Beyond decolonisation: lived Indian management practices for leadership

The paper describes and analyses three attempts for an indigenous Indian management and leadership practice through the first-person journey of the first author of this paper. In the first section, the first author delves into his inner conflict and investigates the impact of colonial frameworks on Indian organisations and managers, discussing distinct aspects of the challenges of Indian leadership and their impact on the workplace. The second section is dialogical, where dialogues with the second author show attempts to apply Indic principles of governance and inner transformation in organisation development initiatives based on certain working assumptions. The paper first discusses ‘Koodam’ as an Indian consultative decision-making style through work examples in different organisations. Second, the paper presents a framework—called the ‘Difficulty of Being Dhārmik’ framework, that helps understand both the impact of colonisation and the processes and pathways to healing as a lived experience. Through process work, we find that Indian managers and leaders have both the coloniser and the colonised mindset across the X–Y matrix of shame–pride polarity in belonging and rage and healing polarity in expression/action. The difficulty of being dhārmik results in its eightfold characteristic expressions, some optimal and others not. Indian leaders and managers seem to keep traversing these. The contribution of this paper is threefold. The first is the first-person account of the management/leader’s journey in the Indian context. This highlights the need for humanistic management and leadership training rather than a mechanistic target-oriented one. The second is to discuss the ‘Difficulty of Being Dhārmik’ Framework, which discusses the colonised and the coloniser's minds as they engage in leadership/workplaces. Several implications of future research and practice are analysed.