While I had also watched that fateful night that happened in Mumbai in November 2008 on TV in Chennai where I was posted then… the inspiration to understand to write about it came this year 26/11 when a promotion took place at our offices for the movie “Hotel Mumbai”.
We all know what happened at the Taj on the 26th Nov 2008… But as a business leader what triggered in me this year and has also been the subject of a Harvard Business Case study before was the exemplary Leadership from below demonstrated by the Taj Employees.
All of them had the option to leave the building, they knew all the exits, all the getaways.. Not one left.
This is my tribute to those heroes again and my take on why they demonstrated those behaviours.
Let me take you through the concept taking the examples of three Taj employees who were there in the Mumbai Taj hotel on that fateful night
Thomas Varghese
Senior waiter at Japanese restaurant Wasabi…Had been working with Taj for almost 30 years. He instructed the guests to crouch under the tables. He instructed the employees to form a human cordon around them. Four hours later the security men asked Varghese if he could get the guests out of the hotel. They decided to use a spiral staircase near the restaurant to evacuate the customers and then the staff. Thomas was the last man to leave and was gunned down by the terrorists as he reached the bottom of the ladder.
Mallika Jagad
Was a 24 year old banquet manger then at the Taj and on 26/11 the Chairman and CEO of Unilever was hosting a dinner at the Taj for Unilever directors…Senior executives and their spouses to bid farewell to the Indian CEO and to welcome the new CEO. Mallika was assigned to manage this event at the second floor banquet room… Around 9:30, as they served the main course, they heard what they thought were fireworks at a nearby wedding. In reality, these were the first gunshots from terrorists who were storming the Taj.
Jagad had the doors locked and the lights turned off. She asked everyone to lie down quietly under tables and refrain from using cell phones. She insisted that husbands and wives separate to reduce the risk to families. The group stayed there all night, listening to the terrorists rampaging through the hotel, Early the next morning, a fire started in the hallway outside, forcing the group to try to climb out the windows. A fire crew spotted them and, with its ladders, helped the trapped people escape quickly. The staff evacuated the guests first, and no casualties resulted.
Karambir Singh Kang
When Karambir Singh Kang, the Taj Mumbai’s general manager, heard about the attacks, he immediately left the conference he was attending at another Taj property. He took charge at the Taj Mumbai the moment he arrived, supervising the evacuation of guests and coordinating the efforts of firefighters amid the chaos. His wife and two young children were in a sixth-floor suite, where the general manager traditionally lives. Kang thought they would be safe, but when he realized that the terrorists were on the upper floors, he tried to get to his family. It was impossible. By midnight the sixth floor was in flames, and there was no hope of anyone’s surviving. Kang led the rescue efforts until noon the next day. Only then did he call his parents to tell them that the terrorists had killed his wife and children.
These were all people with different background…different skill sets and at different levels of the hierarchy…But they all displayed the same leadership skill…
Was it just a coincidence …or is there a method that we can all pick up to try and replicate at our organisations?
What I also realised during the course of my research that this was not really the first recorded time that this has happened …But in an earlier instance also …but under different circumstances…
At about 9:30 AM on December 26, 2004, a tsunami rippled across the Indian Ocean, wreaking havoc on coastal populations from Indonesia to India, killing about 185,000 people. Among those affected was the island nation of the Maldives, where tidal waves devastated several resort hotels, including two belonging to the Taj Group: the Taj Exotica and the Taj Coral Reef.
Many guests were panic-stricken, but the Taj staff members remained calm and optimistic.
As soon as the giant waves struck, guests say, Taj Group employees rushed to every room and escorted them to high ground. Women and children were sheltered in the island’s only two-story building. Many guests were panic-stricken, believing that more waves could follow, but staff members remained calm and optimistic.
No more waves arrived, but the first one had inundated kitchens and storerooms. A Taj Group team, led by the head chef, immediately set about salvaging food supplies, carrying cooking equipment to high ground, and preparing a hot meal. Housekeeping staff retrieved furniture from the lagoon, pumped water out of a restaurant, and restored a semblance of normalcy. Despite the trying circumstances, lunch was served by 1:00 PM.
The two Taj hotels continued to improvise for two more days until help arrived from India, and then they evacuated all the guests to Chennai in an aircraft that the Taj Group had chartered. There were no casualties and no panic,.. These Taj Group employees behaved like ordinary heroes..
There was no user manual or SOP for either of these situations ..but everyone behaved like heroes…
So there is something that the Taj has inculcated maybe without even realising …
Before we get into that lets understand knowledge ..Maybe this will give us an insight into the employees behaved the way they did
There are two types of knowledge
1. Explicit Knowledge
Expressed in the form of words and numbers and shared in the form of formula…manuals…etc
2. Tacit Knowledge
Not easily visible and express able…highly personal and hard to formalize
Tacit knowledge also has two dimensions to it
1.Technical dimension
Personal skills or crafts known as know how
2.Cognitive dimension
Consists of beliefs…values…mental models…This shapes the way we perceive the world and is this cognitive dimension that was reinforced at the Taj..
Every human being is conditioned to behave in a certain way by conditioning
Let’s understand the types of conditioning
It is believed that our actions are shaped by our experience of rewards and punishment an approach that is called operant conditioning…Operant conditioning breaks down a task to several smaller tasks with small increments for each achievement
Behaviour which is reinforced tends to be repeated and behaviour which is not reinforced tends to die. There are two types of reinforcements, Positive and negative and Positive is the culture which was reinforced at the Taj.
So, what could be some of the reasons for the people behaving the way they did…
Below are some of the process that Taj followed which were little unique
1. Recruitment methods
Identified the key skills needed in the hotel industry which according to them were
• Respect for elders
• Cheerfulness
• Neediness
Recruited from small villages not just hotel management institutes where they felt this was in abundance whether it was for trainees or supervisors
In a country where we are obsessed with grades and certificates, they hired people that had these values
2. Empowered employees
• Identified that employees make 70 to 80% contact with customers in unsupervised environment
• Identified that guests have 40 to 45 guest employee interactions in a 24 hour stay
• Encouraged to take decisions as agents of the customer and were assured support for any decision by the top management – built ownership
3. Trainings
By Inhouse line managers- sharing of tacit knowledge
Three competencies on which training was given
a. Leadership of results
b. Business
c. People
4. Led by example – GM spent evenings in the lobby attending to customers
5. Structured Rewards for the Right Conditioning
The routinized rewards that Taj had conditioned these leaders from below to act as they did during those terrible three days when the Taj hotel was under siege.
At Taj, every interaction is viewed by the company as an opportunity for employees to delight their customers with their kindness. So everything — everything — about the training and rewards systems set up by the Taj is designed to encourage kindness.
Summing it up in one sentence
what Taj has successfully done is they were able to identify and pass on the required tacit knowledge and reinforce the same by continuous conditioning
Below are the pictures of 11 Taj employees who lost their lives on that fateful 26.11.2008
People who with their lives showed us what Leadership from below is all about…
My heart beats with pride for these true leaders..
