Yesterday, news channels and social media were covering the untimely and unfortunate death of a young woman intern at a large global consulting firm due to overwork and work-related stress. Apparently, the company did not do enough even after the event, and the woman's mother had to send out an open letter to the company's India head to get a response from them.
I am reminded of the time when I served in the army - stress induced deaths and suicides were worrying the Army, more so than the Navy or the Air Force, probably because of larger number of people. Managing stress among the men was an organizational focus area throughout the time I was a subunit commander as a Major and Lt Col, and a commanding officer. Why did I leave out officers from the scope? Probably because officers were expected to be mentally tougher due to the focus on mental fitness standards established by the Service Selection Boards, and officer suicides were practically nonexistent (or not in enough numbers to warrant a response at the organization level).
When I took over command of my regiment in an intense CI operations environment on the Line of Control somewhere West of Srinagar in 2010, one of the first things I was told by my Subedar Major (SM) was "Sir, we will be sharing your mobile number with all the men in the regiment. There are orders that any soldier should be able to reach the CO directly in case he is mentally disturbed or stressed and be able to communicate his problems."
This was in line with the orders and policy in the formation or even, across the Army and sounded good - everyone has a direct line to the boss, who can take instant decisions to solve their problems. Typically, the problems men faced included not getting leave to go back home on time for an event, land related issues in the extended family back home, wife and children's health issues, and for bachelors - some of them wanted to marry a particular girl and their families would not allow it for caste, religion or other reasons. It'll take time to change society in the villages and smaller towns, where most soldiers come from.
There also were 'work' related stresses - the monotony and lack of sleep due to repeated deployments on the line of control (patrols and ambushes are mostly carried out in the night to stop infiltration - imagine being awake every second night for 3 to 4 months on end), without much contact with your family and knowing what was happening at home, eating the same food without much variation and sleeping in wet/ soggy vermin infested bunkers. On convoy protection duty, the men would man open army trucks with weapons ready to fire, whether snow or rain every day for 9 to 12 hours. The route was dotted with numerous villages, so there always was the risk of firing on civilians by mistake. This was usually for a couple of months or longer at a time, and they were constantly expected to be alert enough to ward off a terrorist attack from anywhere on the mountains along the route. Every day.
On top of this, if their immediate boss, the NCO or JCO did not rotate them out of that deployment in three months, they had the 'pleasure' of enjoying these facilities and the work even longer. The first level of officer leadership was a hit and a miss, because there simply were too few of them available to lead (the army suffers from shortage of officers in the units) - most majors (subunit commanders) would also be rotating through various duties, whether leading convoy protection or commanding the anti-infiltration post on the LC, or other duties.
In this situation, I decided to do the exact opposite of what my SM suggested - I did not share my mobile number with the men.
My reasoning was this:
The men would hesitate to tell me their problems frankly - the rank and status difference was simply too much between a Colonel and a Gunner or Naik(Corporal). In the regiment, a CO has absolute power over the officer and men and that also makes him a distant figure in the real sense - someone who cannot really be a confidant.
I did not have the bandwidth to patiently hear out and solve the problems of 600+ men, while filtering out the troublemakers (false allegations around work conditions etc). I also could not monitor the progress of the resolution that was decided.
This would also mean absolving the entire chain of my command of their leadership responsibilities - of the well-being of their teams. If the chain of command fulfils their command responsibilities, problem resolution or escalation at every level would be the norm. Therefore, either the soldier's detachment commander, a Havildar (Sergeant) would help him get a solution, or escalate it to the JCO, and then to the battery commander and so on. The commanding officer would need to come in only if 4 to 5 layers of leadership could not address the problem. This of course meant having faith in the NCOs, JCOs and officers to manage this. What better way to start this than telling them about my expectations regarding their leadership abilities!
To ensure that this worked, problems needed to be informed and documented. We modified the system of interviews - every man going out of or coming in to a unit is interviewed by the CO. In most units, it is a formal parade in the morning, where the interviewees are lined up and each man speaks about himself - whether coming back from leave, going on leave, or something else. Not a very comfortable place for a man to tell the CO that his neighbour is trying to take away his land, or that his wife is not able to conceive a child and needs treatment!
We changed the process to an interview inside the CO's office, in confidence. It meant that I had to spend the good part of an hour or more to speak to all the men on interview parade, usually about 10, sometimes 30 to 40. To maintain continuity, we also instituted an interview document with a dedicated page for each man - this would be updated by his NCO, JCO and subunit commander after they spoke to him every time he came to me for an interview - and note a solution there. Soon enough, we had a confidential history of everyone's life and we all could refer back to what happened earlier while talking to him. To reach this stage, it took the best part of two years of sustained effort, a few punishments to NCOs who did not take their leadership duties seriously, and a very thick interview register! We usually went along with the solution suggested by the NCOs.
To manage the problem of NCOs and JCOs not rotating people out of tough deployment duties like anti infiltration post and convoy protection, we used technology. I had been an MS Access enthusiast for a long time (MS Access has disappeared from the Microsoft stack now!). I built an Access based application to manage deployments, leave, promotions, equipment management etc. I had the time, because my NCOs, JCOs and officers were doing their job of leading men well. It would automatically highlight anyone who had completed more than 45 days at these deployments, which gave his team leaders enough time to plan a rotation and replacement.
Of course, the men had managed to get my number, and a few tried to call me to get leave. I found that most were cases of men trying to game the 'stress management system'. I sent them back to their NCOs who resolved their issues via their chain of command - this of course instilled a sense of confidence in the NCOs and JCOs, that their CO trusted them to lead. We also awarded NCOs and JCOs who took the initiative to solve their men's problems and kept the chain in the loop - the award was not a typical piece of Chinese plastic with platitudes on it, but usually a pre-paid mobile recharge card, which was most sought after among the men in that age of feature phones and expensive talk times.
The next year, there was a suicide case in every regiment in the brigade. Except mine. Was it just luck, or something that we did right?
We moved out of the field posting the year afterwards, without any stress related injuries or deaths, or operational casualties.
Most of the writings and workshops being held on leading and managing people in the corporate world may be missing the woods for the trees. Leadership is always end to end - it cannot be restricted to getting results on the business targets and objectives alone. Leadership cannot be reduced to a series of events run by learning and development teams - it needs to be practiced by every line manager, encouraged and instilled in everyone who has the potential to grow within any organization.
