The Care and Feeding of Employees

Your Team as Your Sangha

How Do We Bring Mindfulness to the Process of Selection and Hiring?

Until you’ve come to know the spiritual state of living beings, don’t assume anything about the shape of their abilities. Do not wound the healthy. Do not force those wishing to walk the wide world onto a narrow path. Do not try to pour the deep ocean into a cow’s hoof-print…. Do not confuse the glow of a glowworm for the light of the sun. And do not force those who love the roar of a lion to listen to the cry of a jackal!

—Vimalakirtinirdesha Sutra 3

APPEARANCES CAN BE very deceiving, especially when it comes to human beings! The Buddha is saying here that unless you’ve done the work that hiring takes, you just might judge a book by its cover. Big mistake.

Most organizations waste enormous amounts of time, money, and energy cleaning up the mistakes they have made by hiring people without due diligence. Far too many managers still hire on the basis of “a gut feeling” that an applicant has the requisite skills. Far too little attention is paid to checking out the job applicant’s work history, ability to learn and grow, and, most important, ability to work well with other people.

It is common knowledge that people get hired for their technical skills; they get promoted for innovation; and they get fired for their trouble with interpersonal skills. Fully 80 percent of people who fail on the job fail because they can’t get along with their coworkers, boss, customers, or all of the above.

So how would the Buddha select and hire the right person for the job? The Buddha didn’t exactly hire people—he attracted followers, people who wanted to learn from him and follow his example. But understanding the Buddha’s teachings can still give us some idea of how he might go about hiring if he were working in an organization today.

The Buddha would begin inside, using his mind to clarify what kind of person he was looking for and wanted to attract. He would include both character and competence in his thinking. He would set the stage to attract someone with good values and integrity, someone who was walking his own spiritual path. And he would create an environment that would attract someone who had the necessary skills to do the job, or who could learn those skills.

Then, the Buddha would tap into all we have learned through human resources research on job success factors—he would take advantage of the experience and wisdom of those who have studied job applicants and their performance track records. The Buddha was methodical, not a man driven by whim and impulse. He would do his homework and approach the job of hiring in a methodical way. Here are some of the steps he might advise us to take:

Make sure you have a good pool of applicants by casting your net as widely as possible. Don’t limit your search to obvious candidates.

Be clear about what is required in the job. Make a list of the duties and tasks. Make a list of the results you want achieved. Make a list of desirable personal characteristics.

Consider what it takes to be successful in your particular organization and/or department. Think about people who are successful, and list the behaviors and character traits that make them successful. The new person needs to be a good match for your organizational culture.

Involve many people in the interview process. Others will see things that you miss or overlook.

Ask behavioral questions. The best predictor of future performance is past performance. Ask tough questions: “Describe a time when you had to deal with a difficult customer. How did you do it?” “Tell me about an instance in which you made a serious mistake. How did you fix it?” Questions like these get at real-life behavior and uncover the candidate’s values and character.

Don’t use hypothetical questions. Anyone can make up an easy answer to a question like “How would you handle a supply-side problem?” People spin nice stories when they project themselves into hypothetical situations, but these answers have little or nothing to do with reality.

Make sure the candidate also has an opportunity to ask lots of questions. Hiring should be a two-way process. You can learn as much about a candidate from questions she asks as you can from the answers she gives.

Don’t be in a hurry to hire. Haste in the beginning can be costly later on.

Use job tests wherever you can, whether it’s a typing test, a computer simulation, a role-playing scenario, or some other test designed to assess applicants’ skills and abilities.

In addition to looking at a candidate’s past performance, be sure to consider her future potential. Ask about generic skills: budgeting, organizing, solving problems, writing, making presentations, coming up with new ideas, cutting costs, working well with others, and so on. The candidate may not have done the particular job you are interviewing her for, but if she has the right generic skills, she can do it successfully. Smart employers hire with an eye to the candidate’s future potential, not just her past experience.

Be sure you are honest with the candidate about the nature of the job as well as future growth potential. You don’t want to misrepresent a job to the candidate and have her quit in disappointment later on.

