Hearing All Seven Notes
When I was in college, I had the opportunity to spend a day with Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar maestro. I was interviewing him for a college magazine. It was a magical day for me to sit and watch the legend practice his craft. As I was leaving he called me back and said, “May you always enjoy all seven musical notes”. That statement stayed with me. Imagine how enriching it would be if we could really train our ability to enjoy the distinctiveness of each musical note across the different octaves and scales. What distinguishes a connoisseur is the ability to recognize the notes and patterns during a musical performance.Tone deaf people are not able to distinguish between musical notes and that is not due to lack of musical training or education. Interestingly tone deaf people have a problem only in recognizing musical notes. They can fully understand intonations of human speech. The incidence of people who are tone deaf is lower in cultures that speak tonal languages. That is perhaps because tonal languages use the same word in different pitches to mean different words. Mandarin Chinese has five tones. Depending on which tone you use to say the word “ma”, it could mean mother, horse, hemp, scold or just an interrogative particle. That must make learning such a language so interesting. We use tones to convey emotions. Try saying that sentence by stressing on a different word each time and you’ll know what I mean.“May you always enjoy all seven notes” Can you imagine how this blessing would transform the workplace? To me that would mean being able to hear seven different kinds of stakeholders: The leadership team, the peer group, the team members, the shareholders; the community, the employees of the opposite gender and the alumni of your organization would be my choice of the seven notes we all should tune in to.
Here are my reasons:
1. The Leadership Team: to understand the strategic perspective of what is happening in the industry and what the future looks like.
2. The Peer Group: to get a cross functional view of the business.
3. The Team Members: to get unvarnished feedback about your skills as a leader and team member.
4. The Customers: to ensure that you are building a business that is sustainable in the long run. That can happen only if you can delight them.
5. The Community: at a minimum, we must understand how we can impact educational institutions in the community by upgrading their curriculum and supplementing their resources by having the employees spend time volunteering in the schools and colleges from which you are hiring.
6. Employees of the Opposite Gender: I am always fascinated to see how men and women have different takes on the same events. Being able to tune in to the views of the opposite sex can make you more sensitive as a leader.
7. Alumni: I find this to be a great resource to leverage. This is not about doing impersonal exit interviews. Ask the alumni six months after they have left your organization about what pushed them out of the door. Ask them what they miss the most about the workplace they left behind and what they love about their new employer. This is a source of great ideas.Being able to hear all seven notes is a blessing even in the workplace. Think about it.------------------------------
First published in The Economic Times for my column Intangible Opinion on 1st December 2011. <Click Here to Read>
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