Challenging and fulfilling work is rarely found in the faceless fluorescent open plan offices of the corporate world. Like those who believe in a perfect romantic love, a communion of souls, we are perennially disappointed. The workplaces we seek, modest havens, nice, pretty little places in airy, bright, amiable rooms full of benign wisdom and altruism only exist in make believe.
Ours are fearful workplaces overflowing with misery, where fearful workers spend the best years of their lives in a hellish mix.
Workers devoid of union representation are fired for being ‘non-aligned,’ or ‘resistant,’ to yet another restructure. Zero hours contracts, agency working, institutionalised distrust, surveillance, and small-minded managerialism are rife.
We have allowed our workplaces to be dominated by totalitarian dark age management. A demanding rationalistic project, obsessed with measuring the unimportant and collecting more data than we can ever hope of using. Overly precise job descriptions diminish all our chances of enjoying productive and satisfying work.
Work as presently structured is ill suited to the half contemplative. Sensitive fragile refined souls who reject uncaring hardness are not cut out for such madness.
For those of a delicate nature at risk of society’s suicidal tendencies, and in search of imagined spiritual experiences, perhaps we can create in a remote spot full of tranquillity and quietude, a scrupulously clean community of delicious seclusion. A sweet, small place somewhere in the shade where we can feel useful and at ease.
Such incongruous clever beautiful thoughts have no place in mechanistic egoistic mediocre corporate citadels.
The Board (Bored) room, a place where to be honest, to be sincere, counts for precious little.
Boardrooms, the domains of empleomaniacs, narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavelli’s devoid of empathy, promoted to positions that require far more than their intellectual capabilities allow.
Places that give no harbour to humility, full of bean counters whose profession is the accumulation of wealth at all costs whilst workers rely on in work benefits to make ends meet.
The first item on the agenda, another restructure due to cost pressures.
Retreat, a word that has multiple meanings.
A period used to pray and study quietly, or to think carefully, away from normal activities and duties.
A backwards move by soldiers or an army, either because they have been defeated or to avoid fighting.
To decide not to do something, or to stop believing something, because it causes too many problems.
To go away from a place or person.
To escape from fighting or danger.
To go to a quiet safe place to avoid a difficult situation.
To take part in an all-inclusive free piss up.
Corporate armour substituted for Lacoste shirts, pastel chinos, and soft leather lace less shoes.
Executives pursuing high-powered unrelenting forward thrusting lives full of trivialities, must settle for six figure salaries and a ‘strategic residential retreat’ to a five-star spa hotel with championship golf course and ala carte dining.
A Conclave of the ordained decides whose job should be terminated and how they can get away with paying the minimum amount of compensation for taking it.
Amidst tees and teas, they are subjected to psychometric tests, specifically The Myers Briggs Personality Assessment, (pseudoscientific bullshit that has no evidential base, widely and mistakenly viewed as a determinist authority,) and the Hartman Colour Code Personality Test, whose genesis can be traced to a self-published book in 1987.
Ground rules of openness, honesty, confidentiality, and ‘leaving one’s neuroses at the door,’ are established, and quickly forgotten.
Internal radars scan indistinguishable rooms for threats to their perceived dominance.
The first session ‘team building,’ passes without much incident largely due to a prolonged ‘ice breaker,’ unimaginatively titled ‘getting to know you.’ Most lose the will to live, having failed to uncover anything remotely interesting about Margaret from accounts.
The CEO, and the Finance Director saturated in a sense of their own efficiency, attempt to justify the job losses with arguments drowned in management speak, “going forward, cost pressures and the operating environment make change a constant.”
The solution, “lose some low hanging fruit.”
The FD thought it prudent to defer the Executive pay increase and bonus until the next Board meeting.
An obese woman, the ‘Head of Human Resources and Organisational Development’ whose mouth appeared to have frozen into a permanent smirk, told us how she and her consultant friend would transform the firm into a lean organisation using Neuro Linguistic Programming.
How many firms have been thrown into chaos by such quackery?
There is little evidence supporting NLP’s efficacy nor the validity of its outlandish theories and claims such as an alleged connection between neurological processes (Neuro), language (Linguistic) and behavioural patterns learned through experience (Programming) and how these can be changed to achieve specific goals.
Like Snake oil peddlers, its proponents claim NLP can accelerate learning, neutralize phobias, enhance creativity, improve relationships, eliminate allergies, reverse ageing and enable us to walk on fire without roasting our toes! They also believe that it is possible to model the skills of exceptional people, allowing anyone to acquire those skills! Imagine applying that approach to brain surgery!
The use of NLP is widespread in the corporate setting, where it allegedly includes a set of ‘principles and special tools,’ that are designed to ‘analyse’ and ‘detect’ key patterns of values, strategies of behaviour, and their interaction.
My eye rolling had not gone unnoticed, the consultant asked what I thought about psychometric testing which they proposed to start the change programme with. I replied.
“It seems to me that a rigorous assessment of someone’s personality would have to involve multiple close observations of their behaviour over a sustained period, the typical psychometric test is a one off. Regardless of the claims of pseudoscience, data geeks, artificial intelligence addicts and agile techies, I have not yet seen a methodology or system that is able to deal with the inexhaustible detail of the world, our passions, fears, and obsessions that are often hidden.
Why shouldn’t we be inward secretive creatures?
The problem with these approaches is that they are obsessed with order and categorisation. Not only are they unscientific, flawed, and lazy, they attempt to circumvent the hard-time-consuming graft of understanding ourselves and how we work with others.
At their heart is a dangerous assumption that one has got individuals and situations taped. If a company is going to spend money on such approaches then you may as well consider spending it on astrology, numerology, Tarot cards and other hocus-pocus systems that may prove just as effective in making quasi scientific generalisations.”
Unsurprisingly I did not work for the organisation again.
My session on dark age management was as welcome as a rattle snake in a lucky dip.
I headed home reeling from the pandemonium.
A few people I met on that retreat kept in touch, one contacted me to say that they felt brainwashed.
“I have just finished a marathon ten-hour training session on ‘how to have difficult conversations.’ I feel like a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. The only difference is that I am wearing my machine washable business suit instead of an orange jumpsuit. To discover the ‘real me, they made me wear a different mask every fifteen minutes. By the end of it I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.”
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