How India Works by Aarti Kelshikar

Author:Aarti Kelshikar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

When I asked my interviewees – expats as well as Indians – about their experience of performance evaluations of Indians, their views had one thing in common: performance evaluations with Indians can be difficult.

Peter remarks, ‘In my entire career, the most difficult performance evaluations/pay reviews have been with Indians! Because they largely believe that they are all underpaid, they should have a higher performance rating than they get. They will challenge on pay and seniority but not in terms of anything technical or strategic.’

At the outset, it’s relevant to point out that Indians challenging feedback is a phenomenon that occurs more at middle or senior levels and not so much at lower levels. Let’s try and understand why Indians challenge feedback when it is negative.

One factor is the huge ambition. People want to make it big in a short time span, one that is often unrealistic. As Anand observes: ‘I think that a lot of people outside India struggle with the Indian time frame to succeed. Indians want to conquer the world in three or four years!’

Another factor is that people seem to have a positive view of their achievements, which is not always realistic. Ryan (name changed), a senior executive of an Indo-German insurance start-up, says, ‘I would say that the general expectation of achieving a goal is always ‘I have achieved’, but here the base expectation is that ‘I have overachieved’. So there may be clear under-performance, and then to productively communicate that is a challenge!’

And it’s taken personally!

In an article in Bangalore Mirror on emotions in the Indian workplace, published on 21 April 2016, Kirthiga Reddy, who was Managing Director of Facebook India, said that in the US, Facebook as a company would have things like open peer-to-peer feedback and all information was lateral. ‘Building such a culture in India takes a long time. People take things too personally here rather than logically.’

On a similar note, Amit observed that in the US around 20-30 per cent of his time was spent around people issues, whereas in India it went up to about 50 per cent.

Kanchana’s experience sums up the factors at play:

In person feedback:

Feedback sessions are a task in India! I’ve struggled with Indian managers as I’ve had to search for what they are trying to tell me because it’s cloaked with so many niceties. They are so conditioned to cushioning the feedback that it loses edge. Strangely, I am looking for direct feedback.

With other cross-cultural global managers, I’ve never had this issue because they are so direct that sometimes I wished they would be kind!

For instance, I was providing feedback to someone on areas for improvement. I said, ‘Here are your three areas of improvement.’ I don’t know how else to say it! If I want to say, ‘You need to be more collaborative,’ I am not going to start with why collaboration is important! The person is a responsible professional and should already know that! What good would niceties be if they don’t deliver the

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