Skill versus Leadership Quality – HR wisdom from an Ostrich

Ostrich has eyes bigger than its brain. It is quite interesting. Whether the brain or eyes should be large for animals to be successful in nature? Large eyes with poor brain or astute brain with poor eyesight is best? Both possibilities are defined and designed only by the local or native conditions. Nature has seen only the successful survival of the species and not whether the brain should be larger or smaller than eyes.

The approach of nature has also proven to be right and, the best examples being sparrow and Ostrich. Many people in corporate do behave and display the leadership style of sparrows and ostrich. Unless the HR and the corporate understand the morphology and behavioural ecology of different animals and plants in general, they would make the employees to perform the least than help them to excel in the organization.

A carpenter or a sculptor may be very shrewd in their skill and understanding about the type of a stone or wood and how it would fit for the given task. But beyond that they may not know anything. On the contrary, their boss may not know either the carpentry or sculpture work well or how to select the right base material for the job. But the boss may know how to showcase the art, market and sell for good price.

Like how the bigger eyes with small brain provided to ostrich and sparrow, some employees are skill oriented and will not have any intelligence beyond skill. Such people are not the right choice for developing as leaders.

When investments are made on such people, the investment, effort and time, all may go against the interest of the corporate. The message is not to ignore or neglect such people and ‘use’ them only for some defined job. Develop them in the areas of their expertise and domain space and do not stretch them beyond such space.

The ostrich or sparrow people are equally inevitable for every corporate. Developing people always should be in line with the core orientation of the respective individuals.

Seeing is more important for ostrich as it is a very big flightless bird and that lives in an open terrain. It needs the brain only to give command to respond or react to the visual stimuli. Hence it has small brain and large eyes.

All human beings are not the same. We may say that all are same and all are equally intelligent, but the truth is different. Different people do exhibit different behavioural traits in excess. It is very important that the HR understands the ‘behaviourgram’ of every employee so that the task management and engaging right people for the right job become easy.

Let the corporate learn from biology, evolution, adaptation and behavioural uniqueness of plants and animals, and grow ‘organically’ than attempt to achieve mere ‘economic or physical’ growth.

Dr S Ranganathan