At work , To be or not to be?

Laurence de Fontenay and Emelina Corrales

A company or an institution is a system with its own culture made by rules, published policies or non-communicated expected behaviours. Although created by humans, the company system has its own life and is willing to maintain homeostasis. Which means as soon as you input a new behaviour that challenges the system’s balance, it has to transform to reach equilibrium again.

To make this system produce results on a competitive market, most of the companies tend to recruit workers not people, who get ready to fight battles, survive in a hostile environment created by themselves and their colleagues, in competition mode. By doing this, individuals come to the office with the mask of a strong and perfect actor. These behaviours are sustained by various company policies like bonus schemes that are in general based on individual objectives and push everyone into competition, which reduces the chances of cooperation.

As a consequence, employees are overwhelmed with their battles and have no room for openness, flexibility and agility; no one feels authorized to be authentic. Workers are emotionally or psychologically mutilated by the lack of opportunities to express who they are. In this system, being authentic means taking the risk of exposing one’s vulnerability. Vulnerability as described by the researcher Brené Brown, is the willingness to show up and be seen by others in the face of uncertain outcomes.

Therefore, companies miss a full range of capacities and genuine abilities which would be very helpful in a competitive world. It is a shame that in this working environment, there is no access to this hidden treasure which already exists within the workforce and could be unlocked with no additional cost. On the contrary, the cost created by personal internal conflict between who they are and who they are expected to be is likely to impact the profit when it turns into burn out, sickness leave or any other ways people find to “get out of the system”.

What if company leaders create the structure to allow people to be themselves?

A company system that allows the collaborators to arrive every morning as a whole, has:

• a clear purpose shared all across the organization, what we can call a “soul”, defined by strong value alignment in every day actions
• and a wide aspiration which goes far beyond short term objectives and financial KPIs.

In this type of working group environment, leadership styles are visionary, participative and coaching.  There is more pulling than pushing generating empowerment and engagement and giving individuals the opportunity to unleash their potential.

When a company is able to truly live the above, consistency is experienced internally by the people. Hence, it becomes attractive to high potentials who are willing to thrive creating the conditions high performance. There will be more diversity in terms of behaviour as everyone will not fear to express a full range of capabilities and emotions. Both things are critical to bring creativity, responsibility, cooperation and therefore strong results together with well-being.

In order to move the needle, leaders have to truly believe it is worth the transformation, so they can trigger the change with their own behaviour and show by example. For this to be possible they have to challenge themselves and be ready for a journey of deep evolution. As mentioned by Romain Cristofini what companies need is a “life leadership”, aligned men and women cultivating the desire to live with passion and without giving up what is essential for them.

These leaders can build a working climate that allows a group to perform like a jazz band, where the team agrees on rules and guidelines beforehand, and the level of trust is so strong that each musician can find freedom, thus innovation and creativity to play his own part with his eyes closed.