Work Matters

Consulting to leaders and organizations in the Tavistock tradition

Francesca Cardona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000044942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

Work is complicated: It can be fulfilling and exciting, or disappointing and disruptive. We spend most of our adult lives at work; it shapes our identities and provides a context for our creativity and talents. It can be the source of great pleasure – and of profound distress.

In Work Matters, organizational consultant and Tavistock lecturer Francesca Cardona examines our changing relationship with work today. Drawing on case studies from a wide range of individuals and organizations, she considers the dynamics at play in our working lives. Cardona examines how to navigate times of transition, and the balance of power in the work place, while also addressing latent issues such as the effects of shame, the cost of ill-conceived organizational structures and tasks, the interface between the personal and the professional, and the manager's most precious skill: the ability to be psychologically present. Finally, Cardona casts an eye on the consultant's role in helping organizations move forwards in ways that are professionally and personally rewarding.

Whether you are a business leader, manager, consultant or student, or simply interested in how your work affects you, Work Matters offers essential insights into an area that occupies so much of our lives.

Part I

The context of work

A love affair – the meaning of work in a changing world

As an organizational consultant, my main focus is on the nature of people’s engagement with work, in the understanding that work is central to their lives and could be a source of great pleasure as well as of great distress. In the current complex and uncertain environment, work could be compared to a love affair, one that offers exciting opportunities, adventures and challenges, but also a profound sense of uncertainty and instability. Work as ‘a love affair’ brings passion and desire as well as turbulence, disappointment and despair.

Our interest and focus can be affected by a lack of connection or an ambivalent attachment to our work place and by the experience of not been sufficiently ‘held’ by our organizational environment; the notion of being ‘held’ is linked to Winnicott’s idea of the ‘holding environment’ the mother provides for her baby, a secure place for his development and emotional growth (Winnicott, 1971).

As in a love affair, we might feel frustrated with respect to our expectations around a sense of belonging, stability and long-term commitment. On the other hand, we can also learn how to navigate this fluid environment and create opportunities for ourselves that are more tuned in and connected to the changing environment itself. This requires a capacity to be open and to tolerate the anxiety of inhabiting a ‘fluid zone’ without looking too hard for defined answers and certainty, shifting our perception and expectations of the work paradigm.

Fluidity, or liquidity, has become a metaphor of the present phase in the history of modernity (Bauman, 2000). Instability and flexibility are now the norm. Organizations are always in flow, in endless becoming. Today, work, both in practice and in our minds, has loose shapes, permeable boundaries and is often unpredictable – a changeable network of relationships, roles, multiple identities and groups.

Freud, when talking of love and work, spoke of ‘a general work productiveness which would not preoccupy the individual to the extent that his right or capacity to be a sexual and loving being would be lost’ (Erikson, 1959, quoting Freud). Yet work is now at the centre of our personas; it is increasingly becoming part of our core identity because of its containing function and because our experience of being part of an organization is disappearing (Cooper and Dartington, 2004).

Alain de Botton argues that our choice of occupation defines our identity ‘to the extent that the most insistent question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were, but what they do’ (2009, p. 106). In a fast-changing world, where organizations are less containing and technological innovations increase opportunities for virtual relationships, the issue of our work identity becomes even more central. Our work identity is related much more closely to the competencies we can exercise in different settings, real and virtual, than to an organization. The boundaries between work identity and personal identity are becoming more flexible (Cooper and Dartington, 2004).

The concept of the organization as the ‘container’ and work as the contained has been challenged. Work becomes the main container for our emotional investment and could be experienced as a malignant as well as an idealized container. Many of my clients have felt at some point in their careers a sense of persecution from their work, while also idealizing the potentials of their role and situation (see also Part II on containment).

Work represents our capacity to invest in something away from our own immediate surroundings, a ‘third dimension’ beyond our individuality, family and community. However, the nature of our attachment to work is related to the diminishing organizational containment in organizations. As Bowlby points out, attachment is a ‘primary motivational system’ starting in infancy and operating throughout our lives (Bowlby, 1973). Our capacity for attachment to work and organizational life is also inevitably linked to our early experience of emotional attachment. Without some degree of attachment to a meaningful activity, work can start to feel superfluous and can affect our capacity to feel fulfilled.

