RTE 1 is re-broadcasting the True Lives documentary about Frankie Byrne - Ireland's legendary agony aunt - this evening at 10.25pm. I saw the programme when it was first broadcast and I urge you to tune in, it's an extraordinary documentary not alone about Frankie's life but as an insight into the Ireland of the 50s, 60s and 70s. I grew up listening to Dear Frankie on Radio Éireann (as it was at the time) and remember the down to earth advice dispensed by Frankie to husbands and wives throughout the country in an age devoid of Oprah,Dr Phil and agony aunt columns in magazines. If you want an insight into how we got here...then tune in.
I’m a bad blogger and before I go any further I want to issue a generalisation alert – you have been warned.
I have discovered in my travels through cyberspace that my blog is breaking all of the rules…I don’t offer “ultimate” solutions; “rules” for getting things done right (apart from this entry which in fact happens to be they way I do work with groups); I can’t come up with too many bullet pointed “top tips” entries and I rarely spend enough time trying to compose sure fire headlines that work. Is this rush to certainty purely an American phenomenon? I say this because I see stark differences between the ways in which many American and European business bloggers approach their craft. We appear to be less comfortable offering certainty on this side of the pond – it’s a bit more conversational, less hard sell. What happens when you are so used to being offered the ultimate, no holds barred, sure fire, guaranteed solution to every problem? Do you become immune? What does the more conversational – let’s co-create something together approaches evoke? Do we look touchy-feely in a world that demands certainty? I don’t know….I have found it interesting to explore various voices on this blog but ultimately I don’t believe in certainty. I don’t believe there’s a 10 step plan to achieving anything you want to achieve that is simple to execute and follows in a logical progression.
The bit that is always missing in these foul-proof plans is emotion. Emotion is a no go area in business for a good reason – it’s the thing that makes or breaks plans. Our decisions, while they may look on the surface to be rational and planned are fuelled, contextualised and informed by emotion and there’s no 10 step bullet pointed approach to putting manners on how we feel. It requires work, it requires bespoke interventions; it requires listening and storytelling, it requires expertise; it requires process, it requires courage. That’s if you want the solutions to stick.
If emotion didn’t matter then we’d all be fit, slim, non-smoking, world travelling, happy camper workers and family people with not a care in the world and a bullet pointed map to get us there. Does that sound like anyone you know?
I don’t live in a bite sized world and while I would love to believe that there’s a bullet pointed list out there with my name on it I simply don’t buy it….My world is richer, more complex, operates on myriad levels, attends to conscious and unconscious processes, is rational as well as emotional. I assume the worlds of my clients are equally sophisticated. And yes, I do get results and yes I do get asked back to work with clients so something works about an approach that doesn't offer false hope.
So now I need to go away and write a snappy headline for this post that will get me noticed ..any ideas?
When Adam Phillips' American publishers were planning a US edition of his book Going Sane, they insisted on giving it an upbeat subtitle. The idea drove him, if not insane, then to distraction. "The woman at the publishers said to me: 'How about Maps of Happiness.' I thought she was joking, so I said: 'How about Maps Against Happiness?' And she said: "I don't think so. Against is such a negative word.'
The proposed subtitle rankled because Phillips is against guidebooks to happiness. "A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn't it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all?" asks the psychoanalyst, closing his eyes as he does repeatedly during the interview when he wants to clinch a thought, and then leaning forward to put his head in his hands. "It's become a preoccupation because there's so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough and we'll all cheer up is preposterous.
Oh I wanted to clap and cheer when I read that. Philips is railing against the instant-fix, one-size-fits-all approach to being perfect, happy, sorted - call it what you will. I, like him, believe that you can only be happy if you are able to experience the darker side of life - I mean - how would you know what happiness was if you couldn't relate to not happy? And if we don't attend to not-happy then happy is merely a myth that can never be realised in real life. Consulting and coaching must attend to the "nots" in a meaningful way. Simply glossing over them won't work and the energy expended (particularly on change projects) will be wasted.
Is he saying suffering is necessary to the examined life? No: suffering is not essential. It's just unavoidable. All forms of sufferings are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them.
And on the current craze for books on happiness he has this to add:
I've looked at them. They seem to me to be the problem rather than the solution.
We've got to move out of seeing things in such stark polarities - Adams is merely saying that our ability to be happy, be fulfilled is as a direct result of our being able to handle happiness, unhappiness and all that comes in between. Life isn't one or the other - it's both.
It's like [Beckett's play] Endgame: 'We're on Earth. There's no cure for that.
There's a great thought provoking post at Anecdote that asks the question - are organisations losing their humanity? I'm going to re-post Andrew's piece here with my own thoughts to follow:
For some time now we have wondered whether organisations may be starting to lose their humanity. Maybe its a good question whether they ever had it, but the “Time is money” metaphor predominant in business today seems to have a lot to answer for. Tick Tock. To busy to spend time in dialogue. To busy to explore, we need to know the outcome. “How are you today” – “Busy”. To busy. Time is money.
And then, what about the “no asshole” rule suggested recently by Harvard professor, Bob Sutton.
Don’t hire assholes regardless of their earning potential and if someone has developed into one, help them see the light or get rid of them.
Its interesting and ironic that things have gotten so bad that we need to become more mindful of assholes and asshole behaviour in organisations.
And all this is not without cost. Organisations should care. As Leon Gettler a senior business journalist and blogger at The Age has found:
Workplace bullying is estimated to cost Australian business in excess of $3 billion a year and employers could be liable under a stack of laws, including Occupational Health and Safety, discrimination and workers' compensation.
So, I wonder, are organisations losing their humanity? What do you think?
I think organisations were and continue to be "humane" places - however, the discourse has been changed in the past 10 years with as Andrew rightly points out, increased legislation to protect organisations from being liable for what in many cases is ordinary behaviour. I think we have to move to a situation where we recognise, that to be human means bumping into each other, pissing each other off, falling in love etc - we do those things and we recover from them. If we teach people that the only way in which humane behaviour can be expressed is as a negative, potentially litigious and costly endeavour is it any wonder that we're becoming more “inhumane" – the rule then becomes – do not show your humanity here – it is dangerous.
Not withstanding serious infringements (which should be dealt with under existing laws anyway) a lot of what ends up in formal processes is ordinary behaviour which generally has at its root one of three issues (each one leads to the other if they are not attended to)
I am hurt
I am disappointed
I am angry
Let's start listening to those conversations first and putting in place mechanisms for attending to them before any formal processes get underway. We need a “before” process which looks at the systemic issues behind behaviour that is deemed to be “inhumane” – I don’t believe that people come to work having made a firm decision that this is how they will be at work today – there is always a more sophisticated picture and legal processes, while important sometimes, rarely deliver a win-win for anyone. They really are the end game. The processes I’ve designed (with brave and risk taking clients!) have done that – allowed room for the feelings to be vented, looked at individual and systemic responsibility and allowed everyone to contribute to a better solution. But I also know that those clients were unusual - it's not everyone who is able to unpack the emotional environment in which they are working and then wonder what their contribution to that is. But I'm hopeful...so longs as organisations are networks of people - they will always be humane!
