We’ve all experienced Grumpy Cat; that person who comes into a meeting or a workshop, seemingly set on bringing everyone else down, blasting any suggestion that might offer the potential for positive change. They often cloak their intentions in notions of ‘being realistic,’ or by regular references to health and safety legislation, or funding requirements. But whatever they call it, the effects are often the same: they suck the life out of the room. What’s the best response in these situations?
I’ve done work with a few different organisations lately, in which Grumpy Cat has made an appearance in meetings or workshops. Grumpy Cat takes different forms in different offices, but his or her (usually his) demeanour sets him or her (usually him) apart from colleagues; Grumpy Cat doesn’t smile, Grumpy Cat doesn’t get excited, Grumpy Cat always has a problem with something.
Now I’m reluctant to label someone as ‘negative’ – I think it is an incredibly loaded term which is regularly used within organisations to silence internal critics and avoid dealing with a critical issue (much like calling someone ‘unprofessional’). I’ve been the ‘negative’ one before, because I was the only person in a group who was regularly willing to highlight subtle forms of discrimination, or point out that something the organisation had long done just wasn’t working.
So I have a lot of empathy for a certain kind of person who tends to receive the ‘negative’ label. But I try to distinguish between ‘negativity’ that is critical of the way things are being done in the present (where they may be doing activeharm), and negativity to any ideas of change which at least offer the potential to make an existing problem better.
Even beyond that, I am split in terms of how to best respond when there seems to be the latter kind of negativity in the room. Grumpy Cat may be grumpy for a whole range of reasons, and each probably call for a different kind of intervention. For example:
1) If Grumpy Cat is unhappy or even depressed in life, generally, and their way of engaging is one facet of that unhappiness, how can a facilitator or colleague support Grumpy Cat?
2) If Grumpy Cat is angry at their organisation, but hasn’t found a constructive way of handling it, how can their specific frustrations be raised or addressed?
3) If Grumpy Cat is used to being the person who looks for anything that could go wrong – a common trait in management due to hierarchical accountability structures – how can we help them come into group settings with a different attitude?
However, if the result of any of the above is that Grumpy Cat is actively, if subconsciously, blocking positive changes (thus propping-up the status quo), is it fair to not call that out and hold Grumpy Cat accountable for preventing much-needed progress? A certain form of politeness can allow Grumpy Cat to keep something destructive going, simply by constantly reiterating the impossibility of the change that is needed, through comments about ‘being realistic’ and the like.
Ultimately, I find the balancing act lies in finding empathy with Grumpy Cat, without letting Grumpy Cat ruin the work others are trying to do to bring about change. This could mean having a one-to-one chat with them during a break, to either see if you can get a sense of where they’re coming from, or to highlight the impacts of their attitudes on others. More generally, I often introduce the (cheesy but effective) ‘Yes-And’ over ‘No-But’ approach when starting a session. This forces people to avoid responding to any new idea with dismissal (highlighting ‘why it wouldn’t work’), instead encouraging them to improve on the new idea (‘what could make it work?’).
I’m keen to hear your own thoughts on this, as I’m sure we’ve all sat in a workshop, training course, or meeting with Grumpy Cat before, whether we’ve done so as a facilitator or a fellow participant… Any tips or thoughts are greatly appreciated!
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I wrote a book called Anarchists in the Boardroom: How social media and social movements can help your organisation to be more like people. You can order it here.
In science, fields are the in-between forces that are only visible through their impact. Gravity, for example, cannot be seen or measured, yet we experience its manifestations throughout our lives.
Wheatley applies the same thinking to organisational culture; it affects us, it shapes our experiences and our behaviours, but we can’t easily put a finger on what it is, beyond being confident that it definitely exists.
Reading Wheatley’s framing of culture left me thinking; while we might not be able to see or touch gravity, we have found ways to shift it through technology, and we know it is different in different settings. By extending the metaphor, what does this mean for the ‘field’ of workplace culture?
Here is a starting point; what do you think?
You are sitting at your desk. Your colleague two desks away is being served an uncalled-for quantity of verbal abuse by their manager.
It’s uncomfortable. This discomfort is creating, undermining, or reinforcing your understanding of your workplace culture, depending on your experiences there before the incident.
