The story so far:
Two receptions. A university starts a conversation about creating a happy, positive workplace and is ridiculed by staff and observers alike. A business magazine publishes an article suggesting employers thank employees for their work and an online leadership forum reacts with dismay and fury. Both audiences assume the employer is being false and manipulative, and is asking them to be false and manipulative too. What is going on here?
Here are some speculations.
I hear a couple of unexamined assumptions in the audiences’ reactions. The first assumption is that work is work and it’s not supposed to be enjoyable. The old Protestant/Calvinist streak is alive and well in our thinking here. We might have had “The Sixties”, to the faux despair of conservative or Tory politicians, but no matter how much love was free and how many bongs were smoked, they are a pimple on the bottom of an elephant in comparison to the depth and breadth of the Calvinist mindset and its commitment to joylessness.
The second assumption is that it’s not possible to enjoy work. Possibility can certainly occur like this. Damn infuriating! Talk to someone luxuriating in some beautiful, faithful misery of their own, suggest it could be different, and then see what happens. All I can say is you’d better watch your eyes. As for some poor schmuck who comes along and suggests it is possible, and, moreover, as in the case of the university, “we’d like you to do it”, well, the fury will be untrammelled.
This second assumption is starting to approach another factor, a deeper one, which may be what’s really running the show. It concerns the fear of blame, and the confusion about blame and responsibility.
We are enraged with the idea work may not have to be hard, disagreeable and coercive because it raises the spectre that our suffering may not be inevitable and this is a problem.
If our suffering is inevitable, then we can feel ourselves free from the fear of blame. Because it’s always blame, the premonition of blame, that’s lurking in our consciousness. Our Western culture is weaned and steeped in blame. We are all scarred with it almost from birth, and we will do anything to avoid it.
If, however, our suffering is not inevitable, well then that’s when things start to get tricky. If we were to admit the possibility that our suffering at work, our suffering in any sphere of life, were not inevitable, then a question would arise: who is responsible (or in the terms we’d hear it, who is to blame) for our suffering?
And then we may start to see, out of the corner of our eye, that we are there. We may start to see we bear responsibility for our lives and our experience in this moment, including our happiness and our suffering. Around the same time the stoppers in our ears, placed there by our own hand, might fall out and the call to give up blame and resentment and do something different might reach us at last.
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In summary, my theory is that we ridicule the idea it might be possible to be happy and satisfied at work because we prefer the prospect of our suffering to the prospect of taking responsibility. The former is familiar after all; we know how to play that game. The boss is the boss, and we are the bossed, and if each of us just plays our respective roles, the world will go on turning. We may be miserable, but we’ve survived this far, and we’ll continue to survive.
For many people, however, there comes a day when the bankruptness of this stance is no longer tolerable. On that day, an opportunity presents itself. The opportunity to be a leader. When that day comes for you, what will you choose? To be a whinger, or a leader?
***
Image: Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Vincent van Gogh
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