed is already there in everybody. At a very personal level, as the head of an institution, it is the arrogance of my ambition that wants to see the outcome of my efforts in my own lifetime. Whereas our ability to even have embarked on this journey is a result of generations of people who have invested time and effort.

What about conflict? Working with communities scares leaders because they feel they can manage conflict better within the hierarchy where power flows in discernible ways.
I think people very often mistake, especially in India, that harmony is the absence of conflict. But it is not! In the womb of conflict, are the seeds of change. You need conflict to grow.  Nirvana is not the absence of conflict. Nirvana is in the action, it is in how we are reacting to conflict. We must learn to harvest from conflict.
 
When you are authentic, you do not have any problems in dealing with conflict. The idea is to be open, to stay upfront and find ways in which you communicate in a constructive way. Use that conflict to then grow. There is conflict in the process of arriving at a common goal. Each step of that conflict is about me, calibrating in my mind. I came with some ideas, I listened to somebody else, I had friction in the resolution of that idea and I expressed that friction.  If I didn’t express, it is like putting Dulux on distemper. It just peels away. When I express, I disagree, but I do it constructively, I am trying to forge the common purpose. When we accept the rules of engagement, express and communicate conflict, we get the common purpose and then it is truly energising because it belongs to each of us. The process of creating a vision community is ridden with conflict. And this is the conflict between individuals, between ideas, so people need to become comfortable with the process. It is not a romantic or elegant process; it can be painful. But you have invested yourself completely in it.

Managers fear that communities would hijack their agenda; they have to let go, and it amounts to abandonment.
Letting go is not abandonment. Letting go assumes, what has emerged does not have to have your fingerprints in it. You let go of what you began with, but you own what it ended up as. Otherwise what you are actually doing is pseudo-engagement. What you owe the community is all of your capacity, all of your visioning skills but then you let go, you trust the community would be able to carry it forward in a way superior to what you could have. And then, you own the collective outcome.
 
Didn’t Otto Scharmer tell us ‘you let go, to let come’? But it sounds like a contradiction. As leaders we do not want to appear contradictory. Is consistence or contradiction, the sign of greater leadership?
There are two ways of looking at contradiction. One is about consistency in different forums in the same time and space and the second, chronological consistency. It is perfectly okay to be inconsistent in a chronological sense because it means you are growing. Mohandas K. Gandhi said — do not ask me about my position on an issue ten years ago; ask me about my position on it today. As leaders, we must evolve. Somebody who is afraid of chronological inconsistency, is not growing, is not an evolving individual.

Subroto Bagchi is co-founder & gardener, MindTree and a best-selling author. His brief:  Every fortnight, exchange tales of the road with successful entrepreneurs