The next day the same thing happens again. Your perceptions this time are either reinforced, or further undermined.
The kicker? Your behaviour is now most likely being shaped by what you have experienced. You might be a little less open, a little more defensive, slightly less comfortable with the time you spend at the office…
And today you are also sitting beside a new colleague. This is the first time they have played witness to the bullying dynamic, but not only do they see the bully-bullied pair, but also anyone else in the office not standing up for the one being treated unfairly.
This shapes their perception of the situation, as it did yours, which in turn shapes how they engage with their new workplace.
Their perception may well be that much worse than yours, because they have not only witnessed the toxic act of workplace bullying, but also the failure of their new colleagues to say anything against what had happened.
Through each of these experiences, a field is emerging; it is a field of mistrust, guardedness, pragmatic calculation, formed on the basis of both the acts of the manager and corresponding thoughts and reactions of others, which have a strong tendency to reinforce one another, if not consciously challenged.
Protecting ourselves… at the organisation’s expense
While your (or my) response to the initial bullying makes perfect sense at the level of protecting oneself, it also plays to reinforce the field that is taking shape around us. When we ignore or avoid, we are in fact complimenting and reinforcing the negative dynamic through our complicity. In failing to constructively support our colleague, we complicity contribute to the further deterioration of the field that is our organisation’s culture.
But enough of the bad stuff!
So what would the alternative look like? What can we do to shift the field of ‘organisational culture’, to create a workplace where people are happy, enjoy their time together and create good things in the process?
In my experience, it starts with being conscious of ourselves. If we agree that both our perceptions and our actions play a role in shaping the culture around us, what could we do to move it in a positive direction?
The challenge, of course, at the individual level then, is how we can become more aware of our own influences on the field of organisational culture, to help shift it in a way that improves everyone’s (including our own) experience.
Projections and Perceptions
In the example above, I described how the bullying manager was projecting certain behaviours into the organisational culture field, and how we, as onlookers in the office were both perceiving them, and then acting differently as a result of them. We’ll call this the ‘Projection-Perception Loop’; the system through which behaviour is enacted by one person, interpreted by the second person, and then (often) re-enacted by the second person, creating a cycle that can be either good or bad.
So what happens if we shift our input?
What if we were more aware of the ways we responded when people treated us or others like crap at the office? What if, instead of retreating, or attacking back, we simply started to engage differently?
In destructive situations, we often revert to the old ‘fight or flight’, ‘silence or violence’ dichotomy, but can we be conscious in those moments and find a less destructive ‘third way’? Can we focus on the positive relationships that are there at the office, the elements we enjoy more, rather than giving more attention to the parts of the organisational culture field that we don’t like? Can we improve trust amongst our colleagues by sharing more openly with them, making ourselves a bit vulnerable?
Accepting some responsibility… and thus some credit?
There’s nothing easy about this level of change; it usually involves re-evaluating some very deep gut responses to situations we don’t feel any responsibility for creating.
But if we acknowledge that we have played some small role in making the environment as toxic as we have experienced it can be, can we also take credit for acting differently and thus not perpetuating the cycle again?
Like the old parenting mantra reiterated through generations to the fighting young boys who both claim that the other ‘started it!’, ‘it’s not about who started it, but who finishes it.’
What steps can we take or have you taken to break a bad cycle that has helped grow a destructive organisational culture?
Have you experienced destructive cycles in any other relationships in your life that you’ve been able to shift the patterns around?
What are some of the defining traits when you have experienced a positive ‘field’ of organisational culture?
If we seem to know we do better when we aren’t just being told what to do, why do we keep telling each other what to do? Wouldn’t a supportive atmosphere be a more effective way of getting things done? Many of us have seen this work in learning environments, why not learn from it in working environments?
A few years ago I was running community training courses fairly regularly. At some stage, I had a realisation that many before me had also had: that people seemed to learn the best when they were doing stuff, not me.
Thus, I began to embrace the art of facilitation: how much can you help a group of people walk down a path they’ve never been, without giving them the directions? What combinations of well-timed, targeted questions, suggestions and anecdotes, will enable people to learn what you (broadly) want them to learn, in the way that they want to learn it (and ideally remember it)?