Managing the relationship between a board of directors and CEO of a charitable organisation can be challenging at the best of times. In my experience difficulties arise when both parties are clear about their individual roles are but are unclear about the overlap and relationship between their role and that of the other. Common questions I hear are:
How does an agenda get constructed for a board meeting? and who has responsibility for this?
Who is responsible for making sure that the relevant compliance material is lodged with the authorities?
How much say does the board have in the day to day work of the organisation?
I generally try to work with CEOs and board members separately and then together to firstly clarify their role and secondly draw out their understandings and expectations of the other's. Taking real life examples of dilemmas and challenges is a great way of testing the theory in advance of having to manage a crisis when there's little time for thinking.
Here's a brief outline of the primary roles and responsibilities of the Board and CEO which can be used to start those conversations about role, responsibilities and the relationship between.
Qualitative research, doesn't tell us what is going on, at best it gives us some ideas about what might be happening. And it does this in a way that may help to trigger a new way to define or crack a problem in the planner's mind but is laughable as a means for making critical business decisions.
I don't often come across posts that make me splutter and mutter at the screen but this post from Adlierate (via The Art of Conversation) had just that affect on me. Has Richard looked at the differences between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies? Is he a subscriber to the adage that if you can't count it, it doesn't count? A central concern of a quantitative approach is the generation of findings which are generalised, replicable, test theory and privilege objectivity. A qualitative approach to research views data as emergent; privileges primacy of interpretation; facilitates hypothesising in the service of theory building and seeks to generate theory from data.
I'm currently researching a Doctorate using the principles of Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) a research method in which theory is arrived at through the data. The data I'm generating are very different from and yet aligned with those collected by quantitative researchers in the same area. I'm interested in looking at the meaning that is made of the phenomenon in business life, not only an academic definition of a theoretical concept. In my mind there's no competition when it comes to which methodology works best for the task at hand. My approach is conversational, semi-structured, flexible in order to include as many types of data as possible and most importantly reflexive - I take account of my intrusion into and impact on the study by virtue of asking the questions.
So from now on I am going to reserve the name research for the real deal - actual data that reports on reality.
I should explain that my issue is not with qualitative research though, in a sense it got caught in the cross fire - think of it as polemic collateral damage.
Well I don't think this is acceptable - too often qualitative is thrown around like it's some subservient methodology and as a short hand for "not good enough"...Of course it's not good enough if you don't really know what you're talking about in the first place. Perhaps the issue here is with good and bad research not quantitative and qualitative. In scapegoating the latter what's really being avoided is poor research conducted from a quantitative perspective. Could I respectfully suggest that Richard's post may be suffering from a little of that itself?
Over at Wishful Thinking Mark is pointing out the differences as he sees them between Coaching and Counselling. He's making the traditional distinctions but I would take issue about the assumptions on which they are based and have posted here about this difference before (I’ll repeat some of it in this post). Mark says:
Counselling and therapy deal with personal problems - Coaching addresses workplace performance.
The idea that our personal and professional lives are separate and distinctive is not something I agree with. Organisations don't exist - they are networks of human relationships and as such are emotional and emotion generating environments. We don't come to work and leave our personal selves at the door and I don't know about you - but I have rarely heard someone come home from work talking about "the bottom line" - if they do they are expressing their feelings about the bottom line. Workplace performance is interconnected with personal issues and problems and vice versa. When I am coaching I am always observing why someone brings this problem (personal and professional) to me at this time. The permission I seek to inquire, and the level at which I work is what differentiates coaching from counselling and psychotherapy.
Counselling begins with a problem - Coaching can begin with a goal or aspiration
and
Counselling is sought by people having difficulties - Coaching is used by high achievers as much as beginners or people who are stuck.
People can often come to counselling or therapy with a goal that is framed as a problem. Nobody I have ever worked with has come to therapy to purely talk about problems - they are there to understand and resolve that problem. I have also worked with people who come to counselling and therapy to gain a better understanding of themselves - not just when a problem manifests. And I have also worked with coaching clients who have come and been referred because there is a problem with their workplace performance, so this distinction doesn't stack up for me.
Many (but not all) forms of Counselling focus on the past and the origins of problems - Coaching focuses on the future and developing a workable solution.
Many forms of counselling and therapy seek to understand the past as it impacts on the present. It's essential (in my view) to understand transference - living the past in the present - if you are going to change the future. You can't come up with a 10 point plan and expect it to be implemented overnight if you don't understand what is driving the behaviour in the first place. If this were doable then we'd all be rational only entities with no bad habits.
Mark's differences are the standard ones I have seen when coaches want to differentiate themselves from therapists and it speaks to me of the anxiety many coaches have about the training therapists undergo to understand the unconscious and how that impacts on the present behaviour both in and out of the workplace.
The similarities between both are important to note:
• All individuals who work with a coach or a therapist are interested in a “better” future
• Therapy and Coaching offer skills and possibilities for that future – the methodologies employed are different
• The quality of the relationship is the essential mechanism by which change is effected
• Self awareness on the part of the coach and therapist is essential for successful work with clients
• Unconditional positive regard, empathy and a person-centred approach are key to both approaches
While I apply psychodynamic thinking to my coaching relationships the key difference is about the permission sought to inquire into a client’s personal story and how that information is worked with in the coaching relationship. There are times when it is helpful to know more about family of origin – it may help to understand a dynamic being played out in organisational contexts. But unless a coach is trained to work with this material they run the risk of opening up emotional responses that may be difficult to contain. It’s also essential to know when to refer a coaching client to a therapist. Very often this is when a repeating pattern of unhelpful behaviour, rooted in unresolved personal relationships in the past, is unhelpful in the present.
As a therapist and a coach I bring distinctive skills to the client relationship that are based on my psychodynamic training and which allow me to:
• Meet a client in an authentic person-to-person encounter.
• Process my own feelings in the coaching relationship and to use them as constructive interventions.
• Spot a client who may need a therapeutic relationship and to refer on appropriately.
• Translate psychodynamic insights into powerful work related interventions that impact on work performance and behaviour.
I’m watching the world go mad Twittering. (And I'm watching the passion it arouses when you offer a different view. Call me a luddite but I don’t get it. I get it in the sense that it’s a new fangled gadget and it’s all shiny and out of the box but do we really need more "instant" communication tools? Lisa has an interesting post about the high cost of communicating
If your department budget was charged $100 for every minute you spent communicating, would you choose your words more wisely? It is likely that the costs are that high or higher.
There’s a huge tyranny to this not only in terms of actual financial cost but in terms of the personal. I have a cell phone – not a blackberry. I simply don’t want to be that available all the time. “Turn the thing off” I hear you say – yes, but if you have a blackberry (and now a Twitter account) and even a cell phone you create the expectation of availability and it’s the expectation that creates a difficulty around saying “no”.
