A Different Kind of WorkToxic work | A Different Kind of Work

The Cult Of The Working Dead (And How To Escape It)

Christine — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:00:17 +0000

It’s easily done.

Start out in life so energetic and full of great ideas.

Then find yourself in a career, a job, a way of life to which you’ve given over your ability to think.

Hard to say how or when it happened. And if you look back it was probably not just one event but a process of clever and subtle brainwashing techniques that knocked you out. Whatever, the orthodoxy of the normal life became so compelling that you sacrificed yourself to it, heart and mind.

Now, days, weeks, months pass by, almost without you really noticing.

It alarms you, in your brief moments of lucidity, to consider that you may be under the spell of something that’s not working for you. And you’d rather brush off the feelings of doubt you have about some of the rituals the cult demands you practice.

Tolerating Vampire Bosses because you need them to remind you of your place in the great cult order of things.
Sitting through brain-numbing meetings all day long and beginning your day-job at 6pm, even though it means missing out on family time, friendships and hobbies.
Knowing that a business decision is crazy but implementing it anyway, because you want to see your stock option vest, or your bonus paid out, or your retirement plan come to fruition.

For the most part you don’t question. You can’t. You are so entangled in the cult that it’s hard to know where you’d start to get clear without unraveling, or creating career suicide. All your friends are cult members. You understand life through its teachings. You’ve even begun to channel its ethos to your children and anyone else who will listen to you.

The Hazards

But at times you know that it’s not a life at all. That it’s a death. And you feel the exhaustion in yourself.

Sure, it may be okay for you that the cult has your soul. But if you’re not careful, it’ll take more from you than that.

It can take your psychological well-being.

One person I worked with was so ritualistically diminished by her boss that in the end she had a breakdown and quit her job. Unable to work for some time, she lost considerable income. Her lifestyle was impacted big time. When she did get back in the saddle of looking for something else, she then faced the challenge of recruiters being suspicious about the circumstances that had led to her leaving her old firm. Which in turn affected her self-confidence in a tough recruitment market.

It can kill your relationship.

Consider the guy I worked with some years ago. 42 going on 62 and morbidly obese, he was putting in 18 hour days with no regard for anything other than work. He may have continued indefinitely, but it was the shock of his wife’s decision to move out of their family home that cracked him.

Only then did he understand the impact of his lack of consciousness. But it was too late to save his marriage.

Or, it can kill you.

For another high-flier an aggressive tumour brought her to a choice point. To wake up to the damage that cult working was doing to her, or die? Choosing the former, she breathed new life into dreams, hopes and plans she’d shelved years before, and transformed her working style. She remains well, but the threat of the cancer returning keeps her alert.

Knowing Who You Are

So much of waking up, and deciding to have a life, begins with choosing to understand who you are and honoring yourself.

A good starting point is to consider your values.

You may hear the cult talk about values – the term is bandied about enough in business. But do you really know what values are? And do you know what they are for you?

Think about it.

What are the things that, when you support and allow them, make you feel most alive?

What things, when ignored, make you feel angry, sad, disappointed or crushed?

These are your personal values. They say a lot about who you are. Not who the cult tells you you should be. They talk to the essence of you.

(And, by the way, this is something I’m talking about more in my forthcoming eBook, to be shared exclusively with folks on my mailing list. If you’re not already on it, sign up here to make sure you don’t miss out.)

Knowing your values can help guide your actions and decisions, big and small.

If RESULTS is a key value and the cult wants you just to keep plodding on, doing what you’re doing, watch out.
If FREEDOM is one of your values and the cult insists that you follow a set process of doing things, you are in danger.
And, if INTEGRITY is one of yours, and the cult wants you to go along with unethical practices, well….

Choice

Recovering from the cult of the working dead means choosing to act more and more in a way that’s congruent with your values. The more you do this, the more clued up you’ll get about what’s right and wrong for you.

You’ll begin to notice that, when the cult would rather you did things that conflict with your values, you feel a tightening in your chest, or the onset of boredom, or the desire to punch someone.