Old news
The same debate I was having with myself had been had many times previously and had led to some fairly significant shifts in non-classroom-based learning, as well as numerous alternative school movements. The move was away from the concept of a single expert, putting lots of information into the heads of their less-qualified pupils, towards one where everyone played a part – not only because we all remember better when we do, but also from a firm belief that we all have something to contribute, given our unique experiences.
Like so many things, some old Chinese folks seemed to have figured this out many centuries before myself, or the countless ‘radicals’ who gradually started to see the problems with traditional training/teaching in the 1960s and ‘70s:
“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
Several hundred years later, some of us in the West realised they were probably right. Sadly, many of our learning institutions are still clinging to a perceived supremacy of the old ways…
Facilitating organisations?
Yesterday I was reading about some ‘radical’ management ideas… many of which seemed to echo this thinking from the world of education, namely, that people do things better when they are given the chance to do them themselves and that people from all ‘levels’ of an organisation have contributions to make at all levels of that organisation… (if ‘levels’ are even an appropriate form of organisation in their own right…)
“We have this obsession with ‘leadership’. It’s maybe intended to empower people, but its effect is to disempower them. By focusing on the individual, even in the context of others, leadership can undermine a service of community… When [former IBM CEO Gerstner] heard of the initiative [to get the company into E-business, from a programmer], he encouraged it. That’s all. Instead of setting the direction, he supported the direction setting of others… What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert.” [Leadership and Communityship, Henry Mintzberg, Financial Times, October 23 2006]
“When social innovations take flight… the innovators are influencing their context while their context is influencing them in an endless to and fro. Decisions are made, actions are taken but it is not always clear how they came about. There is a wonderful sense of collective ownership: all who are involved feel this is their project, their cause, their time to change the world. [Getting to maybe: How the world is changed, Frances Westley et al, Vintage Canada, 2006]
“Most of our programmes are based on the notion of giving employees control over their own lives. In a word, we hire adults, and then we treat them like adults… Outside the factory, workers are men and women who elect governments, serve in the army, lead community projects, raise and educate families… but the moment they walk into the factory, the company transforms them into adolescents. They have to wear badges and name tags, arrive at a certain time, stand in line to punch the clock…” [Managing without Managers, Ricardo Semler, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1989]
‘Is facilitation the new management?’
Trendy buzzword headlines aside, I can’t help but notice an emerging pattern here towards a more facilitatory approach…
What if, instead of managing organisations, we facilitated them?
While, as others suggested when I put this idea on Twitter yesterday, I’m not keen to create new jargon, I do think ‘facilitation’ provides an understanding of getting things done in group dynamics that is fundamentally different from most of that which we have dubbed ‘management’ in recent centuries.
But rather than provide more quotes from my endless reading into the geeky world that is management philosophy, in the spirit of this post, I’d be keen to hear yours;
Is the facilitation/management distinction a useful or counterproductive one?
Have you been involved in something you might describe as facilitation in a workplace?
Did you feel there was practical value in this approach?
Did it create unexpected problems for anyone involved in the process?
How would you aim to convince someone who practiced ‘traditional management’, that there was a better alternative in facilitation (whether calling it that or not)?
Anything else you might have thought of while reading this?
On September 14th, I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Home Office, as part of NCVO Forum for Change’s voluntary/public sector work shadowing exchange. As someone who spends a lot of time critiquing bureaucracy, but without any personal experience of the civil service, it seemed like a great chance to learn how much of the urban mythology about the public sector was an accurate reflection, and how much was the stuff of a previous era, not yet cleansed from the collective memory.
Those who know me wouldn’t expect to find me wandering around a government department, yet, on September 14th, I was given the chance to meet seven Home Office staff members (and one local authority ‘secondee’), from a range of teams, and at least a few different salary grades. Much credit goes to my hostess, for her excellent work arranging a busy schedule to give me a sense of what the Home Office looked like from several internal perspectives.
What I’ve been trying to determine ever since, is how the good people I met, are able to be part of an institution which creates so much ugliness. Whether in the form of policing of activism, criminalising young people, or indirectly promoting racism via immigration policies, the people I met did not seem like the kinds of people that would make these sorts of things happen.
