It is not an exaggeration to say that at the leadership level the most important thing is not subject knowledge but interpersonal communication skill. The excitement of leadership is that every day comes with the possibility of a new experience. Some of them quite unexpected. Your success depends on how you can turn a potential disaster around and covert it into a competitive advantage. All this takes much longer to write but what you need to be able to do is to leverage all your life experience till date and come up with a solution which is right, first time. Because if you drop the catch, there may not be another chance to salvage the deal. That is why constant practice in dealing with difficult people, though tiring, is the best asset. I’d had plenty of practice in my life dealing with Communist unions in Guyana (another story) and in the plantations in Anamallais and Ambadi. The key is to see such interactions like that, as assets. And even if you don’t go seeking them, and I don’t suggest you do, when they happen, you take a positive view and don’t think of them as inflictions but as learning opportunities.

One afternoon, I had gone to Nagercoil to meet our corporate lawyer, Mr. Narayanan Nair. He was a wonderful elderly man who Arun introduced me to, when I first landed in Ambadi. There were several cases that he was handling related to land acquisition, so I used to meet him almost every week. We would discuss what needed to be done and then he would invite me to have lunch with him and his wife. Arun, who was almost always with me on these trips, and I would then eat some lovely vegetarian food and return to the estate. On this day, Arun was not with me. I decided, after meeting Mr. Narayanan Nair, to meet the Labor Officer whose office was also in Nagercoil. I had an excellent relationship with him as with all government officials and usually when I went to visit any of them, I would be invited into the office immediately and offered tea and so on.

That day it was different. The Labor Officer’s office had a large waiting room with benches for any workers who came to meet him. Then there was a door leading into his office. Off to one side was a door leading into the office of his secretary. I entered the waiting room, headed towards the Labor Officer’s office, when his secretary scurried out of his den and said to me, ‘Sir, please wait here. I will tell him that you have come.’ I found that strange because normally I had direct access to him. Also, given our highly feudal society, to make someone of higher status, wait in a general waiting room was an insult. I realized that something was wrong but could not imagine what that could be. I could have simply turned around and left, but was curious to know what, if anything had happened, so I sat on one of the benches and waited. After about 15 – 20 minutes, when I was just about reaching the end of my patience, the secretary came out and said to me, ‘Please go in. He is waiting.’

The Labor Officer’s room had his desk at the far end from the entrance door. He sat behind a large wooden table in a high-backed chair which had a white bath towel draped over its back. Don’t ask me to explain why government officials like to sit on bath towels but it is the norm in all government offices in most of India. Maybe it is good to have a towel handy to wash your hands of responsibility. Then perpendicular to his desk was a long table stretching the length of the room, on either side of which were chairs. This was to facilitate meetings, where both parties could sit on either side of the table with the Labor Officer at the head barricaded behind his desk. Social protocol was that normally the Labor Officer would remain seated and depending on who it was, he could do any of the following:

1. Pretend to be working, looking down at papers on his desk and ignore you for a while. Then he would look up and wave you to a chair.
2. Pretend to be working, looking down at papers on his desk and ignore you for a while. Then he would look up and start talking, without offering you a chair.
3. Wave to you, smile at you, fold his hands in greeting, stand up to greet you and shake hands, ask his peon to pull a chair out of the formal arrangement and put it next to his and invite you to sit with him and ask for tea to be brought. This is how he used to greet me normally. Very friendly and cordial.

That day he did none of the above. The minute I stepped into his room, he started shouting at me, ‘You managers think you own the world. You are arrogant. You have no respect for us. You come to us only when you need us. Otherwise you are not willing to help us in any way. I thought you were different. But you are like all of them.’ He went on in this vein for a while.

I was shocked, insulted and very angry. But I did not show any of that. I simply stood there and let him rant. Eventually he ran out of breath and words and waved me to a chair and said, ‘So what do you want?’

It was very difficult, but I kept my cool. I took two or three deep breaths and then said to him, ‘Nothing. I don’t want anything. I have no idea why you are angry. Let me come back another day after you have cooled off. I only came to greet you as I was in Nagercoil. But it looks like today is not a good day for that. Vanakkam (Tamil greeting).’ And I turned around and started to walk out of the room. He then called out to me, ‘Baig Saar, please don’t go. Please come.’

