Happiness, Shame, and Narcissism

Welcome back to another edition of This Week in Culture. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s run through a few things.

Three Skills For True Happiness At Work: I’d argue for awareness (of self and others), openness (to same), and valued engagement. At the intersection of those three, I think happiness at work is possible. Is said happiness then constant? No. Everyone has bad days, bad hours, bad meetings, and even bad weeks. But I think we’ve made a big mistake drawing this thick line between “emotions” and “work,” like the two should never ever cross. You absolutely do bring your emotions to work – you’re not the same person on a workday after a fight with your partner, something you did wrong as a parent, or the loss of a friend. Emotions impact work. Being aware of them is a gift to your professional development and the team around you.

In the same vein: MIT Sloan School of Management Review called for “well-being intelligence” as a core workforce competency this past week. I like this, and I agree cultures would be better if more managers were more aware of their own well-being and the well-being of their teams. However, the problem we always run into – and this is something CULTURE PARTNERS works really hard at with our clients – is that so many managers fall into “Action Traps,” where they believe the only value is doing, doing, doing. This creates essentially a treadmill of tasks and deliverables (which can be good, yes), but when you’re so focused on those tasks, you lose sight of the real important things about being a leader of others. Tasks are great, and moving the ball down the field on projects obviously has value. But you do need to stop and assess how your team is really doing sometimes.

The role of shame at work: Here’s some interesting research from UPenn and UCLA researchers, basically saying that shame helps to build organizational cultures. It includes the line “Organizations are inherently interested in aspects of normative control.” That’s true at some level, yes, but that’s where the research lost me a little bit. We need to be moving away from fear- and control-based cultures (in which shame plays a bigger part) to cultures dictated by awareness and agape love. Now look, if an employee does something really wrong in their first year or so, and there’s a sense of individual shame on their part, and that shame eliminates that mistake in the future – that’s good. I’m not anti-shame. I understand it can play a powerful role. But I don’t think it should be a defining feature of any culture, or that we should spend time studying normative control patterns. Instead, let’s talk more about how to create experiences that make employees want to show up for work and do a good job.

The pace of work problem: It’s not that “no one wants to work anymore.” Plenty of people want to work and need to, to make all their ends meet. It’s more so that … we’ve forgotten how to work. 

Narcissism: Charles O'Reilly is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Management at Stanford University; we have done some collaborative work with him on different facets of organizational culture and behavior, which is his focus. He has some great research out there, including “Adaptive Hybrid: Innovation With Virtual Work” and some amazing work on the role of narcissists in the workplace. In 2012, he co-authored work called “Women in the Boardroom: Symbols or Substance?” that’s informed a lot of thinking about the role of women at work since its publication. He recently sent me a longer paper on narcissism and psychological safety – as you might imagine, narcissistic bosses are not good for psychological safety in teams – and while the paper isn’t live yet, I’ll link it when it is. He’s a great thinker on culture issues and his research is worth the read, even if in condensed Stanford form.

Kelli: This is an older article on HBR, but in it we meet Kelli:

This has become a huge problem in cultures – they talk about diversity and inclusion all the time, but when an easy promotion opportunity is in front of their face, they miss it – worried about their Instagram ethos instead. Cultures are driven by people and their experiences. We get fascinated with marketing and following the latest trend lines, but ultimately we need to take care of our people above all. When you do that, some of the performative inclusion stuff fades away.

Personally, I’m a big fan of interculturalism these days, which is the concept of embracing similarity as opposed to difference – as many diversity training programs focus on difference, which creates a recoil effect in attendees. We have an eBook and webinar on interculturalism coming in the next few weeks.

What else would you like to see us discuss? 

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