What I did notice, however, (with the notable exceptions of a colleague from the Neighbourhood Policing Team/ Policing Reform Unit, and a seconded Oldham council staff person) was a distinct disconnect between action and reaction, or the work that was being done, and the impacts that were happening, as a result, in the real world. Which is what I want to start picking apart…
Disconnected?
This revelation is probably unsurprising to most. It is one of the hallmarks of the urban mythology surrounding the civil service, but may, I realise, be deeply offensive (for which I apologise) to many of the people I met, who felt confident that their work was good, honest, fair, but still, whose outcomes were often still anything but…
So how does this disconnect occur? How do those assembling the bomb get the impression their individual efforts are part of a collective good, when outsiders can clearly see the destructive effects of these efforts?
What follows are a few observations and my interpretations of them. They may or may not have value, but thought they would be worth putting out, for the sake of discussion…
‘Collective ego’
Though there was little sense of individual egos at play in my conversations, there seemed to be an overarching collective one present. This seems a contradiction of terms, but what I mean is, though those I met did nothing to unduly elevate themselves as people, there was an unwavering sense of the Department’s collective ‘correctness’ in effectively addressing complex national issues, even when responses to those issues clearly shifted with political currents (and recently, parties). Was there a sense that ID cards were ‘correct’ under Labour, but then ‘incorrect’ under the Coalition? What might be framed as ‘learning’ within the departmental context, appeared to be nothing more than a collective rationalisation (always backed by a detailed evidence base) of a different political perspective.
Who asks the questions?
So it did not seem to come across as a drastic shift when a previous Minister asked the Department’s researchers and policy analysts “What are the economic benefits migrant workers bring to the UK?”, and then their successor asked “What is the appropriate level for an immigration cap?” Each of these questions encompasses a political attitude (built on certain assumptions), meaning the results will invariably reinforce that attitude, no matter how ‘objective’ the research and policy defining them are able to be. The answers produced can only be as varied as the constraints posed by the facilitating questions. So if you’re asked the question about the migration cap, your research will focus on the pros-and-cons of different migration caps, rather than the inherent value of a migration cap, more generally.
Finding value in our work…
This gives those in the Office the fair sense that their work is not about simply justifying a political perspective, as within the question posed, they have honestly tested each of the possible answers, without bias. This provides a sense of meaning, which is something all of us seek in our work. Working in restaurants for several years as a means of funding my community work and music in Canada (which gave my time behind the bar a sense of purpose), I met career bartenders who had been able to ‘give meaning’ to the order in which drink mixes were arranged in a bar fridge. This made no sense to those of us passing through the jobs, but provided a sense of meaning to those who had made a career of serving drinks and needed to give their efforts a sense of importance to be able to justify the time they spent there. Which ties into the next idea…
‘Horizons’
The Home Office, from Wiki Visuals
My colleague Paul Barasi described this concept (as he does so many things) like a game of chess: If you look at your next two moves, you can give yourself the impression of a likely victory, even if you are in fact setting yourself up for a checkmate on the third move. Most of the legwork at the Home Office (like most larger institutions) is carried out by people a reasonable distance from those asking the types of framing questions listed above, therefore individual’s ‘horizons’ are generally set not with the endpoint of a policy or law in mind, but with the point to which their manager takes responsibility for the actions (finalising a data set, writing interview questions, getting a report approved, etc). The ‘horizons’ of the job then, allow individuals to work towards what they feel is a positive ‘endpoint’ (ensuring a good report is produced), without questioning either the justification for that ‘endpoint’, or where it might go next (i.e. – the impact of the report, on a law, on peoples’ lives).
These limited ‘horizons’ disconnect the personal actions from the collective result – distancing the she or he doing the deed, from some element of responsibility for the real world impact. This applies to both positive and negative responsibility; the former in relation to the lost sense of ‘credit’ described by Marx’s ‘Alienation of Labour’, the latter as described in Mark Akbar’s ‘The Corporation’ as how corporate board members avoid personal guilt for their company’s crimes.
…So when the (party-political) Prime Minister says: “We want British jobs for British people.”
…Then the (party-political) Minister says: “We need an immigration cap to ensure British jobs go to British people.”
