Creating a workplace that Works for all!
That’s what I had in mind when I wrote the book The manager and the employee (commimg soon in english). A major theme of the book is “Opening Up New Space.” The book challenge conventional thinking, introduce new ideas and foster positive change. The common quest is changing underlying beliefs, mindsets, institutions, and structures that hold managers/leaders and employees back. The manager and the employee offering a unique combination of thoughtful analysis and progressive alternatives to promote positive change at the workplace.
The manager as surrogate mother
Geese fly south for the winter. People choose whether to travel to warmer climes.Animals and insects are controlled by their adaptation to nature through instinct and reflex mechanisms. We became humans when we acquired a free will. When our lives were no longer simply about inherited mechanisms and when our adaptation lost its compulsive character. Being a human and being free were thus inseparable phenomena from the very beginning.All human journeys begin with birth, when two bodies are separated and we become our own biological entities. In purely material terms, however, we are still one unit since we are fed and carried and have all our important needs satisfied by our mothers. We still lack freedom and live under a sense of security and affinity. Our mother is our bastion, our foothold. Metaphorically speaking, the umbilical cord is still intact. Gradually, we learn to see our mother as an independent being as we start to experience the outside world and eventually explore and discover it. And it’s here somewhere that our obstacles and opportunities arise. Where animals display an unbroken chain of reaction – such as for hunger, which starts as a sensation and ends with a more or less fixed course of events pursued in order to curtail this sensation – humans have to make decisions and choices.Our bond with our mothers instilled in us a sense of security, but now we must provide that for ourselves. This means that as adults we must orientate ourselves and choose a path that will give us our own firm footing in life – we must find, quite simply, other ways to experience and feel the security that unity with our mothers gave us.The one side of our disengagement from our original sense of security is that our personality becomes stronger; the other is that, indirectly, we become more isolated. Our original anchoring with our mother gave us a sense of security and belonging. The encounter with the big “bad” world outside creates a feeling of littleness and anxiety. Insecurity gradually infests us, and each step we take towards greater liberation and development threatens to bring only more insecurity. Our need of security is like a rubber band, constantly pulling us back.Could it be the case that in our insecurity we seek to turn our manager into a kind of surrogate mother? An authority who will see me and affirm me as part of my own need to feel security? Otherwise, why would we care so much about what he or she thinks about us? Take, for instance, the private performance review. We sit, adults all, listening like eager students to what the boss thinks about us. We have a kind of indirect desire that she will develop us, and that we will be her favourite. It’s as if we think that our manager holds our future in her hands and that it’s our manager who builds the business, its work climate and success.But our manager is not the answer to our ambitions. We must ourselves learn a little of what we already know and continue to investigate what we believe in. We must use our freedom and our choice of workplace to develop both the business and ourselves. Your manager does not provide the security you seek. The security resides within yourselves.