I turned around and walked up to his desk. I still didn’t sit though he once again offered me a chair. I asked him, ‘Tell me, what is the problem? What is it that you think I did? Why are you angry?’

He asked me to sit, ‘Please sit down.’

‘I won’t sit until you tell me why you are so angry with me.’ I said.

He said, ‘I had requested you for a donation for our Annual Workers’ Sports Day. You promised to do it as you always do. But when my man went to Ambadi to take the amount, he was told that it had already been paid and he returned empty handed. I was put to a lot of embarrassment thanks to this. How can you do this? How can you go back on your word?’

I said to him, ‘In all the time that you have known me, did I ever go back on my word? Did I ever lie to you?’

He said, ‘No. You never did.’

‘Why then did you believe that I lied to you, so easily?’ He looked very sheepish. I then asked him, ‘Can I use your phone to call the estate office?’

I called my office and asked my accountant about the matter. He said to me, ‘Sir, a man came from the Labor Officer’s office and we gave him the donation. Then another man came, and we told him that someone had already taken the money and he went away.’ The mystery deepened. I asked my accountant if he had kept a record of who had collected the donation. He had. It turned out that it was someone from the Factory Officer’s office who had come. He had come to ask for a donation. But when my accountant saw him, he assumed that he had come from the Labor Officer’s office and asked him, ‘Did you come for the donation?’ The man, in all good faith, said, ‘Yes’. The money was given to him. He signed for it and left. It was really a comedy of errors. But though I had to bear the brunt of it, it turned out well for me.

When all this had been clarified, the Labor Officer was very apologetic. He apologized to me profusely for his outburst and plied me with tea and sweets and snacks. And we parted on good terms. His guilt stayed with him and in the events leading to and after the lockout, he went out of his way to be helpful. Guilt is a good motivator.

I was elected the President of the Kanyakumari District Planter’s Association because of which I was the Chairman of the Wage Negotiation Committee. It was the year in which the wage agreement was coming to an end and we had to negotiate a new agreement. Tensions were building up. The wage agreement was for three years. The history of the district was that the signing of the new agreement would take between 9 to 12 months during which the union would instigate multiple work stoppages, go slow and use other means of agitation to put pressure on the KDPA to agree to their demands. This resulted in loss of production. Eventually when the new wage agreement was signed, there would be arrears of wages to be paid which meant a strain on cash flows. And by the time all this was over, you barely got a year of peaceful normal work before the next wage agreement would loom over the horizon. I decided that it was time to break this cycle. Everyone agreed that it was necessary but highly skeptical that it could be done. The usual excuse was, ‘This is how it has always been. Nobody could do this before’.

My standard response, ‘Did you try to do it earlier?’

‘No’.

‘Then how do we know it can’t be done?’ Anyway, I was the one trying to do it and the others were happy to watch from the sidelines. After all, if I succeeded, they would all benefit. And if I failed, ‘Well! We told you it couldn’t be done, but you wouldn’t listen.’ This is one of the most common things that you are going to face if you want to lead. People support only those who look like they are sure to win. Confidence is critical. So is wisdom.

The current agreement was going to expire on December 31. We were in late September. I called a meeting of the union and asked them to give me their charter of demands. The CITU (Communist Marxist) Union President, Mr. Hemachandran Nair said to me, ‘There is still so much time. Why are you in a hurry?’ I told him, ‘I want us to complete our negotiation and sign the new agreement before December 31 so that the new agreement can go into force from January 1. That way there will be no tension, and everyone will be happy.’ I didn’t tell him that we wouldn’t have to pay wage arrears and so our finance people would also be happy. He said, ‘That has never been done before and it can’t be done.’

I said, ‘At least all my KDPA members and you, agree on one thing.’ We both had a big laugh.

I then said to him, ‘But you know what? You and I are going to prove them all wrong.’

He didn’t like the sound of that. For him, mentioning himself and me in the same sentence was not Halal. But he didn’t say anything. He just looked serious and didn’t seem to be convinced but agreed to bring the charter of demands the following week.

