Don't Bring It to Work

Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success

Sylvia Lafair

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470496732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

How can you get to the bottom of workplace behaviors that simply don't work for you or your organization?

Don't Bring It to Work explores what happens when patterns originally created to cope with family conflicts are unleashed in the workplace.?This groundbreaking book draws on the success of Sylvia Lafair's PatternAware program Total Leadership Connections. Throughout the book she shows how to break the cycle of pattern repetition and offers the tools that can turn unhealthy family baggage into creative energy that will foster better workplace associations and career success.

Lafair identifies the thirteen most common patterns that correspond to characters familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an office: Super Achiever, Rebel, Persecutor, Victim, Rescuer, Clown, Martyr, Splitter, Procrastinator, Drama Queen or King, Pleaser, Denier, and Avoider. To help overcome destructive behavior problems, she maps out the three main steps for becoming aware of patterns and finding the way OUT:

• Observe your behavior to discern underlying patterns
• Understand and probe deeper to discover the origins of these patterns
• Transform your behavior by taking action to change

The book includes a wealth of real-life anecdotes and practical, workbook-style exercises that clearly show how anyone can get beyond old, outmoded attempts at conflict resolution and empower themselves to make profound differences both at work and in their personal lives.

PART ONE

THE HOME-WORK CONNECTION

CHAPTER ONE

RELATIONSHIPS AT WORK AND AT HOME

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.

—ANTHONY BRANDT

Few things seem more different than the worlds of work and home. We talk of “work-life balance” as if work and life were chunks of matter on opposite sides of a balance scale. We talk about “taking refuge” at home when work becomes stressful, and “losing ourselves in our work” when problems break out at home. Sometimes we don’t talk at all, as when we consciously limit how much we reveal about our private lives to our colleagues or bosses, and about our work challenges to our spouses or partners.

From the standpoint of relationships, though, work and home are not nearly as different as they seem. Work teams and families both constitute systems of relationships among individuals. There are important differences—for instance, you cannot choose your family, whereas you may be lucky enough to choose your work team. (Think about it for a moment: you can have “ex-bosses,” “ex-direct reports,” even “ex-spouses,” but you cannot have an “ex-mother,” only one you choose to steer clear of. Nor can you have an “ex-father,” only one you haven’t talked to in years.)

Families and work groups are structurally similar, and the day-to-day workings of both groups are fundamentally the same. It’s not surprising then that home and work relationships flow quite naturally into one another. Although we gain autonomy as we grow into adulthood, we don’t dispose of our old relationship systems. Rather, we layer a new web of relationships—those of our work team—on top of the original family system. Family was the place where we first learned how to exist in relation to others. It was our original organization. So it makes sense that we would repeat what we learned there in our new work systems. Unfortunately, very often the result is that the now outmoded family patterns we have never addressed flare up consistently and automatically in our professional lives.

A WORKPLACE SYSTEM THAT WASN’T WORKING

The underlying similarity between work and home is never as apparent as when problems knock on the office door. Consider the situation at Bellville, Inc., a Pennsylvania-based electronics company. The firm’s CEO, Martha Bellville, had a habit of making deals without considering what it would take for the firm to deliver on them. Content to regard herself as the dashing, high-flying entrepreneur, she left it to Barry Waldman, her COO and second in command, to make it all happen. Barry did what he could, yet the firm found itself in a constant state of crisis. Everyone was struggling to make good on Martha’s promises to customers while forever lacking the necessary infrastructure.

The need to keep up with Martha exacted an especially heavy toll on Barry. Week after week, he flew to San Francisco to attend to an ailing business unit. The head of this unit, Wanda, seemed determined to make a bad situation even worse. Although a competent manager, she was rebellious by nature and was reacting to the challenges facing the company by spreading rumors and refusing to follow company policies. As time passed, Barry became convinced that she needed to be fired. Yet when he tried to discuss the problem with Martha, she ignored him, saying that she was too busy, that it was his job to deal with the day-to-day operation of the business. Barry left these encounters with a sinking feeling in his stomach, aware on some level that he wasn’t addressing the real issues.

Barry hit an internal wall. He couldn’t figure out why he stayed with the status quo and felt helpless to change the situation. He continued cleaning up messes created by Wanda, yet he was never making any real headway. People around him were frustrated. Customers were furious about poor performance, pulling contracts from the firm. On the home front, Barry’s wife was complaining that he was never home and that his kids no longer knew him. Barry wanted to do the right thing, yet he was stuck and never seemed able to find the words to talk with his boss.