What are we teaching our clients and colleagues? We’re teaching them that there are no more boundaries. Instant availability, instant access, instant blurring and instant gratification. It’s not possible to meet anybody else’s needs to that extent – we will wear ourselves out, increase stress and erode the ability to care about others. Saying “no” is a fundamental boundary setting exercise if not done appropriately leads to an inability to manage our wants and desires.
All this elecronic communication is an avoidance of real intimacy. Sending out group emails, arranging social lives by text, reporting in live time about that social life via Twitter none of it is about being in the moment with the person with whom you are with. Reading a text message online about what someone with whom you have a casual relationship is doing right now is voyeuristic and it’s playing to an audience that’s not there – it’s not a genuine relationship based on giving and receiving. If it’s that important - pick up the phone and have a real conversation with somebody. Arrange to meet for a coffee or a chat - are you really in touch if you have to use a keyboard as an interface? What am I doing? Why not take a risk and call me to find out?
Welcome to the March 19, 2007 edition of emotion at work. (The first edition in fact) and thanks to everyone who submitted a post. I'm fascinated to see what a topic like "emotion at work" has evoked - there are really interesting and different approaches to the topic here that echo much of the management discourse around emotion as something that needs to be valued in its own right (my own view) or controlled in the service of organisational harmony. I'm also curious about the fact that no women submitted posts around this topic and wonder what might be going on there that's interesting.
Mark McGuinness presents 7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm posted at Wishful Thinking. Mark talks about tapping into your natural enthusiasm and how reconnecting with your curiosity is a critical first step in banishing procrastination and keeping the creative juices flowing.
Erik Mazzone presents Deciding to Quit your Job posted at Erik Mazzone's Blog. Erik advocates tapping into your feelings as distinct from your rationale when you have to make a decision to stay in or quit a job.
Alan presents There is always a way posted at Made to Be Great. Alan advocates stillness as a way of connecting with the sense of what’s possible and he also talks about reframing problems as potential solutions (something I’m a huge advocate for).
The Positivity Blog presents 5 life-changing keys to overcoming your fear posted at Henrik Edberg. Henrik offers some strategies for overcoming fear which are useful for work and personal life beginning with a non-judgemental approach.
Noel Kuhlman presents How To Destroy The Lazy Drones In Your Team posted at Self Help Can Be Fun. Noel offers some no nonsense approaches to co-dependency in the workplace. The title is challenging but I think he’s addressing the way in which we enable people to adopt less than helpful roles in the workplace and he asks us what our part in that is.
Craig Harper presents A Letter to all Blokes.... posted at Renovate your life with Craig. Craig invites blokes to reconnect with their emotions in a witty and “bloke-friendly way”. I'd like to hear Craig's view on the relationship between blokes, their emotion and the world of work as I imagine he'd have an interesting take on that subject.
The Silicone Valley Blogger presents Work Place Drama Ends In More Money at The Digerati Life which is an interesting piece on how the organisation in the mind (or the boss in our mind) is very often out of kilter with the external experience and how our emotions are central to that experience.
Scott Young presents Introduction - Emotional Mastery (Series) posted at Scott H Young. Scott offers an introductory blog post on the "secrets to emotional mastery". The rest of his series focusses on the issue of control and emotion.
That concludes this edition. Thanks to everyone who submitted an article for this first carnival. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
One of my favorite shows on TV is called "Intervention" on A&E, which is about the struggles of people dealing with addiction. On the show, families stage interventions with the addicted member of the family in order to get them to seek help and change their ways. One of the principles that is encouraged is not only that the person is willing to change and get help, the family needs to come together in order for the change to work.
I haven't seen this particular programme on this side of the pond but am familiar with the concept - Travis applies the thinking to organisational change processes and suggests that there needs to be a healthy "family" and a desire for change if this process is to work effectively in organisations. He goes on to say:
The dynamic of the workplace, whether it be a team, group, division, or whole organization, has to be in a healthy state for the organization to undergo serious and permanent organization change. It is almost a paradox that in order for change to be successful, there must be some level of stability in terms of relationships, communication and culture before the instability of change takes place.
This got me thinking about the way in which interventionists are used - the 3Cs Counsellors, Consultants and Coaches. Very often (not always) the 3Cs are called in when an individual is perceived to be "unhealthy"...the 3Cs are marshalled in the service of keeping the organisation healthy by splitting off the unhealthy individual to be made more healthy externally and reimported once s/he is sorted out. To take Travis's example above (and addiction is a great example of a systemic approach) there are other questions to be asked about what work the individual does on behalf of the system and how the system itself contributes to and informs how the individual behaves within it. Increasingly I am working with client organisations to feed back into the system the dynamics that emerge within the coaching relationship and this is having significant impacts. The contract with the individual respects the content of the discussion but also makes space for the overall themes to be explored in the context of the whole system and as such is fed back as organisational intelligence.
I'm taking the opportunity here in New York to catch up with some colleagues who practice in a similar way to myself (not a lot of us back in Ireland!). Over lunch this week I had a fascinating conversation with one colleague about how consultants (particularly those of us who are psychodynamically inclined) participate in listserves. The impulse if you're a psychodynamic consultant is to wonder about the question or dilemma rather than answer a question. Very often in business settings it's that ability to step back that generates interesting material - don't take the obvious for granted etc. But when a group of consultants gather on a listserve there is often more energy devoted to exploring the question rather than offering an answer.
This got me thinking about the power of interpretation. A consultant is given, and accepts tremendous power in organisational systems to interpret what others can't make sense of. How that interpretation is done can be a very creative endeavour - but ultimately it's the interpretation that a consultant is being hired to offer. The permission that is sought and received to interpret is a delicate negotiation. When a group of consultants gather in virtual space to converse it can be a different matter - the jump to interpret is somehow assumed rather than negotiated and this makes me rather uncomfortable because I think this needs to be made explicit. I may ask a question of you as a colleague but that's not the same as inviting you to interpret as a consultant.
Ultimately this is a boundary issue which arises all the time in work settings - am I interpreting from a coaching? counselling? consulting? perspective? Am I throwing my weight around to show how smart I am? Am I endeavouring to close down any difference in the discussion by using my interpretative authority to say it "as it is"?
The lunch time discussion offered so many interesting perspectives that I'll be ruminating over them for quite some time to come - but it has made me consider the explicit and not so explicit ways I negotiate with clients and colleagues and the assumption of authority which each brings.
Sometimes the worst situations offer the best learning. In a gathering of colleagues recently we shared stories of some challenging consulting assignments. Yes, there were difficult clients and some harrowing stories, but each of my colleagues had reflected on their experiences, learned some lessons and allowed the learning to inform how they are in relationship with clients subsequently.
I extrapolated some of my learning from reflecting on my own practice and from participating in the above discussion and here are some of the questions I ask myself when the going seems tough.
• How am I being “used” here?
• In the service of who’s truth and reality?
• How is what’s happening to me relevant to my client’s dilemma?
• In what way is this situation my client’s experience?
• What have I contributed to the situation?
• What problem did my contribution solve for me?
• What’s useful about my dilemma?
What kinds of questions would help you reflect on your practice?
