Message From MD August – 2019

Dear friends,

“God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers”. This Jewish proverb communicates nothing but the ultimate Truth.

My mother’s love will always remain with me. Losing mother is one of the deepest sorrows a heart can know. But her goodness, her caring, and her wisdom live on – like a legacy of love. I am grateful to all of you at this time of sorrow and deeply appreciate your expression of sympathy and kindness to my family. Thank you once again for keeping us in your prayers and thoughts.

As I remember her, I pause to reflect on the pivotal role that mothers play in shaping the society. Mothers are a pillar of strength at home, in society and in business. We draw important lessons from motherhood in order to understand how we should strengthen our organisations and inculcate values and principles in building ethical organisations.

Motherhood is associated with growth, responsibility, love, care and many other things done in order to prepare a child for adulthood. This role can be defined by social, cultural, religious and biological attributes but the essence of motherhood is about forming a relationship with a child. It involves imparting values and knowledge to a child, with the hope that the child will uphold these principles in his or her journey through life. Similarly, laws, policies and other factors influence basic conditions of employment or the relationship between an organisation and its team members, yet the real bond is not captured in these regulations. This relationship includes aspects such as values, trust and culture, which are essential for ethical performance and should be cultivated over time. These attributes are dynamic and require both the organisation and the employee to have a common understanding of the organisational objects and the trust that each party will enable and support the attainment of the organisational interests.

As mothers apply what they learn, follow advice from their parents and grandparents, listen to their intuition in parenting, they also understand that the decisions made by their adult children are not within their control. All they can do is to provide advice and trust that their children will make good decisions and with an expectant heart, mothers hope that they make the correct choices. Organisations comply with regulations, apply best practices and seek advice from specialists in organisational ethics; however, they also need to understand that ultimately each member has to be able to make decisions on behalf of the organisation. Organisations can set the standards, communicate those standards to team members, capacitate them on ethical decision making, but at the end of the day they will make decisions based on the authority assigned to them. Management can only monitor decisions to ensure the standards are upheld, to institute discipline and create a system that makes it easy for all members of the team to do the right thing.

As we reminisce about motherhood, we also reminisce about organisations that have created an ethical foundation that is necessary for team members to maintain ethical standards. Friends, once upon a time, a little girl was asked by her friends, where her home was, and she replied without delay, “where mother is.”

Regards,
Sunil Kumar V.