Next time that happens, don’t swallow your anger, reach for a burger, or wait and explode at your other half when you get home. See it as a piece of information from your strengthening psyche.

And decide that you will or won’t act. Either way, just realising that you have decision-making power allows you to gain ground on the mindlessness around you.

One of the most insidious aspects of the cult of the working dead is the infiltration of the belief that there’s no choice in the matter.

But there is always choice. Live or die. Which one are you choosing?

photo credit: gabrielsaldana

How Not To Give Feedback At Work: Part Two

Christine — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:05:29 +0000

Have you ever wondered about the source of poor management behaviour?

I’ve always believed it comes from the top. The board or its equivalent. Set a bad example and you give your more junior people leaders licence to copy you. On the weekend, I witnessed a sad but true endorsing example.

You may recall that last November I was talking about an experience in my local coffee shop of the store manager belittling a member of her staff in front of a client. Me.

Well, yesterday, in the same shop, I stood at the counter, ordering a couple of Americanos, as the franchise owner questioned one of the store’s supervisors on something she hadn’t done.

“Why is the sign board not out on the pavement?”

“I tried to put it up when I put the tables and chairs out first thing, but it kept blowing down.”

If you live in the South East of England, you’ll appreciate it was both windy and rainy yesterday morning. Understatement.

“The sign board should be out.”

“I know that, Paul, but I reckoned it was a safety hazard. It’s blowing a gale out there.”

Paul harrumphs, marches to the front of the shop, and puts the offending board out on the pavement anyway. The supervisor meets my eyes in a WTF kind of way and gets on with making my coffee.

I take my coffee and me and my man sit and watch as the board gets blown down several times, being rescued by kindly passers by. We wonder whose insurance is going to pay out if the board blows into one of the cars parked on the road right beside it.

Paul disappears as the Sunday morning coffee traffic picks up. Eventually the supervisor reasserts her own good judgement and brings the board inside the shop.

I did giggle about this. But I do think it’s just a little crazy.

What do you think?

photo credit: KelseaGroves

The Shocking Truth About Corporations

Christine — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:00:32 +0000

Big business’s lack of respect for people came home to me yet again this weekend, when an invoice I’d submitted to a company for a piece of executive coaching was returned unpaid three months after it was raised. I’d made a small, but apparently significant error in addressing it.

The whole thing angered and saddened me for several reasons.

First, I have a good and long-standing relationship with the person sponsoring the coaching, and indeed now too with the direct client.

Second, I’ve done the work in good faith of the invoice being paid, recognizing payment cycles and all that good stuff.

Not only that but, third, I’ve almost completed the program and am well on my way to delivering the contracted coaching benefits.

You might, like me, imagine that some friendly purchasing person could have emailed or called before now to highlight the error.

“Hey, Christine, instead of putting the brand name on the invoice, you need to use the company’s legal name.”

But no.

Instead, three months later, I get a standard “reject” letter by post from the foreign country dealing with their payment systems. The letter has a list of possible misdemeanors, and a cross indicating mine. There’s no name or personal contact details. No individual taking responsibility for so belatedly telling me the process. A faceless machine has just chucked me out and used my error, it feels, as an excuse to hang on to its money for another couple months.

For a moment I was gutted.

Then I decided, in the spirit of being a good professional coach, both to reframe the experience and indeed to use it as a bit of evidence about the corporate system itself.

If I chose to, I could have felt both unimportant, and that my work was not valued. Neither of these are true.

And still, I wonder how many times my people who work in this and other similar corporate systems feel unimportant and not valued, because that’s what the system sets up.

I had expected, because of the quality of the relationships I have with the individuals here, that the company would care. I had been nurturing a fantasy that, because I had played fair, the company would play fair with me.

And I ask myself how often my people imagine that, if they play fair, the company will reciprocate. When it cannot.

It reminded me of how often we expect companies, because they are set up as personalities in their own respect, to have a heart and to feel on our behalf. But how, in fact, their whole raison d’être has no place for everyday human feelings.

