The Bigger Stick

 

              Image by fallcat from Pixabay

At school I was fortunate to witness a revolutionary coach who created a winning hockey team in the era  where football and cricket were the go-to sports.

Just before our first practice match, Mr. MP Sharma, our coach, said,

"This is your first match. You know the rules. But one more thing before you start..."

We waited

"Don't come back to me complaining the other player hit you with a stick. Because I have provided you with a stick too."

I didn't make the hockey team at school, or for that matter, any team. But I always remembered those words.

As I joined the corporate world, I told one of my mentors these words, he said he wanted to add something,

"Very soon you will become somebody's Boss. Which means you have a bigger and more powerful stick than your subordinates. They know it. You don't have to show it all the time."

And immediately I was able to understand why this illustrious, highly qualified man never raised his voice or highlighted my faults. 

Being an architect, I spent the next few decades designing or furnishing Offices all over the country. It made me interact with a variety of people and their differing reactions to their cabins or cubicles- shows of power, or 'the bigger stick.'

I am reminded of that lady in a powerful bank who had our entire management standing attendance as she ranted on about the faults in her cabin till my mentor figured out the real problem- her cabin was in a corner and a foot shorter than the other woman manager in the team.

Mumbai, where space is short, had this idiosyncratic hierarchy of workspaces. Cabins being enclosed rooms, where difficult to award to everyone who moved up the ranks. At the same time, in the 90s, India was liberalizing and people wanted swanky titles. So they built two hierarchies simultaneously- designations and workspaces. This saw the birth of a new animal called The Cubicle, which is different from the American concept of  'Cube'.  Cubicles were workspaces with a partition slightly higher than 'staff' workstations. The various designations were, therefore, catered to by cubicles a few inches larger in table size, number of visitors and partition height. It became an interior designer's nightmare to balance the aesthetics with a corporate jungle of cubicles of 4 different heights spread organically across the corridor. 

Trivia: India's largest furniture manufacturer had 13 sizes of office tables to cater to 13 hierarchy levels in the corporate jungles.

Fortunately at the turn of the millennium, the IT Industry and the modular furniture makers got a Uniform Seating Code with just 2 animals in the workspace- Workstation and one type of cubicle. So, the burgeoning Chair Industry decided to create a divide and created close to 20 types of chair, even though human evolution still had only 1 type of arse. Another decade and that got standardized too (the chair, not the arse). 

The battle of in-your-face power is nearing an end. With the whole WFH debate, everyone who reports to an office wants to know demonstrate that they are working their arses off (on the same size of chairs..)

To be continued