Grow above the normal to lead the team – Giraffe to HR

Only by being above the ‘normal and ordinary’ one can easily win over the odds and adversities in corporate. Especially the leaders and the bosses must always grow above the normal and ordinary and also must be totally, completely and distinguishably different from the rest if they want to effectively lead the team.

How to be different and what is the true meaning of ‘different from the ‘normal and ordinary’? To understand the above, the thermoregulatory mechanism of giraffe, the corporate leaders must learn.

Giraffe is the tallest land animal that lives in the hot plains of Africa. Indeed, the temperature of the Giraffe’s habitat rises considerably during the day where most mammals would find it hard to live. Ironically, giraffe sweat poorly. Finding water in hot summer is difficult for most of the African animals. Giraffe is no exception.

Giraffe being the tallest animal, to drink water from river or lakes is always difficult and risky as the predators would wait for an opportunity to easily stalk giraffe especially when it comes to drink water. Nature has engineered an innovative method in giraffe to overcome all the above obstacles.

Sweating although helps in thermoregulation, but do cause severe water loss. Animal like giraffe with great surface area of skin, sweating means, disaster, as it has to search a water hole to immediately to replenish water. Further the leaves eaten by giraffe are not succulent (rich source of water).

Nature has beautifully made the giraffe to live with higher body temperature. It means, the body temperature of giraffe rises gently above the temperature of its habitat so that the thermoregulation can be easily achieved and adjusted without sweating. Through the above process, perfect maintenance of the body temperature without any water loss is achieved by giraffe and hence there is no necessity for them to search and find water. The risk of getting attacked by the predatory animals especially when giraffe bend down to drink water also can be avoided or minimized easily.

Look at the beauty of nature’s creation. Giraffe raises its body temperature above the habitat during summer and thereby manages different challenges and threats to its life.

The corporate leaders instead of wasting their efforts and competencies to protect their position should learn to outgrow above the competition and adversities and become successful. But unfortunately most corporate leaders and bosses engage in playing dirty games and cheap politics to safeguard their position. They are supposed to be the best and exemplary example to people, but instead they prove wrong leadership ingredients and style.

Competition, restlessness, fear, betrayal etc., can be easily avoided in corporate life if people learn to be above normal and ordinary. Once they outgrow above others and exhibit uncommon qualities, success in totality can be easily achieved.

The saddest fact is that the HR function in some corporate does not even know how to make its people to grow above the bar. They believe that by making people to compete with each others only talents can be developed. Learn from the thermoregulatory mechanism of giraffe and the marvel of nature, it is not competing, growing above competition is inevitable for success in corporate.

Dr S Ranganathan, ClinRise Derma Pvt., Ltd., Chennai