The Shocking Truth About Corporations

In law, they exist for two reasons. First, to return a profit to shareholders; and second, to continue to exist come what may. They will do whatever they need to do to achieve these ends. If that means crapping on people and other stakeholders – in this case a supplier like me – that’s what they’ll do.

They have no soul.

In a scenario where money is tight and times are tough their ways of achieving their ends only get more ruthless. And the people in the system have to cope with the emotional fall-out. It’s difficult sometimes, even on the outside, not to take it on, and to maintain one’s own sense of perspective and equilibrium.

You might imagine that this would make me less interested in working with individuals that work for big companies. In fact it does the opposite. My people are by and large business people. But they have hearts and souls and want a life too. I work hard to empower them to have both.

photo credit: Marcin Wichary

How Not To Give Feedback At Work

Christine — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:00:52 +0000

An embarrassing thing happened to me the other day that I want to share and get your perspective on.

I’m in a coffee shop with my other half for breakfast. I order him a bacon butty. The barista, a fairly new guy, doing his best at smiley customer service, puts two sachets of ketchup on the plate that’s awaiting the toasting sandwich.

“It’s one sachet, not two.”

The manager appears from nowhere to deliver this piece of “on-the-job coaching”. Her tone is so accusatory, I feel I’ve been caught stealing cash from the till. The casual, comfortable spell between me and the barista is broken. He withdraws a ketchup sachet, offers me an unspoken WTF, and busies himself in making coffee.

“He’s always getting it wrong,” she says. “He knows the rules: one sachet per sandwich.”

Without another word, I pay my money and take my tray to where my OH, along with the rest of the shop, sits having just witnessed the scene.

“There have to be other ways to deliver feedback to your people than that,” he says. I can only shrug.

But it got me thinking, and I’m curious to ask:

Has a manager ever pulled you up for something in front of a colleague, or client? Have you ever been a client where something like this has happened to you? And, as a boss, do you think this is the kind of way to develop not just your people, but your business relationships? Share your experiences in the comment box below!

photo credit: homesbythomas

A Comprehensive Guide To Slaying Your Vampire Boss

Christine — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:51:29 +0000

Your first meeting with her was inspirational. “Hurrah for charisma,” you thought. At the time, something lurched in your solar plexus; something you couldn’t name. But you told yourself not to be silly; you were just imagining things.

But weeks after you start working for her, things are not right. You’ve got all the signs of being in the grip of a vampire boss attack. But you can’t reconcile yourself to it.

I mean, this is the business world, not Transal-bloody-vania. Right? These kind of things just don’t happen in brand name companies, do they?

Except, as the hundreds of folks who read my Tell Tale Signs article last week will tell you, they do.

“Give us more advice on wising up,” you said.

Here’s an eight-point plan. Read it, and share your experiences in the comments.

Take Up The Challenge

Step one: you must decide you’re going to slay this soul-sucking monster. The longer you prevaricate and stay in victim mode, the longer she’s got the upper hand.

And don’t just think it. You’ve got to feel your decision, heart and soul. Put words to it like Sharon shared with us last week: “I will not allow [insert vampire boss's name] to paralyze me and/or keep me from doing what I must (want to, love to) do.”

It’s this that’s going to fuel your determination to get through the steps to come, so lock it in tight.

Build Your Psychic Reserves

Vampires tend to attack folks with gaping holes in their self-confidence. They will touch weaknesses in you that you thought you were doing a pretty good job of hiding. Part of the reason your vampire boss spooks you so much is because you feel transparent to her. Like she reaches into you and pulls on that bit that’s most vulnerable.

What is the weakness she’s hooking? Go ahead and name it in yourself. Think you’re not good enough? Not perfect enough? Not really worth the effort?

Now, instead of having her paralyze you by touching it, consider that she’s unwittingly challenging you to shore it up. How would that change things?

Find the words for yourself. But you must begin to believe from the core of your being that you are okay, just as you are.