We met the following week. Hemachandran came with his demands to my office. Some of his followers were with him. I read the demands and said, ‘Great’ I agree to all of these.’ He was so shocked that involuntarily he blurted out, ‘Athengane saadhyamaakum?’ (How is that possible?)

I said to him, ‘Even you, know it is not possible for me to accept these demands. Then why do you want to waste your and my time by demanding things you know we cannot accept? I suggest therefore that you take this back and come with something that is possible for me to accept. That way we save time and energy. To help you, I will give you an accountant who will work with you. I will tell you what is non-negotiable with me in terms of productivity and cost of production. If those goals are met, I am happy to accept anything reasonable that you want. After all, your members are my workers.’

‘Mr. Hemachandran’, I said. ‘Tell me, whose benefit are you working for?’

‘Workers.’

‘Who do you think I am working for?’

‘Management,’ he replied.

‘Right. But tell me, if my workers are unhappy, angry, deprived of what is rightfully theirs, can they be productive and interested in their work? And if they are not, how can I get the productivity and quality that I need to please my management? So, their satisfaction is even more important for me. I am not their enemy and you know this.’

‘Yes, we trust you. We know you are not their enemy,’ he said. This is where my relationship with them always worked in my favor. Trust always helps you in times of stress.

It may seem like spoon-feeding, but sometimes or even lots of times, things which should be obvious to people are not, and must be pointed out to them. Do that politely and pleasantly and even subtly but do it.

The long and short of this was that the union brought their demands and we had a few negotiation meetings and signed the wage agreement well before December 31 and the new wages were paid from January.

In this context, let me tell you also about a tool that I used very effectively in these negotiation meetings. That tool is Active Listening.

Active Listening is when the listener shares with the speaker their own understanding of what was said, before responding. It is not merely repeating the words, but saying to the speaker, “I understand you to be saying that……” When the speaker agrees and only when the speaker agrees, is the listener allowed to go to the next point. This may sound a bit cumbersome but let me tell you that especially when negotiating or in resolving conflicts and in many other situations, this saves both parties a lot of time. But in my view the major benefit of this method is that it ‘enforces’ understanding. I put that in parenthesis because this is a particularly good example of using structure to guarantee results. What happens when you are forced to paraphrase (share your understanding), is that you are forced to look at the matter from the perspective of the other person.

In most, if not all, negotiation or conflict resolution situations, there is a win-lose mentality. I must win and the other person must lose. Even if you do not say, ‘The other person must lose’, you are not concerned about whether they also win or not. The other person is also in the same frame of mind and the result is enhanced tension and often, even if there is a resolution, it is at the cost of the relationship and comes with ill feeling. When you use Active Listening, you will find that it builds genuine understanding between people. I have had situations where after paraphrasing the listener said, ‘If that is what you mean, then there is no conflict.’ Effectively the conflict is over because it had arisen because the two parties involved didn’t really understand what the other one wanted.

For those who are still doubtful, I want to say that even if you want to totally disagree with someone and destroy their arguments, you first need to know what they are saying or believe in. The better you understand their position, the better you will be able to counter it. Nobody will argue that it is necessary to understand the position of the adversary in order to counter it. How can you do that best? With a face to face conversation where both of you practice Active Listening. Please try it and tell me how it works for you. I have used this technique in highly conflictful situations in several countries and cultures and in several languages and can tell you that it works beautifully.

Finally, another thing I started was that when we had these meetings, we all went to lunch together. Eating together is a very powerful symbol in the Indian culture. The norm was the opposite. Management staff would go to the district club for lunch and the union team would go to some local restaurant. It was funny when I first invited everyone to go to lunch with me and my team. The union was in a quandary because to refuse the invitation would have been very rude but they were not sure how it would look like if they ate with us, politically speaking. But Hemachandran and Perumal (General Secretary) came with me and everyone followed. In this case we all went together to a restaurant to eat. By tacit agreement, we didn’t talk shop while eating. Eating, after the first time which was a bit stiff, was always good fun and we would return to the negotiation table in a good mood.

Sentient systems are excellent facilitators for successful negotiations. Do whatever works for you in your culture. There is no magic formula. But do something that creates a space for you to meet outside the work context. The important thing is to ensure that the door of dialogue always remains open.