…And the (‘party-neutral’) Chief Economist says: “What is an appropriate immigration cap to ensure there are enough job vacancies for all unemployed British citizens?”
…And the (‘party-neutral’) Senior Economic Researcher says: “How many less immigrants do we need next year to ensure unemployed British citizens will be able to fill upcoming job vacancies?”
…And horizons’ of the person attached to each descending salary grade are reduced accordingly, along with a personal sense of either credit or accountability for their actions.
An offer?
On an issue where I’ve had some experience (youth gang violence), I offered my opinions and the potential to continue the conversation in more detail another time, or to put the department in touch directly with people I know with more firsthand experience of such concerns. In this situation I was dismissed (I have since sent a follow-up email and will add a comment to this piece if I get a reply), seemingly without thought on what, say, local activists dealing with youth violence might think about the Home Office’s attempts to curb knife crime.
This felt (very aware of the subjectivity here) that they had all the knowledge they needed, in-house, and weren’t interested in involving people from the outside in these discussions, even though I saw minimal evidence of in-depth engagement with community perspectives on this crucial concern.
When I brought up a meeting I facilitated three years ago, in which sixteen London community leaders (early-twenties-to-early-fifties, and all black) involved in youth violence issues agreed unanimously that government wanted to impede effective youth programmes, to keep their communities oppressed, they seemed to have never come across this level of cynicism before. When I challenged them on how significant that mistrust was, to getting honest information and building partnerships, it was not seen as something that needed to be actively addressed.
Expertise?
The emphasis in expertise (perhaps this was more a reflection of the people I met?) was very disproportionately economic. As Dougald Hine picks apart, when seen in isolation (from the social, the cultural, the political, the spiritual, etc) economics can provide a very damaging understanding of the world, which is able to justify a range of activities as ‘positive’ (due to their economic benefits), when any more holistic lens would see the inherently negative consequences of, say, (as Dougald highlights) the industrial revolution on British workers.
Further, as Henry Mintzberg describes in ‘The Soft Underbelly of Hard Data’, the ‘hard science’ of economic measurement can often be based on limited information and a series of assumptions:
“Something is always lost in the process of quantification… As Eli Devons (1950:Ch. 7) described in his fascinating account of planning for British aircraft production during World War II, ‘despite the arbitrary assumptions made’ in the collection of some data, ‘once a figure was put forward… it soon become accepted as the “agreed figure”, since no one was able by rational argument to demonstrate that it was wrong… And once the figures were called “statistics”, they acquired the authority and sanctity of Holy Writ’ (155).” [Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, The Free Press, 1994]
While there remain innumerable ‘experts’ on a range of Home Office related issues in neighbourhoods across the country, there seemed to be little interest in hearing from these people and having them play a part in shaping the policies that are likely to affect them. I made several offers to help bridge these worlds, but felt largely ignored. If that comes across as bitter, it’s probably because it is – not for my own dismissal, but for the rejection of people I know who have experienced youth violence and racist policing first hand, but who have remained marginalised from the discussions that will invariably affect their lives.
Maybe this is all unfair
This may all be unfair on my part. I spent one day there with no previous experiences of the civil service. I have attempted to understand my experience there, in the context of my own thinking around organisations and human behaviour, though claim that in no way these represent truths – just the explanations I (at this point) feel make the most sense of these things. I’d been keen to hear the thoughts (by name, or anonymously) of those who have spent more time in Whitehall, past or present, and if any of these ideas resonate, or if I’ve simply drawn far too much from a very limited experience…
We write-off good ideas when they seem too far removed from our current realities. Unable to immediately comprehend the practicalities of such drastic shifts, we categorise the good idea as ‘impossible’ – and discredit it. But if we don’t start to challenge the seemingly impossible problems we face in the world, how will we ever move beyond them? On this note, what if trust was realised in every aspect of the voluntary sector?
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Following on from my blog on Paul Story and ‘The Honesty Edition’, there were loads of comments, Tweets and real-world conversations that made me want to follow-up on the idea of applying ‘trust’ to a range of voluntary sector activities/processes. Namely, in relation to funding, people said things to the effect of: “a funding relationship will never be trusting, because there’s money involved”. This drew me to one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite books: “Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed”:
“Change—surprising and sometimes radical change—does happen. The world does turn on its head every once in a while. And what seemed almost impossible looking forward seems almost inevitable look back.” (Getting to Maybe, viii)
With this quote in mind, please indulge in the possibly Utopic fantasy which follows.