In our rush to offer solutions to clients’ problems we often (too often in my opinion) eschew the personal and embrace the professional. We really don’t get the value of being “ourselves” because somewhere along the line we’ve learned that to be ourselves is to not be good enough. I’m of the firm belief that there are no differences. What there are – are boundaries. People hire people because after they’ve assured themselves that you have the skill set to do the job, they want to be in a relationship with someone they like, feel comfortable with and ultimately feel safe with. All of that requires a large degree of self awareness and an ability to manage boundaries. It also requires that we be ourselves. You can try faking being personal but it won't work. It never does.
I have a number of questions I ask myself when working with clients to make sure I’m “being myself”.
What’s my emotional response to this client and to undertaking this assignment?
Would there come a time in this relationship where I could share that understanding in the service of the relationship?
Whose authority am I drawing on to make this client feel confident about working with me? My own? Or someone else’s?
How do I feel about “not knowing” in the presence of this client?
What is my motivation for working with this client? Money? Learning? Creativity? All three? something else? i.e. what's in this for me?
Those basic questions help me to keep connected to myself and more importantly, they ensure that I bring myself to the relationship. Tricks and tools are great and important sometimes, but if I’m not sure of what I’m feeling and when, I can’t reach for what I need in the service of my clients. Unlike the customer in the advertisement above, I want to feel personally connected to my clients and it’s only in that frame of mind I can grasp how best I can give them value for their money.
I teach my clients how to to say “no”. Many are simply overwhelmed by the task of managing and leading to garner the resources to tell others that they are simply not available. So many managers I know feel guilty about saying “no”. I think it’s one of the most liberating words in the English language and used effectively it’s one of the most empowering.
We’re so conditioned in business to saying “yes” - to being available 24/7 to meet the client’s needs that saying “no” evokes anxiety and fear. But what does constantly saying “yes” set up?
Exhausted and worn out executives
Excessive demands from clients
A never-good-enough culture
Lousy boundaries
Saying “no” on the other hand fosters
Empowered and sane executives
Good boundaries
Realistic expectations and deliverables
So saying "no" in this instance is really saying "yes" to something that's defined by healthy boundaries
Think for a moment about small children. At the age of 2 they discover the “no” word and apart from the frustration it causes, it’s a pivotal moment in a child’s life when they realise they are empowered to get what they want. It creates a negotiating position and forces parents to be more creative about their demands. “Pick your battles” is the advice from those who have been there before. And it’s wise advice. If you can’t use the word “no” then every demand and expectation assumes the same importance as every other. Using the “no” word judiciously invites others to choose what’s important and approach accordingly.
Good boundaries make good neighbours and I encourage my coaching clients to examine what they are setting up for themselves by constantly “being available”. Sometimes we have to take responsibility for the demands we place on ourselves before we look to those being awarded by others.
Firms in the US are hiring consultants to help them manage "needy" workers. Apparently the Generation Yers are so used to persistent parental praise that they have become a demanding demographic in organisations. NPR has an interesting story on this that's worth listening to (click here for the download).
What's fascinating is how "demanding" the 20 somethings appear in the piece. Daily affirmations of a "good job" are a prerequisite for loyalty to the organisation and HR departments are having to invent ways of complimenting workers daily on a job well done when "well done" means doing the job that was meant to be done in the first place. The option of choice appears to be hiring consultants as surrogate parents to ensure adequate ego management.
The NPR story doesn't take on the real challenge here, which is the degree to which this narcissism is being encouraged and promoted by hiring consultants to assist in the persistent praising. The "no" is missing and it will just fuel incessant and unreasonable demands for "more" that can never be fulfilled.
It reminds me of that great quote from Laurence Oliver who quipped "Dear boy, it's called acting." - upon seeing Dustin Hoffman's "method" acting by not sleeping and making a mess of himself to get into character while shooting "Marathon Man".
I've just returned from Stockholm where I attended the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations annual symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for those of us working in a psychoanalytic way with organisations to meet and share knowledge about this area of practice.
There were numerous interesting papers and one in particular on a group relations conference conducted via the internet caught my attention. I have to admit to being mystified by how a group relations conference that didn't deal with the territory (i.e. cyberspace) would work. The consultant presenting the case paper bravely stepped into the project and fed back his experiences of how it was managed and conducted. The detail of that isn't of particular interest here. But what did interest me is how systems-psychodynamics needs to be applied to working on the web. There is a whole body of literature at this stage (particularly from psychology and systems thinking) about operating and working on line which I think systems-psychodynamics needs to attend to and build on, not merely replicate. Working on the web seemed to be a very new idea to many people who were at the conference and to some extent mirrors my experience of therapists and consultants who work psychoanalytically, many of whom have a sometimes neurotic attachment to being "in the room" and privilege this as the primary way of generating the transference. (As an interesting aside, of the 14 people who attended this workshop only 2 of us were women...I'm not sure what that means but the gender imbalance was more pronounced here than at any other event I attended).
Some of the thoughts that occurred to me about this..
1. The web doesn't exist - it is a wonderful manifestation of the collective unconscious - everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
2. The web is a boundary less space and many of the conversations (particularly in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident) about placing boundaries on it have resulted in strong reaction and an acknowledgement that formal rules simply won’t work in this space which means it’s ripe for persescutory experiences and a regression to primitive drives.
3. The only thing that stops any of us committing an “offence” online is our own conscience or sense of what is right and wrong. So our internalised boundaries and how those boundaries are negotiated and made meaning of, are of primary importance in this space.
4. The absence of the social clues that assist us make meaning of, and interpret, relationships offline are absent online so this heightens the transference and counter-transference in a way that can be persecutory. This is why I’m mystified as to how a group relations conference that doesn’t address the territory can operate with integrity in this space.
5. When a conference finishes we have our experiences of the people who attended and how we entered into relationship. When contact online ends we have that, minus the physical presence of people but we also have the written correspondence. What happens to the text afterwards? And how are boundaries around text negotiated? We all know that once something is out there in cyberspace it is never coming back so the archiving function of the web is something that has to be looked at?
I'd love to hear from any psychodynamically informed practitioners working online about their own experiences of this area..
Synchronicity is at work once again - Finola Howard is doing something I've been thinking about for a while - Paying it Forward. It's a simple idea - you do three good deeds for people unknown to you in return for each good deed done for you. Lots of people (many of them complete strangers) have gone out of their way to help me over the years whether it’s been in business, personal or blogging life and this is a nice way of saying thanks to them and offering something back to others who might benefit from some of my accumulated wisdom.
I’m offering free executive coaching sessions or consultation time on one day a month (starting on Friday 3 August) to anyone who wants a space to reflect on their role or on relationship management issues at work. The three hour-long sessions will be free of charge and your only commitment is to pay it forward to three people you don’t know after we've finished. We can work in person (in Dublin), via Skype or phone.
Finola is a marketing consultant based in Carlow and she is offering a free clinic on the third Friday of each month. If you have a marketing question, dilemma or issue, phone her on +353 59 9183206 and book in for one of the three hour-long slots. IT consultant Colm Whelan of Rockfield IT has also joined the movement and he can be reached at colm.whelan@rockfieldit.com (he’s based in Carlow also) and if anyone else is taken by the idea to sign up then let me know and we can start building a community of practitioners interested in paying it forward.