Ambivalent work attachment

Miles, a bright and ambitious manager in a large global company, has progressed to a senior role that he finds interesting and challenging. However, his ability to take pleasure in what he does is limited. He arrives at his coaching session looking tired after a very intense couple of weeks abroad. In a flat voice, he tells me how he organized a successful conference and that he will soon be promoted to a global role. I comment on how positive and exciting this sounds, though he seems unable to express any enjoyment about his achievements.

I connect this experience to his background. University and work have represented an escape from a complex family environment for him and a means to his independence. The absence of parental interest has made him deeply insecure about his worth. As a result, his investment in work, particularly at the beginning of his career, lacked emotional engagement. Even now, much more secure in his personal life, Miles struggles to feel fully attached to work, despite his commitment and success. The anxiety of engaging with a potentially ‘negative container’ often generates withdrawal and detachment in him. This experience is emphasized by an organization that operates a lot virtually and by a leadership team that is scattered around the world.

In the coaching sessions, we address Miles’s problems around feelings of entitlement and his struggle to trust authority, so painfully connected with the experience of his distant parents. His efficiency, determination and focus seem at times to compensate for his sense of emptiness and his unfulfilled emotional needs. We also talk about his longing for ‘attachment’ and how he could develop a safe enough ‘container’ in his organizational context, despite the physical distance of his boss and some of his peers.

Ambivalent attachment towards organizations can also be linked to the growing culture of performativity, where the emphasis is on performance and results rather than loyalty and belonging: ‘We become ontologically insecure: unsure whether we are doing enough, doing the right thing, doing as much as others, or as well as others, constantly looking to improve, to be better, to be excellent’ (Ball, 2003, p. 220).

Hoggett, professor of social policy, talks of three dysfunctional elements in our current organizational environment: triumph of numbers, performativity and fragile narcissism. Numbers are mistaken as the ‘real thing’ – i.e. what can’t be counted doesn’t count – and there is a widespread feeling that nothing is ever good enough. He suggests that the anxiety raised by a culture of performativity leads us into ‘survival mode’ that prevents us from engaging with the meaning of what we do. He also links it with shame and feelings of failure, exposure and humiliation. Shame produces a sense of inferiority in a context where only the strong seem to survive and vulnerability is not accepted (Hoggett, 2016) – I will discuss the theme of shame in more detail in Chapter 3.

As Sennett says, ‘Failure is the great modern taboo…. Coming to terms with failure may haunt us internally but seldom is discussed with others’ (Sennett, 1998, p. 118).

Driven by performance anxiety

Victor was an engineer in a global company who attended a leadership development workshop that I facilitated. I knew, from the head of human resources, that my client group – senior executives with a technical background – were struggling to engage with the ‘emotional side’ of leadership and were quite reluctant to spend two full days of training in this area. After quite a difficult start, with many of the workshop members constantly gazing at their mobile phones, I suggested that they each attempt to draw their organization – a free, individual drawing representing the ‘organization in their mind’ (Armstrong, 2005).

Victor’s drawing was of a huge plane that dominated the whole flip-chart paper; in a corner, three tiny figures represented his wife and children. Close to tears, he explained how he was hardly ever home and missed seeing his children growing up. One after the other, the members of the group then described a life of constant travel, away from their families, feeling compelled to reach very ambitious commercial targets.

Lucey talks of her experience of working with executives ‘who are very caught up in a performance approach and, at the same time, seem to be longing for meaning that has been lost as a result of this approach’ (Lucey, 2015, p. 215).

Applying Bick’s concept of ‘second skin defences’ in infants to organizational life (Bick, 1968), she describes the pseudo-protective layers that individuals build up in response to failures of containment: ‘Second skin-type functioning involves an adhesive form of identification which is a superficial way of relating, as opposed to the more in depth three-dimensional way characteristic of containing relationships’ (p. 217). This second skin often represents a cover-up for underlying anxieties and the authentic experiences of the individuals. As a consequence, a performativity approach doesn’t allow the development of a sense of purpose that gives authenticity to the experience or which allows people to take up their roles with accountability and authority (Bazalgette et al., 2009, p. 9).

