Organizational Life and Its Discontents
The human experience inside organizations is pushing us to the brink. It does not take much to peel back the curtain and see what organizational life is doing to us: making us at once more connected yet apart.
A good friend of mine recently quit her job, moved into a studio apartment and started a flower business because sitting in front of a computer each day, away from her young child, was sapping the humanness from her. She shared with me that she felt like Pavlov’s dog, hitting the keyboard on command. The meaning had drained out of her work. She left her well-paying job so she could take back control of her time, build a community and raise her child.
We desire to thrive and are no longer willing not to.
There is a shoving down of emotions in organizations. We are caught in systems that psychologically reinforce a shutting-down of our personal internal experiences. We forget that there is a difference between having an emotion and being emotional. We label emotions as bad and unproductive, something to be shunned rather than used as an entry point for learning.
Work really does feel overwhelming, emotionally lonely, and like repeated failure. People are struggling in an old-fashioned system that is no longer up to the task. Work moved from industrial era-efficiencies created through process, guidelines, and clarity, to a new way of working Peter Drucker dubbed “knowledge work.” We went from body work to thought work and have been stuck here since. Thinking for a living has gotten us pretty far into the era of advanced technologies, start-ups and profound possibilities.
While organizations may claim to value openness and the whole person, the experience inside is quite different. If you are a human being who knows what it feels like to be out of truth with yourself, playing a role and putting on a mask, then the stakes are even higher than damaging the company’s ability to come together to drive business results. You are actually losing yourself, despite the fact that being human can be a joyous journey.
A few years back, I started to see the most wise and steady people leaving my organization. They each reached a point where they felt they could do more good outside the organizational boundaries. They also could create a more integrated life, one where their internal experiences were valued just as much as their external outputs. Creating a more connected, fulfilling, and self-directed life started to outweigh any external rewards, to the point that leaving was eventually the only option. My own mentor and respected boss took this path. The high rate of burnout is a clear indication that we are at our edges of our internal resources is the increasing rate of burnout.
This got me wondering how organizations can retain those with deep perceptual ability, emotional regard and business acuity. More importantly though, how can we find ways to create a richer life overall?
Meanwhile there is a trend toward finding ways to flourish in a constant wave of disruption and the pressure cooker of expectations. Stanford even has a course called “Creating a Flourishing Life.” The good news here is that there is widespread desire for our lives to be more in balance, with a focus to create integration and wholeness.
Of course, meditation and other means of opening up are now normalized. Google itself has pioneered meditation in the corporate environment, at least for its ability to increase resilience and productivity. Michael Pollan’s book How to Change your Mind has gained popularity with the Silicon Valley set for the same reason. For me, a yoga practice has become a centerpiece of my life as I work in these ever-changing environments. Yoga is all about deepening one’s ability to notice subtleties in both the body and emotional states, and through the practice, I have seen gains in my ability to perceive problems in new ways and access composure and stability in the face of headwinds. It has been a way to embrace the naturally sensitive part of myself and to see its value clearly.
But all of these efforts can amount to little more than window-dressing if we’re unable to lean into some of the human capacities we have lost along the way, and jettison many of the old methods, models, frameworks and processes we used to find essential and profitable. There is an urgent need for us to rediscover who we are and what we are capable of becoming.