Finally, look especially carefully at someone who interviews well or tries to get away with glib answers to questions. She may be skilled at interviewing, but make sure that she also has the other skills to back up her brilliant interviews. Due diligence is essential: listen carefully, watch how she behaves when she is nervous, ask her tough questions, work to discern her true character.

Yes, all this is time-consuming. But either you can put in the time on the front end of the relationship, or you can spend the time later dealing with discipline, coaching, retraining—even firing and then having to hire someone new.

What Really Motivates People?

Once I was staying with my mother in London. At the time she was the housekeeper for a very wealthy Canadian who lived in a luxury flat just off Hyde Park. They all went off for a while, and I had the flat to myself. There I was in London, living in this luxurious flat with two huge color television sets and all the food I could possibly eat! I had enough money for whatever I wanted, lots of records, lots of everything. But I was so bored!

I told myself, “Please remember this. If you are ever tempted to think that physical comfort gives happiness, remember this.”

But then, another time I was staying in a cave, not my cave but another cave, which was very small. It was so small that you couldn’t stand up in it, with a tiny box you could only just sit in, and that was the bed as well. It was full of fleas, so I was covered in flea bites. You had to go half a mile down a very steep track to bring up water. There was also almost no food at all, and it was hot. But I was in bliss. I was so happy. It was a very holy place, and the people there were wonderful. Although from a physical point of view the situation was difficult, so what! The mind was happy. I remember that whole place as being bathed in golden light. Do you see what I mean?

—Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake¹

MANY BOSSES WANT to motivate their people but feel frustrated because they don’t have money to spend on bonuses and pay-for-performance salary increases. No matter how many times you tell them, “Money isn’t everything,” they don’t believe it. Yet it’s true: money is vastly overrated as a motivator.

Tenzin Palmo’s personal story illustrates the findings of Frederick Herzberg, who conducted what has become classic research on worker motivation. Herzberg’s research revealed that while the absence of material rewards such as money and perks may de-motivate people, these things offer no guarantee of motivating them. The effects of pay raises and bonuses last only weeks, because people just adjust their spending, and their positive feelings wear off. Herzberg learned that what really motivates people are intangibles: appreciation and recognition by their peers and the boss, interesting work, challenging tasks that offer stimulation and learning, autonomy and flexibility, and meaning and purpose in work. This is why missionaries, social workers, teachers, nurses, firefighters, and others who receive low pay and work in dirty or difficult circumstances still work so hard. They’re motivated by their participation in a job and a field that gives.

What Role Do Expectations Play in Personal and Organizational Success?

Before the battle of Okehazama, General Oda Nobunaga, though highly outnumbered, was confident. Still, he knew his men had doubts. They stopped at a Shinto shrine and Nobunaga told them, “After we pray to the gods for help, I will toss a coin. If it comes up heads, we will surely win. If tails, we will lose. Our fate depends on the gods.” When he tossed the coin, it came up heads. Assured of the gods’ favor, his soldiers were eager to fight.

Nobunaga’s small army did win. In fact, they eventually united the entire country. After their victory, the men were jubilant, and one of Nobunaga’s lieutenants pronounced, “No one can change destiny.” “No indeed,” said Nobunaga, revealing a coin with heads on both sides.

—Popular Japanese Zen story

SOME PEOPLE SAY, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The human truth is closer to “I’ll see it when I believe it.” Buddhist teachings arise from and reflect back on the power of our mind. Thoughts become things; beliefs become reality; our nightmares come true—as do our dreams. Choose your thoughts and beliefs wisely; with them you are literally creating your own future. And, as Nobunaga’s example teaches us, you might be creating the future of an entire corporation or an entire nation. In yourself and in others, create positive mind-sets, and you create the possibility of success.

How Can Buddhist Training Inform Business Training?

Do not think that I intended to create a “teaching system” to help people learn the way. Do not hold such a view. What I teach is the truth I have found. A “teaching system” means nothing because truth can’t be divided into pieces and rearranged in a system.