Work and creativity

Work also represents the diversion of aggression and sexuality: ‘In work, as contrasted with purposeless destruction, the aggressive impulses are moulded and guided in a constructive direction by the influence of the creative (erotic) instinct …’ (Menninger, 1942, p. 33). Our engagement with work is an expression of our creativity, but creativity also brings with it the anxiety surrounding our capacity to be disruptive. The drive to be creative comes from a feeling of lack; work can provide an outlet for filling this sense of emptiness.

Creativity can also disrupt our personal and organizational status quo. The creation of something new and different implies a loss – the loss of familiar relationships, patterns and structures – just as the birth of a child can bring with it a sense of loss and anxiety about what has been created. The capacity to manage the tension between our creativity and our anxiety about disruptiveness is essential for the development of a healthy engagement with our work and role.

Theresa, a social entrepreneur with huge energy and a great capacity for innovation, had just opened a new pioneering family centre after overcoming incredible bureaucratic obstacles from the local authorities. As soon as she started this challenging and exciting new venture she suddenly became distracted by many other projects and a number of commitments abroad.

With my help, she gradually began to realize how anxious she felt after the ‘birth’ of this new project, the product of her creativity and desire. Theresa wasn’t afraid of the challenges ahead; she was anxious about engaging with something she had created that could become potentially disruptive or profoundly disappointing.

Creativity is connected with the concept of finding and generating meaning in order to feel fulfilled and engaged in what we do. The sense of meaning needs to be sustainable in order to allow us to manage and accept the contrasting feelings connected with the creative process. Armstrong talks of discovery or recovery of meaning, finding meaning and making meaning: ‘Work needs always to be rooted in – or at least to provide space for – the evolution of meaning, which is necessarily provisional and transitional, but without which such terms risk a kind of emotional degeneration’ (Armstrong 2005, p. 67).

Engaging with the love affair

Miles’s experience of work became much worse after his boss left the company. The incoming new boss was based in another continent and had a very different approach. Much more directive and less facilitative, he didn’t seem to have much time or space for Miles.

Miles was losing his confidence. His fear of work as a ‘bad container’ – linked to his early experience of family life – seemed to be confirmed. It took him a long time to be able to engage with his new work situation in a different way. He had to let go of his ideas about what ‘should’ happen and be more open to what the new boss had to offer so that an element of trust and collaboration could develop. He became gradually more able to ‘hear’ his boss and could share his views and plans for the future without feeling under scrutiny and as though he were in a risky position.

It is tempting at times to feel nostalgic about the past or overcritical about the present; wanting the present to be different, rather than engaging with what it is. However, if our aspirations are for consistency, stability and predictability, we live in the wrong era. That said, if we had lived at the time of the industrial revolution, a period of radical change in the world of work and society, we might have experienced similar feelings of confusion, uncertainty and instability – as well as excitement, curiosity and interest. Now, like then, a technological revolution is fundamentally altering the way we live, work and relate to one another.

Navigating the world of work today requires a capacity to create attachments and containing structures in a different way. This entails a shift in how we think about work and how we translate this understanding into our expectations and practice, with the acknowledgement that today’s fluid organizational environment can increase our anxieties and our capacity to be present and fully engaged in our work.

The culture of performativity is difficult to resist or to manage. Driven by anxiety, often generated by scarce resources in the public sector or by a drive for profit in private companies, it represents a malaise of our times.

It is challenging for individuals, leaders and organizations to maintain a reflective stance that can help them to make sense of, and develop, a healthy sense of perspective on their working realities.

Forming attachments and being part of containing structures remain crucial for a healthy and meaningful involvement with work. The challenge is to learn how to do it – moving from the turbulence of a ‘love affair’ to a more stable relationship – without denying the unpredictability of the environment we are in.

Ambivalent love?

Women’s relationship and relatedness to work

In the previous section I discussed work as a love affair, with respect to both the pleasure and pain that work entails. This section focuses on women’s relationship to work and the ‘ambivalent love’ they often experience in relation to it, as a result of the conflicting demands of raising a family.

A few years ago, I offered consultation to a number of women with children who wanted to re-think the directions of their careers. Some were looking for a more fulfilling occupation; others were in very demanding jobs and wanted to find a more balanced approach to work and motherhood. They were all quite unhappy and stressed about their situations, either feeling unchallenged and frustrated in their jobs, or too strained and overwhelmed by the demands of their ...