You Will Be Compromised…
- tom12973
- Jul 19, 2017
- 3 min read
I have worked in and with organizations for 40 years now (wow, time does fly)! Over that time there have been numerous times where I felt like I was doing something that just ‘didn’t feel right’; for me.
For example, going back to the scenario I began these posts with, the ice cream plant, you may recall we ended up doing a budget based on the assumption of hot weather. When that didn’t occur we ended up in a position of having to lay people off for a period of time. Some of those laid off were high seniority people who had never been laid off before. I was a new supervisor so now a member of ‘management’ in this unionized environment. I would not be among those laid off. I had come from that unionized environment so a year earlier I would have been laid off as well.
I can still clearly remember having to go around the plant floor and hand out layoff notices to people I knew well. It did not feel right; for me. I felt like I was doing something that compromised me in some way, even though it was perfectly acceptable and even expected in this organizational scenario.
That was about 37 years ago and since that time I have not met a single person who does not have their own personal story, similar in some fashion to mine.
Does this make us bad people? Not strong enough to live up to our personal standards or values? Does it make organizations demons simply waiting to make us feel lousy?
I choose to look at it this way. As I have noted in previous posts there is a fundamental difference in the purpose of organizations and the purpose of people:
The purpose of an organization is to be a viable economic entity.
The purpose of a person is to express identity.
It is this fundamental difference in purpose that makes personal compromise inevitable in our organizational lives. I would say that for me, most of these compromises don’t make me a bad person or ethically weak. It is simply part of the economic game that is the purpose of organizations and for most of us we need to play this economic game.
So it is not helpful to participate in organizational life, blaming organizations for having a purpose that is quite different from us as people. It is also not helpful to heap guilt or shame on ourselves for feeling compromised; it is inevitable.
But the reason these things are not helpful is that they become distractions, perhaps even unconscious or convenient distractions from recognizing, reflecting on, and trying to change things that ARE more serious compromises.
In light of having to distribute those layoff notices it was quite easy for me to think that this is just what being in an organization is when you don’t meet your budget and we all know that. It was part of my job to hand out these notices. I could easily forget that the cause of this was primarily the ridiculous and OUCH! filled budgeting process! Could I do anything about that? At the time, that question did not even cross my mind.
So while it is important not to blame the game for having the rules it does, and not blame ourselves for playing the game, it is just as important to really question the rules of this game we all play and try to change them when we think the compromises are important.
A lot of what these posts have been about, the OUCH! in our organizations are things that DO compromise people. Compromise people significantly, and for the most part we are willing participants in this compromise. And our left loop to deal with this compromise is to exist in environments that we have filled with blame, shame and guilt.
So again we find the need for balancing. Balancing the need to be gentle with ourselves as we participate in organizations that compromise us, and the need to be ferocious in our efforts to see and change the causes of those compromises.
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