—Diamond Sutra 6

AGAIN AND AGAIN, the Buddha resists our efforts to pin him or his teaching down into a neat little system. He knows how much we long for security and reassurance in a world that is constantly changing. We want him to give us those “Seven Easy Steps to Enlightenment” or “Top Ten Ways to Get Nirvana Now.” Just check out the best-seller lists today—the books we buy speak volumes (and volumes and volumes) about how we humans think. We love books that promise us a wonderful life if we follow X number of steps, tips, or checklists. Even Buddhism has plenty of lists, but the Buddha never tells us that learning the way and walking it is as easy as checking off an item on a list.

Instead, the Buddha says that teachers must resist the urge to try to boil things down to recipes. Trainers must not make false promises by oversimplifying the complexity of business. Learning can never be systematic, because each person learns differently. Each person must experiment, make mistakes, struggle, ask questions, explore alternatives, and find his or her own way on the path to mindful work.

The Buddha stayed with his students to help them find their paths. Nowadays, teachers can’t usually do this, so they need to create a learning environment—one in which people are challenged, with problems to solve and goals to accomplish, in collaboration with others. Everything at work can be part of the awakening process.

Can the Buddha’s Teachings Help Boost Employee Morale?

Get rid of your selfish mind and create a mind sincerely focused on others. Making someone happy inspires that someone to make someone else happy. In this way happiness spreads from one act.

One candle can light a myriad of others and continue to shine just as long as before. Sharing happiness never decreases it.

—Sutra of Forty-two Sections 10

IN THIS LOVELY passage the Buddha explains the basic and beautiful truth of happiness, a truth as basic to making employees happy as it is to making all living things happy.

Paradoxically, the more we work at gaining happiness, the less likely we are to experience it. Happiness doesn’t come from “looking out for number one.” Happiness doesn’t come from “What’s in it for me?”

So how do we increase employee morale and make our people happier? Look at what the Buddha did. He didn’t call for more company picnics or feel-good T-shirts for everyone. Nor did he send out for pizza on Fridays. Instead, he just lived with his community; he went on alms rounds right along with the newest monk; he encouraged them with his example and with his constant presence. He shared what he had, his own happiness, and he never ran out.

The Buddha’s example and presence taught even the lowliest monk that if he wanted to improve his morale, he could start where he was, by looking around for someone to share with. So if you’re in that position, help someone who has something to learn or has fallen behind. Don’t curse the darkness—light another’s candle.

Is There Job Security in the Buddha Mind?

Being a collection of its fingers,
A hand is not an independent thing.
The same with fingers, which are made of joints.
And those joints, too, consist of smaller parts.
These parts are then divided into atoms,
And atoms split in various directions.
At last these fragments collapse into nothing.
All are empty, lacking real existence.

—Bodhicharyavatara 9.85–86

WE WOULD LIKE to have job security. We would like to have security in general. This is natural, but it’s also unrealistic. In our economy, most people have long since given up the expectation of spending their whole working life with one organization. But many people still lament the passing of “the good ol’ days” when employees were loyal to their organizations, and vice versa. But those good ol’ days were merely a blip in the overall history of work. If you look back over the many thousands of years of human history, the notion of job security is a recent thing, occurring only in the past hundred years or less. The expectation of “job security” was a new phenomenon, brought about by the development of modern capitalism, the industrial revolution, unprecedented job choice, and the human mind’s desire for permanence and stability.

In the last two decades, we have learned that job security breaks down when companies break down. The Buddha reminds us that companies always break down, like all things. We like to think of our organizations as real and solid, especially when we’re counting on working there for a while. But organizations are only as solid as their structures. And structures are only as solid as their employees. And employees are only as solid as their minds and bodies. And as we have all experienced, both bodies and minds change over time.

Look what the Bodhicharyavatara is saying about our bodies. They are made up of many parts, such as feet and hands. But hands are made up of fingers, and fingers of joints, and joints of still smaller parts down to atoms and electrons and quarks and other particles that only last the briefest moment and die away. Where is the solidity in all this? The Buddha tells us it is simply nowhere. Permanence and solidity do not exist and never will.