The Trusting Place
Once upon a time, there was a distinct space that existed between the greedy hedonism of the private sector, and the soulless bureaucracy of government. This space was known as ‘the trusting place’ and was built-on an entirely different set of values than those of its counterparts; a place where trust was at the core of how and why people did what they did…
…I’ll skip the fairy tale hyperbole… But let’s think for a minute about what some of our sector’s relationships might look like if they were based on trust (rather than a range of contractual compliance measures)… All I ask is that rather than going to the knee-jerk ‘that won’t work because…’ response, take a minute to think about how much better than the realities you are used to dealing with, these options would be. If we can collectively acknowledge that there could be significant gains made (reaching new people, improving staff morale, discovering new social solutions, etc) from placing a higher premium on trust in our work, *maybe* then we can start to get passed some of the obstacles that have kept it from happening thus far…
Staff
What if managers and the staff they managed got to hold each other accountable on a range of mutually-agreed aims and objectives, rather than this process-happening in one-direction?
What if we felt we could admit our mistakes, shortcomings and poor judgment calls to those above and below us, without fear of some kind of retribution, backstabbing or disciplinary?
What if we only addressed problems as they arose, with the people involved, rather than filling reams of paper with ‘what to do in case of worst-case scenario’ policies?
Funders
What if funders and organisations saw themselves as partners, aiming to openly learn from their respective experiences and achieve social change together?
What if organisations were supported to trial some new ideas before throwing all of their efforts into one approach, helping learn what really works before deeply investing?
What if funders and trustees supported innovation and the kinds of (often risky) practices that foster it, rather than requiring a predetermined outcome and stressing heavy-handed accountability messages?
Volunteers
What if people who wanted to help a good cause could just show up and be put to work?
What if organisations encouraged volunteers to take-on high-level roles or define their own roles, rather than simply offering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ voluntary position?
What if volunteers made collective decisions on the issues that affect them, rather than having them imposed by management or trustees?
This is clearly a polemic piece…
Some larger voluntary organisations have broken through some of these barriers effectively, and many have not. My instinct is that if a big organisation (and their relevant funders) could put this whole picture into action, the gains would be truly immense.
We assume the need to be ‘professional’ in the voluntary sector, but are our concepts of professionalism outdated, unfulfilling and ultimately unproductive in achieving the impacts we are here to achieve? Instead of a ‘professionalism’ that wedges a gap between who we really are and the role we play at work, what would enable us to ‘take off our masks’ and build work places that are ‘More Like People’?
“You must learn to always be professional. Never lose your temper, never cry, never get impatient, never get upset, never show your weakness. If you are caving under pressure, run to the bathroom. …by being emotional, you are making yourself a liability. No one wants to keep people who are flakey or break under pressure. The corporate world wants people of steel.”
This may be a somewhat extreme example, but the essence of this excerpt can be found in countless watered-down versions by Googling the phrase: “how to be professional at work”. Even in the voluntary and community sectors, we are increasingly used to a singular definition of professionalism, one that may have felt initially alien to us, but which we‘ve become increasingly accustomed to during our working lives. Unfortunately, the old rules of thumb around how one should behave in a working environment often have significant negative repercussions, fostering tension between colleagues and erecting barriers between the ‘professionals’ and those an organisation exists to support.
Tips on ‘professionalism’ from corporate consultants and bloggers often include:
How to dress (‘business casual’, ‘formal’)
How to speak (Queen’s English)
Dining and drinking etiquette (table manners, ‘who pays’)
I recently heard Jon Rouse, Chief Executive of Croydon Council describe these kinds of ‘tips’ as the basis of ‘the Cult of Professionalism’. This ‘cult’, he said, is guided by an incredibly narrow set of mostly unspoken norms, which strip away some of the core principles that make us human; traits like empathy, emotion, individualism and opinion. While becoming ‘professional’, we separate ourselves from the vast majority of other people in the world, behaving – and often thinking (while at work, at least) – in ways that seem unimaginable and often highly suspect, to people who exist outside of this constructed reality. But unlike the cults of Scientology or Freemasonry, membership in the Cult of Professionalism is often fluid – a membership which many of us will pass in-and-out of at different times in our working lives, rather than committing to permanently.
