Ownership systems vs controls
One of the most fascinating discoveries I made in my reading of the most popular book, the Bible, was that it has two interesting stories generally called the Old and the New testaments.
These stories tell the two phenomena of grace and the law, where the law is controls and grace are ownership and absolute by-in.
This is subject to debate, but this is how I have read the two stories.
In the old testament you have wars, murder, and fights. You have stories of adultery and deceit and a desire to defeat and win.
One gets the impression that God had set them up to fail, of course for a good reason. It is as if God was saying to the whole world that would later read the Bible, that they must watch how controls and the law are a failure trap.
It was as if God was selling and promoting grace through displaying the perils of the law and controls.
They tried their best but failed. They had good people like King David who were referred to as ‘a man after God’s heart…’
We are talking here about a man who committed adultery with one of his military men’s wives. He killed a man and inherited his wife.
Two men’s wives, Abigail, and Bathsheba. This is a man who tried his best but failed in many ways to the extent that God himself saw blood in his hands and said he was not going to allow him to build his temple.
The fact that David and many others were good human beings means to me that there was something wrong with the system and the culture.
It was a failure and death trap, and no one was going to succeed ultimately under the circumstances.
I do not think that God created a failing system erroneously but that he deliberately exposed that Jewish generation and many others that fell along the way to failing systems in order to teach the world a scientific principle that there is no winning under controls.
It’s a death trap and it’s slippery. Controls are for survival and nothing else and organisations now have a lesson to learn from God and the Jewish nation in the hands of God.
What we see in the workplace are leaders who do what God did, exposing their organisations to controls and the law, but in their case not deliberately and for a good purpose, but because they know not what they do. God, along the way, changed his mind and I believe it was an informed and deliberate change to now say to the world, “look now how things work…” The law does not work…
Things then took the direction of grace, which for my purposes, I view as ownership.
The law, according to the Bible, now must be inscribed in the hearts of the people, which means that it gets personal and becomes an inside-out issue.
It ceases to be a stranger participating in something they do not own and becomes a total buy-in issue.
The type of buy in here is not a mental or intellectual one, but a heart one.
We know that the heart is a blood circulating organ biologically but on the sentimental and emotional side of things, it is about love and commitment.
It is when a person has committed hook, line, and sinker and this is what the workplace is looking for in Zimbabwe and beyond.
Controls and the law will apply only to those who are not committed and have not internalised what the business stands for.
They do not understand what the vision means and wants to achieve and so they drag themselves to work to give as much time and commitment as they have been given.
If they have a chance to sneak out and do other things that benefit them, they will do them and they are not wrong because the employer also does the same.
He or she thinks of what to get from the employee and it becomes a dog-eat-dog ethos or a cat and mouse one.
This happens when work processes are left to chance with no scientific understanding of what processes need to be crafted that do not unnecessarily limit a hard worker who wants to make more than what their salary gives.
Currently, companies are not expected to be giving people fixed salaries only and expecting them to be content.
You lock up an employee as an employer for eight hours to say to them you are only going to give them this fixed amount of money. Really?
If they are brave, they will leave that employer and dive into the unknown where chances of killing more than they are getting as a fixed salary are high.
They will take risks and go the do or die path and most likely not die.
The workplace is being invited to take this phenomenon seriously and put workers in a villagelike field and say go out there and plough and make as much as you can for yourself and for the company.
Salaries can then just be there as a basic need to cater for certain basic needs that need to be taken care of.
In South Africa, vehicle owners who hire drivers to provide uber, taxify and other private hire cars have this concept called renting a car where the driver is told by the car owner how much is expected weekly.
The driver knows that their first task is to make the owner’s money and after that focus on making their own. This is a fair deal and a win/win one where no one feels robbed.
The driver is not limited to making a certain amount of money and in this case only their commitment is the limit.
What I observed when I had the opportunity to talk to a driver in this kind of business arrangement was that they were happy with it.
It is not perfect yes, but its challenges can certainly be handled.
What we want to deal with next week then are the mechanics of creating ownership-based work processes.
We would like to go deeper and not just argue but explore the irresistible science behind this important subject.
How do we break down the whole thing and lay bare the essentials so that companies that desire to exploit the potential of human capital may do so with clarity?
● Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a Zimbabwean company as human capital executive, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management. He can be contacted on bhekilizweb.bn@gmail.com