Consulting to Bellville, I realized quickly that the underlying structure of its leadership team resembled nothing so much as an ineffective family. It had the irresponsible parent (Martha), the rebellious sibling (Wanda), and the good sibling expected to pick up the pieces (Barry). Doing some digging, I learned that the relationship dynamic playing out in Bellville’s leadership team was actually more or less identical to that of Barry’s family. When Barry was growing up, his father was always working, and his mother kept busy organizing charity events. Barry’s younger brother was rebelling and getting into drugs, but every time Barry went to his mother, she made excuses for his brother and told Barry, “I’m sorry, dear, I have a meeting.” Barry spent his time keeping his brother out of trouble, and when Barry’s parents got divorced, he was saddled with even more responsibility, taking care of his functional, although quite troubled, brother.

I’ll say it again: families and work teams are not so different after all. Reflect on some of the families you know and then think hard about your work team. Don’t people in your work system play off each other the way people do in family systems? Don’t you yourself behave with certain colleagues the way you might with siblings or a parent or a child?

To improve the performance of any poorly functioning group, whether a family or a business team, you cannot simply focus on the behaviors of one or two apparent troublemakers. Nobody’s behavior exists independently of his or her interpersonal relationships . Therefore, you need to go beyond the level of the individual and examine the inner workings of the group using a systems approach. In business, just as it is in families, real, meaningful, profitable change is possible only if we start to see work teams not as a collection of disconnected parts but as living organisms that are unique and complex.

NOT YOU AND ME AND HE AND SHE, BUT WE

What is a system exactly? By one account, it is a “collection of parts . . . integrated to accomplish an overall process.” The key word here is “integrated”: systems are interactive; everything depends on everything else. For example, the way doctors and nurses behave in a hospital emergency room is a system. If the experienced head nurse calls in sick, all of a sudden the team starts working in a very different way. Take away the patients, and the system stops functioning altogether.¹

Systems are not just found among social groups like work teams or families. There are biological systems, such as the human body, food chains, and the planetary environment as a whole. There are also mechanical systems—an airplane or a dishwasher—and hybrid human-mechanical systems, such as a person typing at a computer. Local and national economies are highly complex, multidimensional systems, as are state bureaucracies, supply-chain arrangements in multinational corporations, and even large networks of friends on such Web sites as Facebook or MySpace or business networks like LinkedIn.

If systems are so prevalent, how come books about workplace issues seldom talk about them? The answer is that business is still largely shaped by analytic thinking, an intellectual orientation marked by a tendency to understand living things not by looking at the organic wholes that they are, but by separating them into their component parts. Since the Renaissance, Western thinkers have tended to break the world into stark opposites—good and bad, reason and emotion, public and private, and, of course, home and work. Such thinking has given rise to everything from the Industrial Revolution to the medical profession to the division of school days into discrete hour intervals. Ever notice that corporations are broken down into supposedly distinct functions (marketing, operations, finance, and so on), each of which is in turn broken down into its own subspecialties and competencies? That’s mechanistic thinking at work.

Most business leaders aren’t trained to think systemically, but rather in dichotomies or dualities. When problems occur, we resort to a predictable, analytic response: sort and judge, sort and judge, sort and judge. Often we put the spotlight on the situation or the task in question or on a specific “problem” person rather than on interactions or the larger system. And it’s not only business leaders who do this. Is crime a problem? Throw the drug dealers in jail, but don’t address the broken homes and urban blight that produced both them and their customers. Test scores down? Crack down on underperforming schools, but don’t address the larger picture, which includes stress placed on children in our fast-paced world.

Analytic thinking seems to be a natural way of understanding reality, but if you look at world civilizations, you encounter quite another orientation. Societies have for thousands of years paid homage to organisms, systems, and the connectedness of the universe. African, aboriginal Australian, and native American cultures have long taken for granted that it takes an entire community to raise a child. The ancient Chinese yin-yang symbol represents the connection of all things as a circle with dark and light segments, each containing a smaller circle of the other color to indicate that there is always some positive in the negative as well as some negative in the positive. Buddhist philosophy holds that there are no divisions and that we contain everything in the world within us. In Western society, systems thinking flourished prior to the Renaissance, showing up in the medieval idea of the “Great Chain of Being” that linked animals, humans, and the divine. Earlier still, Aristotle captured systems thinking in his famous saying, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”²

What does this have to do with the way you and I behave at work? Everything! After centuries of slumber, the older, systems-oriented mode of thinking has more recently been making a comeback in the West. During the early 1940s, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin argued that industrial societies needed to transform themselves by developing a more integrated, holistic, and systemic approach to the world—what he called “creative altruism.”³ In 1956, the Society for General Systems Research was established on the premise that all phenomena can be viewed as a web of relationships; that all systems—electrical, biological, or social—have common patterns, behaviors, and properties; and that studying and understanding connections rather than just focusing on isolated units yield a dynamic understanding of our complex world.⁴ During the 1960s, systems thinking began to enter into discussion about school reform. Open classrooms began to appear. Teams of teachers worked more fluidly with groups of youngsters of different ages, and the mechanistic conventional conveyor belt that moved students from grade to grade gave way to organic “pods” in which interest groups would learn together.⁵