Essentially though, this model of ‘professionalism’ pushes those who accept it to compartmentalise their lives (to varying degrees), to fit its rigid criteria. ‘From nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday, I am a ‘professional’. During evenings and weekends, I might be a new father, a scout leader, a revolutionary Marxist, an alcoholic, a BNP member, a choir leader, a beekeeper…’.
Some of these roles, we might say, are clearly best left outside of the workplace. However, like a pressure cooker, if we try to create false partitions between parts of our lives for too long, they will eventually boil-over into one-another. For example:
Closeted racism may slip into hiring practices;
Problems in a personal relationship may start to taint interactions with colleagues;
Nights spent awake with a crying baby may make it harder to focus on work.
Or more positively:
Previous experience in a gang may give new insights into staff motivation and management;
Being a parent of teenagers may provide an awareness of the attitudes of younger staff;
A mate might be able to help with a piece of work that the team has been stuck on for some time…
So I would argue that ‘siloing’ ourselves (‘the professional’ and ‘everything else in our lives’) is neither sustainable, nor desirable. The loss of basic human characteristics that so often occurs when we allow only a limited piece of ourselves to show over a significant period of time can limit or damage the relationships we are able to build in our working lives. And whether in the corporate world, or that of palliative care, good relationships are increasingly recognised as crucial to (relative) success in the workplace.
But such things only happen in the corporate world!
Though the Cult tends to be most associated with the civil service and the financial sector, one does not have to look far to see the growing prevalence of corporate influence in civil society organisations. Whether as ‘value for money’ audits (as opposed to value for impact), public contract culture (‘we’ve got to compete with bids by private companies’), or Social Return on Investment (and its attempts to convert human stories into cash sums), there are many examples of the values which have traditionally underpinned our sector, being subtly undermined by more bottom-line-orientated approaches.
As may have been expected, the cultures associated with those practices in the private sector have gradually begun to foment themselves in the working cultures of various larger voluntary organisations. This is clearly more immediately problematic when staff are engaging with victims of abuse or ex-offenders, than if they are simply trading stocks in the City. Impersonal and sterile policies against ‘hugging’, ‘personal relationships in the workplace’ and a range of other basically human activities, send a clear message that the ‘professionalism’ an employer desires, is one which checks many of your personal characteristics at the door; not all that far from the quotation I begun the blog with…
So what do we do about it?
This is not an easy one and I don’t pretend to have clear answers, as our entrenched attitudes are not easily re-shaped. That said I have a couple of ideas that might be worth thinking about if you’ve experienced some of these issues in your organisation.
Push the professional comfort zone Most of us would find it much harder to be ‘professional’ (in the narrowest sense) if our regular working environment was radically changed. Jon Rouse at Croydon Council implemented such a change via direct interactions between senior council officers and local people who had felt hurt or oppressed by the council services they had received. This was not to necessarily validate every negative experience as a fair indictment of the council, but to give people who rarely saw the frontline impacts of their decisions, a first-hand glimpse into what it would have felt like to have a child taken into care, or to be unable to visit a loved-one while they were in the hospital. The officers were not there to defend the choices made by the council, only to better understand the feelings of those on the other end of those choices – encouraging a sense of empathy with their experiences. Rouse described the process as intensely emotional for many, but one which shifted the perspectives of many of those from the council who were involved, helping them to better appreciate the difficulties social services could unwittingly create in people’s lives, and how these might be mitigated from the policy level. It’s hard to maintain a narrowly professional persona, when confronted directly with firsthand human suffering, especially if there’s even a minute possibility that something you did or didn’t do, may have played some role in allowing that suffering to happen.
Trust staff’ judgment – don’t always try to regulate it I just read an advice piece in Third Sector on dealing with staff who are in relationships together. It was based on the premise that something bad would probably happen as a result of a romantic relationship and that a policy for such matters was needed… Wait! A policy? To prevent heartbreak? To tell staff not to let their heartbreak show at work? To tell them not to have personal feelings for colleagues at all? There’s no question that there can sometimes be messy elements to workplace relationships, but nothing you can regulate will prevent these from occurring. With that said, most of the time they don’t, but our responses often assume the worst before having reason to do so. Why not congratulate them on their happiness and address any issues individually, if they do happen to become issues?
