How to enjoy organizational life
I asked a well liked and respected manager who had spent a lifetime of service in the humanitarian sector what his advice to younger colleagues would be. He was close to retirement and gave the impression of being a man who was at peace with himself and the world. He said that to find satisfaction in an organization it was necessary to give up 80% of your identity, and 80% of your personal preferences. I was surprised by the precision of his answer but touched by his sincerity and humility in sharing it with me.
As HR professionals we meet many people who have not achieved this kind of peace with their careers and who seem to experience organizational life as punishing and unfair to them in particular. In spite of this, they remain in the organization unable to make the adaptions necessary, perhaps, to make their working lives easier.
They do not achieve the delicate and fluid balance between their individual and organizational identities. Self awareness concerning what their needs are and what the organization can realistically provide them is low. It is as if they are ‘stuck’ in a position in which they are failed by the organization but feel powerless to do anything about it.
What helps
Gently asking people who appear ‘stuck’ and unhappy, at the right moment, why they choose to stay in the organization.
Asking what it is they liked about their job/ the organization/ their boss because at one moment they made some choices which had underlying positive motivations.
Connecting them with their own sense of agency by asking them to describe the way they achieved significant change at earlier stages of their career and life.
Resources
Gabriel, Y. Organizations In Depth, Sage Publications, (1999).
In the Chapter ‘Individual and Organization’ , Schwartz describes the ideal of the ‘civic individualist’ : ‘those who experience organizations as normative communities, involving a legitimate plurality of interests and points of view; they adopt the stance of citizens who contribute to a broad commonwealth, not because they have to but because they see the virtue of doing so; they can act altruistically without melodramatic self-sacrifices.’ Ah, if only we were all ‘civic individualists’!
