On a scale of 1 to 10 how liberated, happy and satisfied do you feel at work?
Annually, or even more often, many of our organisations issue ‘employee satisfaction surveys’. You may have noticed that they don’t measure the amount of ‘bliss’ employees experience at work?
We tend to measure things which we see as ‘a problem’ collecting statistical data about how we have made things go badly. If you look at the situation on a broader scale, the UK economy has been fairly stagnant for 16 years, the media perpetually reports that the economy is oscillating at the edge of economic depression. For citizens this can be rather depressing news!
When we are failing to achieve progress, the failure can be traced to one or more aspects of our paradigms (unconscious mindsets). A significant cause of the depressing stagnancy in our organisations and economy can be traced to paradigms of structure and control, which once grown out of control are undeniably harmful.
The fundamentally destructive nature of paradigms of structure and control can be seen in the plight of the Rohingya people, the Uighur Muslims and the destruction of infrastructure and life in Gaza and Ukraine. When one group of people seeks to control and regulate the mindset of another the outcome is mass misery.
For the majority of us it is not straightforward to contribute significantly to the resolution of political and national conflicts. But most of us could take more responsibility at a local level should we choose to do so. Responsible organisational leaders and managers could easily make choices to mitigate the more subtle but nevertheless significant harm done by paradigms of structure and control in our organisations.
When the organisations implement more and more policy and excessively mandate process they progressively strip the possibility of creativity, innovation and achievement from employees paradigms. But isn’t it true to say that creativity, innovation and achievement are central components of most organisations success?
Paradigms by the nature operate at a largely unconscious level. Paradigms of structure and control have been developing out of awareness in many organisations. A couple of examples of stagnancy caused by prevalent organisational paradigms, people:
- Laboriously feed good ideas to the top of the food chain where they are often crushed because they do not fit in with leaders own personal preferences. The uplifting effect of being able to make a positive contribution which develops an employee’s self-esteem, self-belief and self-respect is lost.
- Spend a lot of time going through a multitude of relatively pointless, highly structured, box filling processes which do not materially benefit anything. In these circumstances only the most strong willed and determined retain the will to achieve personally to make their salaried contribution to organisational goals.
These two phenomena are significant contributions to the stagnancy in our organisations which contributes both to the stagnancy in our economy and the need to measure the suboptimal employees satisfaction levels.
It does make sense to have some regulation within an organisation but in excess paradigms of structure and control asphyxiate any sense of empowerment within individual employees and has a sub optimal effect on business progress.
What do you think is for the best:
- To continue on the current trajectory using paradigms of structure and control
- Evolve more humanitarian, productive and life enhancing leadership paradigms?
If you are in favour of your understanding of how to develop humanitarian paradigms of empowerment and how they facilitate greater productivity, you can join me on a webinar which will show you how to:
- Build self-esteem and confidence for employees at all levels
- Develop everyone’s capability to deliver
- Facilitate greater contribution across the entire organisation
- Empower people to achieve their potential and develop their own self-respect
Would our organisations be a happier place to work if the management and leadership paradigm had onboarded all of the qualities above?
If you have already absorbed how to make more progress by absorbing a task orientated paradigm and would like to discover more about how to evolve a more productive paradigm for management and leadership join my next ‘Empowering Your Organisation’ webinar.