This ties into some fairly key ideas of human institutions, challenging the assumption of the worst (‘left unregulated, people will do wrong’) that often underpins organisational planning efforts and policies. Regulation should be a last-resort, rather than a knee-jerk response to organisational dilemmas. Humans are remarkable when it comes to addressing issues as they arise!
Make yourself a bit vulnerable I have only gut-instinct and a limited mix of personal and professional experiences on which to base this, but feel strongly that ‘conscious vulnerability’ is an important step to breaking-through the ‘Cult of Professionalism’.
As we’re rarely used to expressing anything resembling emotion in the workplace, this is a difficult challenge for most of us, especially as working relationships can be subtly competitive, or even adversarial. In this context, becoming consciously vulnerable can feel like a death sentence, however, it may be the olive branch that begins to shift a working culture towards something more genuinely mutually beneficial. There’s no guarantee of success, and a bad experience may not be an easy one, but without risk, we omit the possibility of change…
Conscious vulnerability breeds trust, through the implicit acknowledgment that you have given someone the opportunity to hurt you, on the assumption they won’t. So if you ask for the help of someone of a lower rank, but with particularly relevant experience, or admit that a decision you made was a mistake, it may start to change the ways people relate to you and to each other. By modelling little changes and demonstrating trust in those you work with, it may very well encourage others to follow suit.
When we cut-off our own emotions (conforming to the spoken-and-unspoken expectations of the Cult), we often simultaneously limit our ability to empathise with the emotions of others. Empathy is another key idea in my human institutions work, and one that Jeremy Rifkin talks about in the context of “re-thinking our institutions in society to prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilisation”. A bit abstract, I know, but an important bit of grounding for some of the bigger picture changes that our collective behaviours can gradually start to shape…
“Push the professional comfort zone,
Trust staff judgement,
Make yourself a bit vulnerable”
Have you broken free of the Cult?
As mentioned earlier, membership in the Cult of Professionalism is far from all-encompassing and elicits different commitment from each of us at different times. Very few people bring the Cult into every aspect of their lives, as we would immediately find it limiting to our ability to form meaningful relationships and get any real sense of satisfaction from the world. But many of us, understandably, take on bits of it, as it suits us, when we are in a working environment where it is the norm. Sometimes it’s easier to refer a member or client to a policy, rather than unpick the details of their concern; sometimes admitting we don’t know something might seem to jeopardise our job or reputation; sometimes the issues we face in voluntary and community sector can feel too difficult to acknowledge our own feelings about…
So I’d really like to hear about when you have:
Been able to model an alternative
Bucked the office trend and acted in a way that truly expressed empathy with either your colleagues or those your organisation exists to serve
Openly admitted your weaknesses to those you work with
Refused to use a new bit of in-crowd jargon
Given honest (if unpopular) opinions to managers
Allowed yourself to ‘just be yourself’ at work
As this blog is very much ‘thinking-in-progress’, I’m keen to hear people’s views on this. Collectively, we might be able to develop some alternatives to this debilitating notion of what it means to be a professional…
More Like People is an association of freelance consultants, facilitators and trainers, working primarily in the voluntary, community and campaigning sectors in the the UK and elsewhere.
I’ve done work with a few different organisations lately, in which Grumpy Cat has made an appearance in meetings or workshops. Grumpy Cat takes different forms in different offices, but his or her (usually his) demeanour sets him or her (usually him) apart from colleagues; Grumpy Cat doesn’t smile, Grumpy Cat doesn’t get excited, Grumpy Cat always has a problem with something.
Margaret Wheatley, in 
Those who know me wouldn’t expect to find me wandering around a government department, yet, on September 14th, I was given the chance to meet seven Home Office staff members (and one local authority ‘secondee’), from a range of teams, and at least a few different salary grades. Much credit goes to my hostess, for her excellent work arranging a busy schedule to give me a sense of what the Home Office looked like from several internal perspectives.