Befriend Other Slayers

Use your intuition to seek out other folks who’re having a similar battle, or who have wrestled with it in the past. They may be immediate colleagues, or friends from outside your company. Heck, they may even be folks you’ve met through this post or its comments. Their role is to validate, strengthen and empower you.

Beware folks you’d imagine to be supporters – HR and the vampire’s boss. They may indeed be on your side and extremely helpful. Too often, however, they are werewolves, happy to hear your woes and use it as ammunition for their own power attacks. Beware you don’t get your professionalism dirtied by getting caught in the cross-fire.

Decide What Is And Isn’t Okay For You

One of the things that friends – and indeed a good coach – can help you do is get clear on your boundaries. What are your personal values? What in your boss’s behavior can you relate to and go along with? What goes against your values and will need attention?

Become A Mirror

Use your gains in confidence, and clarity of boundaries, to manage your boss better. Record, either for yourself or formally via email, all the key deliverables your boss has asked for and to which you’ve agreed.

When the goal posts change, as they inevitably will, you need to put the mirror up to your boss. “You asked for the report to show the trend line over twelve months. Now you’re asking for it over twenty four. So, you’re wanting another report?”

Good mirrors are clear, don’t lie or distort. And vampires are weakened by them.

No matter how it makes you quake in your shoes, be the best, assertive you that you can muster, and stand firm. Remember the decision you made not to let this blood sucker continue to leech you.

Hold Up The Crucifix

If she violates your boundaries, you need to confront it. But you need to be clever about how.

An example is that she makes some kind of personal attack. She’s an older woman and doesn’t like the fact that you get along with your male colleagues. Despite that fact that you more than deliver, one day she catches you having a laugh with three of the guys.

“You’ll get your job done faster,” she says in open forum, “if you stop flirting with the men.”

You are incensed. However, you mustn’t fight back there and then. But, follow her to her pod and say something like:

“Help me understand the point you made just then.” Say it logically and curiously, without aggression. Chances are she’ll laugh it off immediately. Or she’ll continue. If she keeps on, your job is to keep your cool, and to ask her questions about what your chatting with the guys has to do with your performance.

Either way, you’ll have rattled her.

Stand Back From An Attack

Of course, it’s always possible that, because you’ve decided to take your power back and exercise it, she’ll throw a strop. Pay close attention. This is an invitation into feeling guilty and bad about yourself. Don’t play the game.

Instead, choose to be a spectator. Decide that if she wants to have a sulk, that’s her business. But it’s not going to touch you.

Drive A Stake Through Her Heart

Sometimes strength and time will sort these things out. Bosses move on or get moved on. You get promoted to another department. But sometimes you’re stuck with her, or, worse still, her kind of behavior is endemic in the culture.

If, despite all your efforts of building your confidence, getting clear on your boundaries, and standing up for yourself nothing changes, you have to ask yourself whether it’s time to look elsewhere. The whole episode will have taught you much, but presumably you hadn’t imagined you’d end up as some kind of Buffy character, permanently stuck in vampire slaying mode.

Your resignation will hurt, but don’t imagine that it will permanently wound a vampire boss. She’ll be on to her next victim before you’ve left the building.

But next time you meet a new boss and there’s a ping in your solar plexus, you know that’s the warning that you’re in territory you don’t want to be anywhere near.

photo credit: HermiG

Is Your Boss A Closet Vampire? Check These Tell-Tale Signs

Christine — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:11:00 +0000

Ever have that feeling of being perpetually drained of energy?

You know, that wrung-out, zombie state that never seems to leave you? You want to shake yourself free of it, but can’t quite find the enthusiasm. Meantime, there’s work to do, targets to meet, actions to deliver. So you just go along with it all, running on empty, feeling less than enthusiastic about work or life.

You think that’s just how it is. Everyone feels that way, don’t they?

But has it ever struck you that your boss’s red lipstick is more than just a power thing? That for all she is big and sassy and well in with clients and top bosses, she may have some kind of underworld affliction going on that she’d really rather you didn’t know about?