Questions are a key part of my consulting toolkit. In particular there are 6 questions I think every consultant should ask of themselves and the clients with whom they are working because I believe that asking questions of ourselves is a key way to process and analyse information we receive.
1 Who is the Client?
Sometimes the client isn’t the client and it’s important that you are working with or reporting to someone who has authority in the system. If you are not, then you are compromised from the start.
2 What’s really going on here?
The presenting problem is rarely the problem. It may be that the problem is a solution to a particular set of circumstances in the organisation. Treating the presenting issue as a symptom will generally yield more information and possibilities that moving in with a solution
3 What am I listening to? What am I hearing?
There is a difference between listening and hearing (and I’ve written about this topic before). A consultant’s job is to respond to what they are hearing, not what they are listening to.
4 How am I being used?
Consultants are engaged for many reasons and it’s important to work out what task you have been given on behalf of the entire system. It may be that you have been selected because you can offer insight. It may be your task to say the unmentionables out loud. It may also be that you have been selected because you can’t do the job. In the latter instance it may be important for the organisation not to resolve this particular issue and selecting the “wrong” consultant ensures that the status quo is, in fact, the status quo and a scapegoat is being required.
5 Is my experience the client’s experience?
Pay attention to how an assignment makes you feel because your experience may mirror your client’s experience in this organisation. Your experience therefore is a critical piece of systemic information about how this organisation works.
6 What is useful about the client’s experience and problem?
Persistent behaviour (constructive and destructive) has a pay off and a value in organisations and dealing with the pay off is essential if the issue is to be resolved so asking what’s useful as distinct from what’s “wrong” can be a helpful place to start.
There are many more questions to be asked when consulting but I have found these to be a central part of my toolkit. What’s in your consulting toolkit?
Every problem is a solution to a set of circumstances – so you could say that the problem is both the problem and the solution.
One of the things I try to do with clients is help them “appreciate” the problem they are having. No, that’s not some new age methodology that doesn’t deal with the issues. It’s more a case of asking them – is there any way in which this problem has truth to it? Most particularly if it’s a problem person we’re talking about. I try to encourage my clients to look at the “job” this person is doing for the organisation first before we talk about what to do about it.
Here are some examples of the work problem people have done in organisations I have been invited to consult to.
A technical director in an engineering company made the working life of the sales department “hell” (their words) by refusing to co-operate with them. He withheld his staff, demanded more appropriate briefing, took the sales requests back to his department and sat on them for days holding up the closing of business. When we actually looked at what was going on here, this technical director was seen to be protecting his division and team from an increasing set of demands by all departments that were impossible for his technical team to meet. The technical director was, in fact, offering leadership to his team by protecting them from being overwhelmed by demand. By helping the sales team appreciate the problem they were able to articulate the real problem which was an unrealistic set of sales targets that had been imposed by senior management on both the sales and technical teams and not negotiated with them.
The manager of a cultural organisation was increasingly vilified by her board of directors as being “useless” and having “terrible” communication skills. The board never knew what was going on and more to the point this manager wouldn’t take their calls when they phoned. On closer examination it emerged that the way of communicating in this company was informal. The 10 directors on the board would frequently phone the manager at all hours of the day and night sometimes requesting the same information. The manager was in 10 different relationships and each director was comparing notes with the other. It was a fact that she was “useless” and had “terrible” communication skills when you looked at it from this perspective – who wouldn’t be? The organisation had transitioned being a voluntary organisation to a company limited by guarantee with a board of directors. While they had hired a professional manager, the board themselves were still operating like a voluntary group – which meant that the company business was done informally and out of traditional business hours. The director was trying to run the business during the business day and the directors hadn’t settled in to their new roles. By helping them look at the “problem” as the “solution” they were able to openly negotiate a way of working that resolved the tension and achieve what they really wanted.
More often than not, problem people are articulating something in organisational life that others refuse to do. When you’re on your own you sometimes have to shout louder to make yourself heard – the louder you shout, the more problematic you are and the more isolated you become. “Problem” people can emerge for lots of reasons and the person who carries this role may have a personal back story that makes them the perfect candidate for the job. A person’s back story may also be where the intervention is required so knowing when to refer someone on for more personal work is a key part of any consulting in this area. The working environment and context for the issue is of course an essential part of the story as well.
Building a good working alliance with a client is essential if we are going to have that kind of conversation. Organisations have an unconscious life. Because it’s unconscious it’s unseen and difficult and very often threatening to look at and my clients have to trust in my skill that I have some idea of what I’m talking about. But if you can have an appreciative relationship with the problem, then that’s a really great place to start the conversation.
Matt Moore continues to write really engaging posts and his latest one The Technology of the Secret really piqued my curiosity. He's writing about the process of telling and keeping secrets and how much of his work (and indeed my own) revolves around secret keeping.
Simply hiding something makes it more desirable to others. We may hide it for any number of reasons. It may be shameful, boring, illegal, hurtful. Whatever it is, we don't want people to know about it. We manage & maintain our identities and the exposure of a secret threatens that. Our secrets make us vulnerable. And because they are a part of ourselves that form us that we cannot publicly acknowledge, they can be a heavy burden. Many cultures have developed rituals & roles for the entrustment of secrets to others. The catholic confessional, the psychiatrist's couch.
Secrets (of ourselves & also of others) are powerful tokens of exchange. The secrets of others might be exchanged for material gain but our own secrets are offered to people to build trust between us. We often start with little vulnerabilities and then move on to the bigger things. And in a world where random connections are increasingly common, we sometimes fell happier giving our secrets to complete strangers instead of those close to us.
In my experience there are 4 reasons why someone "tells" their secrets to someone else.
1. I’m telling you a secret because if I say it out loud in the presence of another person then I can begin to hear it myself for the first time.
2. I’m telling you a secret because I feel lonely holding this and I want some company in my isolation.
3. I’m telling you a secret because you can then have the worry about what to do with it and I can absolve myself of that responsibility.
4. I am telling you a secret because I need you to “mind” this for me until I can work out what to do about it.
I'm ambivalent about secret keeping primarily because there is an assumed contract around confidentiality which is rarely negotiated. It's fairly clear if someone is breaking the law but outside of the legal requirements to disclose what about the moral or ethical issues?
I remember one consulting assignment where 10 people revealed their (competing) views about the organisation and made it clear that they expected me to keep their stories confidential. At the end of the few days they were relieved to have told someone and I was burdened with the content and the expectation that I would miraculously come up with a “solution” to a problem nobody was prepared to talk about.
In the end, I gathered the group together, told them I’d maintain confidentiality around their stories but I wanted to talk about the formal and informal ways in which communication was conducted in the company. The assignment turned out ok in the end because my interpretation of the balance between container and contained was a good fit and we had a very meaningful discussion but what I learned from that assignment was never to take confidentiality for granted so now it’s an ongoing part of my contracting with clients.