Today we see that job security was an illusion all along—a shared myth born of desire and circumstances. We have awakened from our illusion. There is no job security and there never was. Our only job security is our ability to secure a job. Work with that.

What Might the Buddha Advise Us about Career Development Programs?

Engineers work water; fletchers arrows.
Builders master wood; the wise their selves.

—Dhammapada 80

THE WORLD IS full of rich natural resources that best meet human needs with a bit of shaping and guidance. Engineers work water into canals so that water can work for us. Fletchers make arrows for food and protection. Builders cut and carve wood into furniture and housing, to help us live more comfortable lives. All of them manage and use natural resources for our ends.

So who guides the natural resource of humanity? The Buddha says that we do. There is no one outside us to shape us into better humans—we must do that ourselves. Like engineers, we must channel our own energy. Like fletchers, we must sharpen our skills with precision. Like carpenters, we must smooth our minds to enjoy peace and comfort. We have the raw material of our lives with which to work, and we are responsible for what we create from that material.

This means we are also responsible for our own development as employees. We should not look for someone else to hone our skills and develop our raw talent for us. We each must do that for ourselves. A fool sits and waits, saying, “Here I am, boss. Teach me something and make of me what you will.” The wise person takes the initiative and says, “Here are my career goals, these are my talents and abilities, and this is the kind of training I think I need to accomplish my goals. Can I count on your support?” The wise master themselves.

How Would a Buddha Create and Use Effective Incentives and Bonuses?

Although gold dust is precious, when it
gets in your eye, it just causes trouble.

—Bo Juyi, memorial inscription
for Xingshan Weikuan

SOME PEOPLE (including some Buddhists) see the Buddha as the keenest psychologist who ever lived. He understood the totality of human nature—in all its paradoxes and complexities—better than most of the therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists who have lived in the 2,500 years (especially the last 100) since the Buddha’s time. Reading the earliest teachings of Buddhism, we are shocked by how little human nature has changed in the past two and a half millennia. It’s mind-boggling … and mind-opening.

The Buddha understood money and mind because he spent the first nearly 30 years of his life in luxury, the next 6 years in absolute poverty, and the last 45 years as the head of an order that owned great properties, but whose members owned only their staffs, their begging bowls, their toiletries, and a couple of sets of robes. He had seen money and mind from three enormously different perspectives, and he knew how to make money work for mind, not just the opposite way around.

In modern business parlance, we say, “People do what they get rewarded for.” Buddhism says the same thing, just in different language. In the quote above, the poet Bo Juyi points out how easy it is to get seduced by the lure of money and overlook the true purpose of work—which is to serve others with worthwhile products and services. Given our ability to be seduced, most people work to maximize their individual rewards—often oblivious to or in denial of the effect their actions have on others. We have only to look at businessmen like Bernie Madoff to see the distortion that money can cause—and not just in others, but in us: no one forced anyone to invest in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. People—well-meaning people—made huge sums in down markets with Madoff. Some of them suspected malfeasance, but they stayed in. It was the culture on Wall Street.

Crucially, the Madoff fiasco was not isolated. It was a particularly stark example of how incentives currently work in the global economy. Those incentives have also brought us the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the spectacular failures of institutions like financial titan Lehman Brothers and the vast Washington Mutual Bank, the global recession beginning in 2008, and so on. These collapses occurred because the compensation and bonus systems in the financial services sector rewarded behavior that, sometimes intentionally, bet billions against the common good.

The Buddha might smile, but it would be a sorrowful one. We have rewarded greed over effort, easy evasions over hard truths. So greed and evasion are what we have gotten. If we want different results, the Buddha would tell us to overhaul our compensation systems and incentives to reward cooperation as well as competition, and dedication over derivatives. We must design creative rewards (and punishments) that grow from a bottom line that provides worth to the world. We are the ultimate stakeholders in every corporation in every country. Corporate incentives and disincentives must acknowledge this reality. Otherwise, we’ll continue to get what we rewarded last time, because in a bad system, good people often do bad things.