No, I haven’t been watching too many Twilight DVDs on the weekend. I’m talking about vampire bosses that suck your energy and bleed you dry. And why you need to wise up to them before they leave you for dead.

Check these tell-tale signs

You never quite feel you’re good enough. One of the ways vampire bosses weaken you is by creating conditions so that they, not you, determine how you feel about yourself. They do this in two ways. First, they set up competitiveness in their teams, so that you never quite trust your colleagues, and feel you’re always having to prove yourself. Second, they continually shift the goal posts on deliverables and performance standards so you can’t ever be sure that what you’re delivering measures up.
You’re expected to go along with their view of the world. The implicit approach they have to things is that “I’m right, you’re wrong”. It doesn’t matter how crazy or fucked-up their position; they expect you to just nod and go along with it. Even better if you blow smoke up their ass.
Challenging them means criticism, ridicule, or the silent treatment. If you dare offer another view point – heaven forbid, your own – they interpret it as a personal attack. Vampire bosses have little capacity for self-learning and the emotional shifts it requires. And any anxiety your comments provoke in them, they turn back on you, and then some. Open ridicule you may be able to laugh off or ride over. But the silent treatment is one of a vampire boss’s most powerful weapons. Here, they’ll sulk for hours or days, sending poisonous, hateful vibes in your direction, leaving you feeling completely shit about yourself.
They unilaterally make decisions about your career. They offer you promotions and added responsibilities expecting you to be grateful. The fact that there’s no additional compensation or that these things don’t jive with your bigger career or work life goals is of no interest to them. To tear your heart out, they’ll make sure to have non-HR conforming conversations with you, bitching about this or that colleague and how they were left for dead after doing something that went against the vampire’s world view.
You continually feel exhausted. To maintain their overly inflated egos, vampire bosses need a lot of psychic energy. They get it by robbing you of yours. Of course, this all happens out of their conscious awareness – they have little consciousness, after all – but it happens nevertheless. The result is that you are perpetually tired, feel continually demoralized, and rarely in touch with all that you are.

Why should you care?

Well, just ask yourself: is it okay for you to siphon off your energy to some God forsaken boss, just to make is easier for her to run roughshod over you?

And, what would you do with that energy if you could redirect it back to yourself?

Becoming a vampire slayer

Unlike the films, no-one’s going to be shape shifting to rescue you anytime soon. You’ve got to become your own werewolf.

The first thing you must do is wise up. Sure, I’ve wrapped it up in a vampire metaphor, but it’s a real phenomenon and it’s prevalent in senior jobs. Why? Well, because these types are so full of themselves, they often push themselves forward in a way lesser mortals fear to even consider.

Getting smart to this stuff means looking out for where you’ve made it okay for your boss, or colleagues to decide what is and isn’t okay for you, taking your power back, and putting some boundaries in place to keep yourself as free as possible from their evil grip.

So, tell me, do you work for or have you ever worked for a vampire boss – or within the culture of a vampire business? What challenges do you have with it? How have you fought against it? What questions does this post leave you asking?
photo credit: letocarri

Warning: Not All Career Rules Are True

Christine — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:08:43 +0000

Corporations often dish up beliefs as truths and then manage you through that lens. I see it all the time in my coaching work. There’s an implicit set of assumptions that underpin the culture of a business. These are all well and good if they happen to jive with your values and beliefs, but crazy-making if they don’t.

Take Bob who was living in the grip of one such “truth” when I began working with him.

A young, talented and ambitious accountant, he’d recently been disappointed to find that he hadn’t even been nominated for the promotion process that would eventually allow him to apply for partnership. But the icing on the cake was the following advice dished out to him by his HR Director:

“You can’t have a career and a good work life balance,”

When I asked him to help me understand, he shared that he wanted to have a life, as much as he wanted to have a career. He was no slouch. He’d work the hours to finish audits on time, and he’d conduct after-hours client review meetings no problem. But when the pressure was off, he’d leave work at six and spend his evenings with his wife and two children, instead of doing the politically required thing of staying at his desk.