My work as a therapist brings up all sorts of issues about secret keeping but at a macro level I wonder why psychotherapists are so absent from public discourse when doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists appear with regularity in the media. One of the stories therapists tell themselves is that they have to maintain the confidentiality of the clients’ stories. Yes and no. Keeping secrets is also a way of colluding with the powerlessness of being unheard. Is it ethical to “fix” clients to return them to wider social systems that may have contributed to their distress in the first instance? Is it “ethical” to maintain a vow of silence about family life; relationships; abuse and all of the other secrets we are entrusted with? Who does secret keeping really benefit?
So you could say I’m ambivalent about secrets and my instinct now is to wonder what’s behind the giving of a secret to a secret keeper and how are we both being made and re-made in that process.
I've just started to read The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld (more about why later in the month) suffice to say it has one of the best opening sections of anything I've read recently.
There is no mystery to happiness.
Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.
But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
Part two of my conversation on the shadow side of organisations with Johnnie Moore and Matt Moore has now been posted by Johnnie - you can download it or listen to it here. Johnnie has also complied some great show notes which I am re-publishing I'm curious to know how long it took Johnnie to edit and prepare the audio and show notes...looks like lots of work to me (thanks Johnnie).
Here are the show notes with the same caveat as for part one: The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.
0.00 Annette asks Matt, with what I’d say is a slight sense of irony in her voice, what knowledge management really is. Is it a gatekeeper? It sounds like a very powerful position…
1.00 Matt says knowledge managers don’t wield a lot of power but they do wield influence. It’s about linking people together. Matt toys with the alternative label of “knowledge courtesan”. Some of the best knowledge managers were those women who ran the salons in eighteenth century France, who created environments for others to have conversations in.
2.50 It struggles with issues of control and secrecy.
3.05 Johnnie and Annette banter before Johnnie slips into Dr Rant mode. (So that’s the connection to the shadow, then.) What’s the problem with these knowledge management people? Are they just trying to raise their status with fancy language? Johnnie drags HR into the fight too.
5.15 Annette asks if Johnnie’s feeling better now.
5.25 Matt talks about how some professions are marginalised, and adds communications/PR to the list. In organisations some divisions have the power and everyone else wants a piece of the action and get into the limelight.
6.25 Annette: how did we end up vilyfying HR etc?
6.35 Johnnie tries to put his rant in context. (Nice try.)
7.10 How could the put-upon divisions be more in their power? Annette asks (great question): what’s useful about having a department to bully? How does that contibute to the established power systems in an organisation?
Annette talks about how HR can get stuck with giving out the bad news for others. Maybe HR, marketing and KM are saddled with trying to manage the mucky stuff of relationships that others don’t want to deal with.
8.55 What role does knowledge manager take up as a gate keeper? Matt responds. Problems of managing intangibles. How KM gets saddled with document management.
10.25 Annette: so there’s some truth to my idea of knowledge managers as gatekeepers.
11.15 There’s anxiety about control of information.. is it about controlling identity?
12.00 We can create the conditions in which stuff is produced but we can’t control what happens. It’s easy to blame the gatekeeper/scapegoat than look at what’s really going on. How do you get out of being the whipping boy? Looking at both sides of this – what’s the “problem department” doing to put itself in this role, and what’s the organisation’s investment in keeping it there?
14.20 Bringing conversation to a close and marking the anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s death.
Bloggers "know" a lot of other bloggers, but seldom get to actually meet them.
This quote from Terry Seamon is so true. I skim read nearly 150 blog postings a day - many from bloggers I feel I 'know' very well from their writing. but most of the bloggers on my blogroll remain virtual friends - particularly those outside Ireland. On this trip to the US I decided to meet some of those bloggers in real life. First up was Dr Jay Parkinson and following that I met Terry at his office The American Management Association in the middle of Times Square and the theatre district. Terry describes himself as a
Learning & OD Guy, interested in management, change, organization effectiveness, communication, work, creativity, media, movies, travel, spiritual growth, stewardship, and making the world a better place.
and I was intrigued by the mix of interests, curiosities and expertise he fuses together on his blog Here We Are, Now What? We had a really interesting conversation about all of the above and much more and yet again I was so impressed by the generosity of bloggers and Terry's interest in meeting a complete stranger. While blogging is often (rightly) described as a narcissistic activity it's also a great way of building bridges and starting conversations - many of those are online, many others extend to offline meetings. I intend to continue cold calling bloggers when I'm on my travels and I would like to extend an invitation to any travelling bloggers to do likewise and make contact with me if you are planning to be in Ireland.
(part of) what value a not-for-profit (corporation or foundation) that supports a community of practice can derive from more traffic on their site. It also shows (part of) what is involved in attracting more traffic... More traffic, especially more traffic that is appropriate for your site does not happen automatically ;)
I think this is a very helpful way of exploring the relationship between organisations, their online presence, customers/clients, content and the feedback mechanisms that operate between each. I'll be using this map with not for profit clients in the future.
Sometimes being in a familiar place can be an unfamiliar experience. I’ve been in New York for the past ten days and the place should technically look and feel the same as it always does. But it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m a regular visitor to the city now (at least twice a year) or maybe it’s that I’m taking it for granted – but I think it’s probably the people and relationships I am building here that makes the difference. I’ve always felt that I make more sense to myself in this city. The grass is always greener I know, but there’s a constellation of people, places and feelings that are evoked in me when I’m here that’s unlike anywhere else I’ve travelled. New York is the city that never disappoints – and technically it should. I know the city very well, the ride from the airport should be passé – but the Manhattan skyline takes my breath away every time, each time anew, each time a renewed beginning.
I’m thinking about this in terms of organisations and what would make going to work a renewing experience every day. With so much energy going into staff retention; work/life balance and work related satisfaction I wonder is it as simple as the relationships we build while we’re there? Work is a social place and organisations are networks of human systems. If, like me, you’re driven by curiosity and a need for conversation then the quality of those relationships make or break an environment. I can’t imagine not having my imagination fed through my work. I can’t imagine not having my heart stimulated by relationships.
I know I’ll look back on this trip and see it as pivotal in the relationship I’m having with myself – I look in the mirror each morning and see a difference - the difference is down to the people I know here. If the old cliché that home is where the heart is, is true then the fact that I’m feeling at home here and within myself has to do with that heart connection. I wonder how many of us can say the same of our work lives?
Each time I come to NYC I'm taken aback by the generosity of complete strangers. New York is a city that's dedicated to capitalism and the contemporary but it's also a city with a huge heart that remembers its friends. This time out I met up with some familiar faces - like Terry Semon at the American Management Association whose blog Here we are now what? I've been reading for some time. He, in turn introduced me to his colleague Bettina Neidhardt who has started a blog called Fearless Leadership. Both of these practitioners are at the coal face of integrating theory and practice and making it work outside the theoretical confines of academia. And then I caught up with Dr Jay Parkinson and his colleague Sean Khozin both of whom are going to turn the way health care is delivered in this country on its head by simply challenging the taken for granted 'rules' about the way things should be done. Then there's Mark Hollander, whom I met a few years ago through blogging, who coaches creative thinkers, accommodates complete strangers, and is the best lunch partner a traveller could ask for in this town. These and many others (most of whom should be blogging because of the wonderful insights and stories they carry around about the work) gave very generously of their time and expertise to me on this trip. I'm grateful to them all (you know who you are :).
