I am an employee. I have a fixed salary every month, for as long as I work with the company. I get some holidays which I can take anytime of the year. Of course, “anytime” is normally controlled by someone else, commonly known as “the boss”. I can “request” anytime, but it’s never “anytime”… Anyway, when I started my very first “paid monthly” job, I never view it as a job I was paid to do. I view it as a learning ground, a chance for me to show both myself and the world out there what I can do. So I feel sad when one day, not long after I started my first job, that “the boss” told me to just do it without questioning, because I am “paid to do so”.
Questioning is part of the learning process. Over time, you learn when to question and when not to question. But not to question AT ALL breaks the very meaning of learning. For me, understanding the purpose of what I’m doing determines the level of energy and intensity into that work. The stronger the purpose, the stronger the will power to make sure it gets done.
In a hierarchical company, the purpose is often lost through the chain of command. Sure, companies have mission statements, but how often are those statements translated to anything remotely close to the work being done on the ground? The only consistent mission statement is “to make money”. This measure on its own is not a good long term purpose for any company. Actually, what they fail to tell you is that this mission statement is incomplete. The full mission statement is not actually to make money, but to make money “in the short term” – to make money as long as the person on top is in charge of the company. Because the person on top knows that his time is short – either make a big bang out of it to prove his worth, or make big bucks out of his time before his time is up.
As a result of the “chain of command”, this mentality is translated to each section of the chain. So, as long as you’re head of some section, you will more or less succumb to the direction the “ultimate head” is telling you, whether you like it or not.
Can we turn this around? Should the fate of the company be controlled by a chain of command?
I believe this military style structure has its use in the past. Business schools have probably dissected this business model umpteen times to fill up a whole course. If so, there must be some solution to this, but why does the problem persist?
I guess the human civilization that we have come to be proud of its growth and technological prowess has failed to grow in the wisdom dimension. We can split the atoms but we can’t split the ego from ourselves. The only thing we have managed to split is our personalities. At work, there seem to be a different creature inhabiting the body. If you were to meet your co-workers outside of work, they would seem perfectly normal. But when you place them in a work environment, somehow, an invisible hand is guiding their actions. Hostile, defensive, insecure, yearn for power etc are some of the common traits of this new creature.
I didn’t mean to write so negatively about the corporate world. So here’s the challenge for myself and for you hopefully as well. We can’t change what’s out there, we can only influence. But the one thing that we can certainly change is ourselves. It’s difficult to go against the grain, but we can still choose to be true to ourselves without appearing that we are going against the flow. Keep a cool core, and as you build up your core strength, it will overspill. Just like the contagious laughter. Smile a little, and your co-workers will smile back at you, eventually!
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suggests, we are drawn to think, sometimes so much so that making “thinking” as an end itself. Doing puzzles, sudoku (which by the way if you haven’t checked this out, is highly addictive) etc are ways in which we engage our mind, apart from thinking about work, relationships, and life itself.