This went against the grain for his firm. So, if he wanted a career there he was going to have to choose between two parts of him that he did not want to experience as ever being in conflict.

Reframe The Belief

The first step in our coaching work was to challenge the assumption in the belief.

“Is it true that one cannot have a career and a rich life beyond it?” I asked.

As we talked it through, it became obvious that, while it was true of his company, he could think of lots of other people in his life and in the public eye who had good lives and good careers.

Take Back The Power

Next up was for Bob to consider whose picture of a professional life he was going to follow: his own or his firm’s.

In the former, Bob himself could set goals for himself and decide what was and wasn’t okay for him. In the latter, he’d hand over much of his power to his firm. They’d decide what was appropriate, and Bob would moderate himself to fit in.

He decided that constantly measuring himself against some external standard, as he had been until that point, was no longer for him. Deciding to put himself in the driving seat of his own career allowed him to feel much more confident and resourceful.

Can You Get What You Want Here?

He decided to test out his current firm by having a further conversation with the HRD about how much latitude there actually was on worklife issues. But he returned to me disappointed.

“The partnership is a club,” the HRD had said. “It may say it values worklife balance, but really it expects complete loyalty. Either you’re happy to play by the rules or you’re not.”

We looked at the kind of club this partnership actually was and whether it was one of which Bob really wanted to be a member. He reflected on the phenomenal professionalism on the one hand; on the other he spoke of the failed marriages, the confirmed singletons, the relationships that appeared to exist purely on convenience. He started to square up to the possibility that this was not a club to which he would willingly belong.

Where Can You Get It?

With my support, he then went off and began having tentative chats with people in his professional network. He was trying to get a feel for how life was in other accountancy and professional service firms. Many of them seemed to have similar cultures. But some of the mid-sized, more entrepreneurial ones appeared more open to the possibility that their people might want to have more in their lives than work.

Finally, he was offered and accepted a senior management role for a smaller firm, with a fast-track route to partnership based on how things mutually worked out.

The last time I spoke to him he’d just been promoted, and was delighted.

Bob’s is just one example of how career rules can work against individuals, and how it’s possible, by getting clear of what’s true for you, to find a better fit.

What career rules might you be unduly struggling against? How might using Bob’s example free you up?

photo credit: Aerokev

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7 Warning Signs That It’s Time To Quit Your Job

Christine — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:33:32 +0000

photo credit: DaveBleasdale

According to a recent survey, 40% of professionals are considering going in search of a new job when they get back from their summer vacation. They’re battle weary after months of slogging it out in positions where their promotion prospects are disappearing, their bosses aren’t living espoused company values, and their bonuses are being cut.

It’s not surprising news. I’m hearing all the time from clients and friends just how much they want to quit. I’ve written elsewhere about being careful about not rushing to escape.

But how do you know when it really is time to go? Here are 7 signs that indicate the end is, indeed, in sight.

You dislike what you’re doing. You’ve got to the point where you’re more than just bored, or not enjoying what you do. It’s becoming an active hatred. You can feel it sitting on you like a lead weight on your heart. It’s affecting your whole outlook on life.
You feel no connection with your boss or colleagues. If you ever trusted your boss, that’s gone never to return. And, there’s no-one at work you can really call your friend.
You’d really rather stay in bed. You’re struggling to get up in the morning, and it’s an effort to get yourself together for your day.
You can never get on top of your workload. No matter how hard you try, you never feel that you’re getting on top of things. You might just about get there when the goal posts change again and you’re back to square one.
You’re constantly ill. Despite whatever you do to de-stress, you’ve always got some kind of minor health problem going on. Whether it’s a cold, flu, whatever, you also notice these things becoming more difficult to shrug off and recover from.
You’re living for weekends and holidays. The benefits of them, however, last only a few days before you feel that you’ve never been away.
You’ve tried your damnedest to make things better. You’re a pro. You’ve read all the advice in this and other blogs about how to hack your career and you’ve applied it all religiously. Without success. You’re done with trying.