Education has since fallen back on more regimented, analytic approaches, but systems orientations have begun to peek through in disciplines as diverse as physics, history, medical science, climatology, and yes, even business management. Physics has given us the butterfly effect, the notion that small variations in the initial conditions of a system (a butterfly flapping its wings) can lead to tremendous long-term changes in a system (the emergence of a tornado in a faraway place).⁶ Western medicine has seen the rise of cross-disciplines that look at the whole body, such as in complementary and preventive medicine. As newspaper headlines report almost daily, ecologists and climatologists have been hard at work charting the connections between seemingly unrelated things, such as carbon emissions in Indiana, urbanization in China, and melting glaciers in Antarctica.

In her book Leadership and the New Science, Margaret Wheatley encourages leaders to break down artificial boundaries and think more expansively and creatively; this is one of the first attempts (and there have only been a few) to apply systems thinking to organizations.⁷ Shoshana Zuboff’s book In the Age of the Smart Machine suggests that new choices can come about only by considering the interface of systems—historical, psychological, and organizational—as we include new technology in our lives.⁸ Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind explores the systemic requirements for leaders as we move into the “conceptual age”; he points out, “The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.”⁹

If you know to look for it, you can also find systems thinking percolating up in popular culture. In 1985, the music industry’s supergroup USA for Africa embraced a holistic, systems mind-set by releasing the song “We Are the World” in support of famine relief in Ethiopia. Since then we’ve seen any number of similar altruistic efforts, including Hands Across America (addressing hunger and homelessness) and Live Earth (global warming awareness). Systems thinking and the notion of seemingly disconnected events fitting together like pieces of a puzzle are also visible in such films as Academy Award-winning Crash (2005) and Babel (2007), which show the unfolding of apparently unrelated but linked stories. Of course, the emergence of social networking as the dominant force in Internet development has only just begun. And, most significant, systems thinking has as of this writing become virtually omnipresent in consumer culture, with global warming renewing popular environmental awareness, and companies responding by adopting sustainability practices and investing in corporate social responsibility initiatives—all in the interest of showing a heightened global consciousness.

FAMILIES AS SYSTEMS

As we’ve seen, systems thinking is turning out to have wide applications across fields of endeavor, and it has proved especially promising in helping us understand relationships between people. As scientific experiments and other empirical data confirm, interactions within groups cannot be understood by looking at individuals alone; rather you must take the system of relationships itself as the primary unit of analysis. Nowhere has this been more clearly demonstrated than in relation to the family.

The discipline of family therapy, now decades old, is essentially the application of systems thinking to psychotherapy. Traditional, individual therapy became a viable force in the twentieth century due to the pioneer work of such luminaries as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Initially the focus was on treating the inner life of individuals. By the 1950s, however, psychotherapists were beginning to understand that emotional health begins in the family system as a whole, as does emotional pathology. In one classic study, it was noticed that when adult schizophrenics returned home after successful treatment, they would revert back to inappropriate behavior and soon return to the hospital. In investigating why, researchers arrived at a surprising finding: craziness was like a virus that infected the entire family. When the patient began to recover, other “healthy” siblings became depressed and had marital or work issues. Sometimes parents developed health-related or psychiatric symptoms.¹⁰ The lesson? When it comes to our behavior and emotional lives, we don’t exist outside our personal relationships.

Subsequent work confirmed that the larger family setting could profoundly affect the health and welfare of individuals within the system. At Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, Salvatore Minuchin began to treat children with emotional problems by exploring the demands placed on the child by parents and also the mixed messages being received. To test family health or dysfunction, the entire family was seated with menus from a local Chinese restaurant in front of them as therapists observed from behind a mirror. An analysis of the family members’ interactions—how they ordered their meal; how they gave each other visual, verbal, and kinesthetic cues; and who the winners and losers were—turned out to provide a quick and useful guide to where the family as a whole was stuck and, consequently, what was causing problems for specific family members.¹¹ Think about your own family and the subtle negotiations that go into the seemingly simple task of deciding what to order from column A and column B.

Other family therapy pioneers broadened our understanding of the evolution of family systems over time and developed therapeutic methods for working with families. Psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, with whom I collaborated for years, explored how family heritage spanning generations could influence an individual’s health or dysfunction in the present day. As he argued in his influential book Invisible Loyalties, families experience a continuous desire to balance and rebalance injustices from the past.¹² Another psychiatrist, Murray Bowen, who founded the Georgetown Family Center, helped develop the method of treating individuals by meeting with them and their families in a safe, contained environment to explore family conflicts. The exercise of talking directly to the primary people in their life and expressing underlying hurts turned out to be r...