The final day of any trip is always a transitional one for me - reflecting, remembering and re-entering. Right now I'm reflecting on the depth of emotion I have felt on this trip. I'm familiar with this city, I know it well. I have developed relationships here - but this time out I have felt those relationships growing deeper - I can say with hand on heart that I have very good friends here, some old and some very new - I have found like minded colleagues here and the New York in my mind is both a construct and a reality at the same time. My parting thoughts are about the sense of privilege I feel to have found a place and people with whom I feel so at home, which makes going home a bitter sweet experience.
How to remain visible in the face of death? Bringing Nuala O’Faolain on her final wish to see Berlin before she died was a sad and memorable journey, but also one of fun and optimism. For the writer whose memoir in German translation was entitled Just don’t become invisible, this was a remarkable way of staying alive
Today’s newspapers in Ireland are infused with images and memories of Nuala O’Faolain. Her radio interview a month ago with Marian Finnucane brought me to tears. Her death, while I was in New York last week, reduced me to silence. The New York Times ran an obituary and an opinion piece in which she was described as ‘fearless even when she insisted she wasn’t’. Fintan O’Toole, in today’s Irish Times, appreciates her understanding of the personal as political and indeed the reverse..
She solved one of the most difficult problems a writer can face – the use of the word “I”. In journalism it can be used to create a comic, self-depcrecating persona, or to bear raw witness to an exraordinary event. …Only very rarely can it be used with sincereity and integrity on the one hand and a cool objectivity on the other.
‘..coming to terms with her life experience was turned into something more vociferous. She felt the need to change things, to fight not only for herself but for everyone else, to expose the damage done by society’
It’s always personal. Even when it’s business, even when it’s framed as something else – it’s always personal. And that’s why I loved her writing because she connected with the humanity of every topic, person and issue she talked about. You were never in doubt as to where her interests and loyalties lay. And perhaps that’s the invitation – each and every time – to see the humanity and the person behind the problem, the issue and the solution. Because if we don’t then we’re missing the point that to be in any kind of relationship means relating on a human level - and that requires feeling and emotion and allowing ourselves to be impacted instead of defending ourselves against the intimacy. There has to be room for love – where ever we are and what ever our task.
Business managers, whether they know it or not, commit themselves to a career in which they have to work on themselves as a condition for effectively working on and with other people. This fact of the business career is so often neglected that we would do well to reexamine the implications of the need to work on oneself as a condition for the exercise of power
Management of Disappointment
Abraham Zaleznik
Harvard Business Review, 1967
I'll be appearing on the Ryan Tubridy show on RTE Radio 1 next Monday morning talking to Ryan about relationships at work - personal and social ones; how we manage them and don't; the 'rules' and boundaries etc. I'll post some of my thoughts here and a link to the podcast next week. In the meantime if anyone has any comments or thoughts on the subject I'd be delighted to hear from you.
Update: The podcast is here (date 16th June) and I appear at around 44 mins in (you'll need Real Player to listen). Ryan and I talked about negotiating boundaries (formally and informally) and the importance of establishing how much information we're willing to reveal about ourselves and more importantly (some times) how much we're willing to hear. I told a story about one work situation where I was unwittingly involved in a boss's affair by having to tell his wife when she called that he was 'at lunch' - very often it's this type of situation that contributes to difficult personal relationships at work.
We also talked about the importance of personal relationships particularly when work is stressful or dangerous and as a way of decompressing from work place anxiety. If my life is in your hands the chances are we are going to be very close and intimate at work. The reality is though that many of those kinds of intense relationships don't transition long term. But work relationships are about work most of the time and the work context will take precedence over personal - chances are if we're friends we may be competing for the same job one of these days and our friendship may take a battering if we're both after the same position.
Work is a social situation and it wouldn't work without personal relationships but I'm becoming increasingly interested in the splitting that goes on where we have highly formalised 'rules' for good behaviour in the work place contrasted with an 'anything goes' attitude outside of work particularly on social networking sites - as though it's possible to keep both separate. Ultimately I wouldn't want to do anything on Facebook that I wouldn't be comfortable doing in front of friends and family. But it's interesting to me that we can even imagine that we can be 'all good' or 'all bad' and separate and contained in those ways.
We just touched on these and other issues - it would be great to continue that conversation in some way - the feedback and emails I've received since the show have been fascinating .. it seems to be an issue many are interested in.
I've written about conductor, teacher, speaker and writer (The Art of Possibility) Benjamin Zanderherebefore - and in this superb TED talk Zander outlines his philosophy of possibility in a passionate and witty presentation that had me smiling all the way through. Using a Chopin prelude (the one with a B and 4 sads...) he takes the audience through an engaging and emotional journey about leadership.
Here's what I took from his presentation
Real leaders have no doubt about the capacity of people to realise their vision - the passion and conviction with which that vision is communicated is key
It matters what we say - will what we utter stand the test of time if it's our last utterance - can what we say be a possibility we live in to?
Not knowing is a place of possibility, not a punative place of doubt - creating a context in which we can articulate our not knowing is the place from which real creativity springs.
Spend 18 minutes with Zander in this TED talk and see for yourself
I'm in a down town, crowded trendy bar a couple of nights ago and I find myself talking with a charming New Yorker who, on discovering my surname, asks if it hails from a small town in the north west of Ireland (it does). And on proffering his own in return (which is also from the same part of Ireland as mine) he reveals that he spent his summer holidays in the same small townland as I did. We probably bumped into each other in the empty streets of the local village.
In a networked and wired world it's easy to see how we're all just 6 degrees from somebody else. But it's also nice to know that the old fashioned face to face communication with strangers can sometimes yield the most surprising synchronicities and in this case it's not 6 degrees but perhaps closer to 2.
In our rush to offer solutions to clients’ problems we often (too often in my opinion) eschew the personal and embrace the professional. We really don’t get the value of being “ourselves” because somewhere along the line we’ve learned that to be ourselves is to not be good enough. I’m of the firm belief that there are no differences. What there are – are boundaries. People hire people because after they’ve assured themselves that you have the skill set to do the job, they want to be in a relationship with someone they like, feel comfortable with and ultimately feel safe with. All of that requires a large degree of self awareness and an ability to manage boundaries. It also requires that we be ourselves. You can try faking being personal but it won't work. It never does.
I have a number of questions I ask myself when working with clients to make sure I’m “being myself”.
What’s my emotional response to this client and to undertaking this assignment?
Would there come a time in this relationship where I could share that understanding in the service of the relationship?
Whose authority am I drawing on to make this client feel confident about working with me? My own? Or someone else’s?
How do I feel about “not knowing” in the presence of this client?
What is my motivation for working with this client? Money? Learning? Creativity? All three? something else? i.e. what's in this for me?