Sometimes the best thing to do is walk away. Some companies are just not for you. Don’t waste your energy and make yourself chronically ill trying to force fit yourself to a scenario that was never for you.

Sure, there are pragmatic considerations around how you get yourself out, what you subsequently do, and how you finance yourself in the process. It may take you time, but if it’s right to go, do yourself a favor and make that a firm decision. That’s step one. The rest will follow. And you’ll wonder why you slogged it out for so long!

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What Employers Need To Know Now

Christine — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:09:24 +0000

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that more people are quitting their jobs than being laid off for the first time in 15 consecutive months. Recent UK figures paint a similar picture.

The WSJ article reckons there’s two reasons:

First, there’s a glut of people who have sat out the recession in the relative safety of their current jobs, when they’d normally have been progressing their careers elsewhere.

Second, many people who have taken the brunt of tough cost-cutting initiatives, are now looking to greener pastures as a way both of voting with their feet, and moving on in their own lives.

No problems with any of that.

But, in tandem, I heard on my own grapevine last week that there’s been a sudden increase in the number of new Employee Engagement jobs in London. A quick look at those advertised online confirms that most of them are about trying to get some enthusiasm back into weary workforces.

As someone who has coached and consulted with some of the most successful companies in the world, I have to say that this seems to be a case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted.

Employers need to get the message that they can’t treat people badly and expect them to keep smiling

We’re not living in the early 20th Century any more. The world and society has shifted hugely since the first mechanistic concepts of people management were developed. People see themselves as having more choice. There’s a lot more consciousness in the system and people will exercise it to their own advantage.

Old paternalistic, command and control cultures are breaking down. People want to be treated as adults these days. They don’t want to be treated as recalcitrant children: lavished in good times; punished in bad. They want their personal power to be respected and valued.

If you manage staff, you can’t talk to them one day about how important it is for you to engage them, hearts and minds, next day unilaterally impose swingeing cuts, and not expect them to be angry about your breach of trust. These days they smell your spin at fifty feet.

Employers need to understand that damaging their workforces, means damaging their brand

I’m an advocate for the well being of people at work, whatever work they do. Work is more than just a cog in the economic machine. It’s a vital aspect of giving each of us a sense of purpose and direction in life. Businesses have a wonderful opportunity to engage talented, purposeful people, support them to thrive – and see their businesses thrive too.

Instead many – too many – continue to see their people mechanistically. Even if they’ve thought about “Employee Engagement” it gets managed as an initiative, rather than a living, breathing, vital part of business. It’s pumped out through town hall meetings and emails. The importance of the human, energetic relationship between managers and their staff gets missed.

Employers forget that their people have voices. That they talk to their friends about their experiences. That they write about them on social media sites. Hence others build a picture of what constitutes a “good” or “bad” employer in much the same way as they build a picture of a consumer brand.

Employers need to count the costs in both people and financial terms

They appear to be blind to the fact that there’s a wave of what they call “talent” streaming away from their organisations. That, indeed, many talented individuals are waving two fingers to the corporate world because they’ve had enough psychopathy to last them a life time.

This is not just a phenomenon fuelled by recession. As the Conference Board reported in January, Job Satisfaction Statistics have been trending downwards for 22 years.

But there’s a financial impact of all of this too.

Joe Light across at WSJ made a good guess at the financial cost of the turnover we’re starting to see as the job market eases off. He estimates that, at more senior levels, the bill is around 50% of each new person’s salary.

That’s not including the costs of paying for interim or consulting staff to cover key vacancies. Or the incremental recruitment costs from the bad will you inflict on putting extra stress on an already pressurised work team.

If you’re in the highly privileged position to be able to have people work for you, you might like to consider what that means going forward. You might like to connect with the reality that people have lives, that they have souls, that they care. That if you dare to provide the right kind of environment, they will bring these beautiful, human qualities to the benefit of your business.

My belief is that if employers adopt this kind of thinking, the rewards will speak for themselves. What do you think?

Social Media. Another 24/7 Work Culture?

Christine — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:59:26 +0000

This is a question that’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks now.

Especially since a few uncharacteristic mistakes in my client work brought into focus how much time I was spending online and how tired it was beginning to make me feel. Not good for one whose raison d’être is about living a whole life of which work is part, but not all. And whose coaching differential is strong energetic presence.

There’s much to love about blogging, Twitter, Facebook and all things social media. It’s such a “now” phenomenon. It opens you and your business up to people, information, products and services you simply would not otherwise access. And for the solopreneur, it’s a way of creating your virtual office of self-selected colleagues.

But if you imagine you’re swapping a 24/7 environment for one that’s less so, think again. It’s entirely possible that, without the kind of self-monitoring I did recently, you might recreate virtually what you’re leaving behind.

Here are 4 key characteristics of 24/7 corporate cultures. See whether any of them are playing out in your social media driven business world.

Focus on external performance measures

Most workaholic organisation cultures have performance management ethics that reward the achievement of “things”. Sales targets; fee revenues; customer satisfaction statistics: these are all valued beyond how they are actually achieved or what impact achieving them has on people.

The locus of control for such measures is often outside of you. You wait for others to confer their approval. Your sense of yourself is predicated on how well you meet their and your own arbitrary measures. You feel in control and powerful when the numbers are good. Bad when they’re down.

Using social media to fuel your business can suck you into this kind of thinking too. Your sense of yourself becomes based on blog traffic, how many subscribers or Twitter followers you have, how many posts you can knock-out.

Sure, measures have their place in focusing and building your business, but it’s about balance. Give yourself psychological swing space by reframing your success measures and remember that you are responsible for determining how well you’re doing.

Fuzzy boundaries between work and life

It’s great to make friends at work. However, 24/7 organisation cultures often confuse collegiality with more intimate relationships. Social contagion has the effect of having you hang around the office for longer than you might because you enjoy the chumminess.

An extreme example was when I worked for Gemini Consulting. They openly spoke of “The Gemini Family” and indeed in our consulting teams we both worked and lived together on locations across the world. We saw more of one another than our partners, children, or long-term friends. When a “family” disbanded at the end of one assignment, another would spawn during the set-up of another.

You can make real and enduring friends via social media. I am delighted to have a sense of belonging to a number of different online communities. But don’t make Twitter and Facebook “home”. Discipline yourself to take time away from your pc or Mac to do offline things, and to give due attention to those closest to you. That way you can keep a healthy harmony in your different relationships.

Excessive workloads

Another enduring aspect of full-on organisational cultures is that what they expect staff to deliver is not often achievable within the confines of a contained working day. Hence people find themselves working into evenings and weekends – through the night – just to keep up.

Accordingly, when we begin working for ourselves and using social media, the chances are that we’ll set our own workloads in a similarly burdensome way.

It’s a tough one because, when you’re starting up or changing direction, you often want to put in more hours in order to build your platform and get established. The thing is to do this knowingly, and also to decide for yourself when you will be quieter.

Hook for obsessives and perfectionists

The truth is, of course, that 24/7 organisation cultures wouldn’t exist if they weren’t staffed by the kind of people who perpetuate them.

Obsessives and perfectionists can be the most successful people in our society. Their vision, drive and commitment to excellence pushes them to achieve things that Joe Bloggs just wouldn’t attempt. But taken to extremes, such behaviour can be punishing, primarily of themselves.

In the social media work culture too, you can get so mesmerised by the endless possibilities that, day after day, you push yourself to do more and more. But if it’s not supported by appropriate rest and revitalisation, that passion isn’t limitless and can burn out.

As I was starting to get a taste of a few weeks ago.

I’d really love to hear what you make of this. In what ways can you get caught up in the enthusiasm of social media? How do you draw the line for yourself and enjoy the best of social media?