Those basic questions help me to keep connected to myself and more importantly, they ensure that I bring myself to the relationship. Tricks and tools are great and important sometimes, but if I’m not sure of what I’m feeling and when, I can’t reach for what I need in the service of my clients. Unlike the customer in the advertisement above, I want to feel personally connected to my clients and it’s only in that frame of mind I can grasp how best I can give them value for their money.
I was saddened to read of the death of Wexford teacher Eileen Flynn. In 1982 Flynn was sacked from her job as an English and History teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co Wexford because at the time she was living 'out of wedlock' with a separated man with whom she had a child.
The 80s were a grim time in Ireland. Apart from recession, high unemployment and emigration we struggled to have coherent conversations about major social issues - remember the abortion referenda? and the attempts to get divorce legalised? (It took until 1995 for the latter to happen and it took until 1993 for the Irish government to decriminalise homosexuality). Eileen Flynn became a symbol of the struggle to separate church and state and was victimised for an act of bravery - albeit a very private one. There were others of course - remember Ann Lovett in 1984? a 15 year old girl whose dead body was found at a grotto in Granard where she had gone to give birth to a baby. Those stories sound like they come from a different era and yet, they are part of my history, my generation - I wonder how far we've really come?
When people vilify scapegoats it's often interesting to pause for a moment and wonder if there's a truth at the heart of 'disruptive' behaviour. Sometimes it's difficult to see beyond the taken for granted culture we're enmeshed in but very often there's the kernel of truth in there that deserves to be heard. Eileen Flynn was scapegoated for our inability or unwillingness to challenge the relationship between church and state in Ireland - how many other lone voices are being stigmatised in 2008 for truths we're unwilling to name?
Some people who are ambitious and want your job will never say they are ambitious and want your job. They will say your hair looks nice today.
And then when she has become your boss and you ask for a raise, she says your hair looks nice today but she liked it a little better when it was longer, didn't you, and she'd love to give you a raise and you certainly deserve it but ... those darned penny pinchers in accounting! Maybe you'd be happier somewhere where you can get paid what you're worth ... and thanks for coming in, I'm glad we could have this little chat!
Oh how in the blink of an eye our fortunes can change!
It being the season of goodwill and all of that, it’s worth noting that this can be done in many many ways. Right now with the recession biting and many good people being let go or made go part-time, it’s worth making a little effort in pointing out to others the good work they’ve done with/for you. Other people don’t even know it but they’ll be let go soon too. It’s unfortunately inevitable. One way for me to give thanks to people is LinkedIn, where over the next few days I’ll try and recommend as many people that I worked with as I can.
In these recessionary times we need more focus on gratitude and less on misery - jobs will come and go, the economy will rise and fall but who'll be thinking of that stuff at the last hurdle? So I've taken Damien's advice - why don't you think about leaving a positive thought for someone you've worked with in the past few months? If they don't have a LinkedIn profile then perhaps they have a blog? or a Twitter account? an email address? or perhaps you might consider the old fashioned approach and pen a 'real' letter? Investing in relationships is always a win win proposition - and we all need to know we make a difference.
Kindness is in danger of disappearing - it has become our "forbidden pleasure" and something "we feel consistently deprived of" - so say Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor in their new book On Kindness. The book is an impassioned plea for the return of kindness in a selfish age...and was probably conceived and written before the world as we know it began to unravel. The book outlines the history of kindness from Roman philosophers through to contemporary psychodynamic interpretations of the concept (in particular those of Freud and Winnicott). At its heart is an invitation to rethink compassion, generosity and kindness as essential to our well being and it's such a timely intervention as we see the financial markets and the 'greed is good' philosophy implode.
So what would our work environments look like were we to take up Phillips and Taylor's invitation? Might forgiveness and empathy; sympathy and patience sit alongside kindness? Might our rush to 'rules and regulations' abate for a while in an attempt to resolve difficulties through discussion? I don't have any ready answers but I do know that an invitation to place kindness more central to our engagement with co-workers can't be a bad thing and might reap different kinds of profits in the longer term.
Season 2 of In Treatment is already underway in the US - Paul has 4 new clients and has decided that his sessions with Gina are therapy and not the confused hybrid of therapy and supervision from Season 1. What I like about the series is that it gives some insight into the complexity of the therapeutic relationship and in particular what it looks like from a therapist's perspective. I've used some of the episodes as teaching resources with first year counselling and psychotherapy students and they have been a useful tool to explore basic concepts such as boundaries, transference and counter transference etc. Many people come to a training programme with idealised notions of being helpful and transforming their client's lives. Few have any thoughts about the challenges of containing and working with very powerful transference from clients and the feelings evoked that can't always be articulated in the moment.
HBO has produced a 24 minute documentary called In Treatment: Private and Confidential (you can watch it online) - in which therapists and clients talk about what therapy is and how it works and why it can be useful (for some people). It does contain spoilers so you have been warned! NPR also recently interviewed Gabriel Byrne and he has some interesting insights into his character's thinking.
If In Treatment does nothing more than make it possible to generate insight into how therapy works then it will have been a success in my view..and for those of you interested in more insight into how Gabriel Byrne works check out Belinda McKeown's interview with him from February's Irish Times.
My website was hacked earlier in the summer, which caused some hiatus in my publishing schedule - of course one delay led to another and before you know it weeks have passed. The extended break turned into something longer than expected but also provided an opportunity to think about use and value and creativity - particularly in the current climate.
I don't have 10 Top Tips to resolving the current economic recession, or to creating work where none exists or to solving the myriad dilemmas that clients face. The question then of course is - well what can you offer that's of any use? Sometimes it's hard to answer that question - maybe that's why a break from blogging can turn into a longer than expected absence.
For those of us interested in emotion and unconscious processes in organisations the current state of the world is a fascinating arena. Nothing much makes sense and that which does is often fleeting. The gap between intention and behaviour grows and trusted ways of interpreting the world don't appear to work any more. But there are ways of making sense of the world that don't involve trying and failing to fix it. Most of my recent work with clients has been helping them navigate relationships and behaviour that on the surface doesn't make sense. In most cases those behaviours and relationships have shifted and transformed - but I couldn't in good conscience say that what I offer is a sure fired, tried and tested methodology that will guarantee results. It's that kind of thinking that has contributed to the mess we appear to be facing.
Managing complexity, anxiety, uncertainty and eschewing quick-fix solutions while at the same time trying to be in that uncertainty as you try to make sense of it is complicated work - but it's the kind of work I am drawn to and the kind of work my clients seem to appreciate. organisations it's the challenge of mediating and navigating complex relationships without offering a fixed solution or outcome.
In this TED talk Philosopher Alain de Botton invites us to examine our fixed notions of success and failure and suggests that snobbery may play a part in our enjoyment (or lack thereof) of our work. It's a useful and interesting perspective on the current un/employment crisis. The comments stream is also interesting and there's a fascinating conversation on the merits of success as socially constructed, imposed, self-imposed, accepted or bestowed.
About Relationships
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Interactions - Creative Strategies for Business in the Relationships category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
