Our Elephant in the Room

When asked about the company culture by a high-potential candidate for employment, Imagine an HR agent who would answer with the following speech:

_ "Our company is reasonably normal, displaying quite common dysfunctional characteristics. Headquarters centralizes and globally over-controls everything from finance to human resources, to marketing, to production, sales, innovation and development. This goes as far as deciding what needs to be rolled-out internationally, hardly taking into account cultural differences, local market needs, national laws, regional economic characteristics, etc.

_ "Ours is a typical top-down, territorial organization with silos within silos, managed by individualists who jealously defend their own areas of responsibility, making sure to cover-up their shortcomings by scapegoating other divisions, departments, teams and individuals. If you really want to progress in our organization, your decisions will need to avoid risks and mostly be based on favoring your own individual career at the expense of the common good. If you want to survive, choose well the old-timer network that will support you no matter your results. In return, you will need to cover-up their ineffective strategies and never volunteer any form of criticism. Their front cover is « we are all a big happy family ».

_ "You’ll also have to attend endless meetings to ensure that decisions never affect your area of responsibility, escape your control and capacity to postpone. Your best employees will do everything to work from home, and the worst managers will insist these come back to the office, in order to justify their own presence.

_ "You’ll have six months to a year to become truly transparent by blending in, we call it adapt to our company culture. If you don’t by then, you will be judged as too disruptive for the system and will be targeted by HR to take personality tests, attend training or be coached. If that ever becomes the case, I advise you rapidly start looking for another job elsewhere.

_ "In short, as the only honest employee in this company, I want to welcome you into a normally dysfunctional organization. Congratulations, you’re hired !"

Of course, this type of onboarding speech was never pronounced.

It is generally replaced by a very normal PR type of presentation that will tell embellished stories about the company's founding fathers, its mythical start-up period, its exemplary development, the quality of its products and services, its truly people-driven and participative culture, its honest commitment to ethics and for sustainability, the crucial importance of its vision and mission to serve if not save the world… Just to name a few.

Just as for the rest of most organizational realities, onboarding talks to newly hired personnel over promise while everyone inside knows their walks grossly under-deliver. Most such companies also make great efforts to look ideal, good or somewhat "normal", as seen from the outside. Unfortunately on the larger market, since most employees hear and believe the hyped talks all other organizations publicly present, employees everywhere feel that they are employed by the only dysfunctional system on the market. That glass hall of mirrored illusion is the going public norm.

It so happens that internally, most other companies are also much more normally ineffective if not dysfunctional. To safeguard this inside-outisde discrepancy, they also all know how to immediately and actively cover-up anything that could prove them to be normal. That is anywhere from somewhat dysfunctional to fundamentally toxic, especially for the top tier of the governing and managing entities. And whistle blowers will be prosecuted all the way up to Snowden and Assange.

• It is said that the first step to recovering good health is to admit to your symptoms,
• The second is to dig deeper to discover their root cause,
• And only then can the malady be cured.

Consequently in normal professional organizations worldwide, the first step is to own up to the fact that there are no truly functional organizations anywhere. Not anymore than there are functional families in the present social context, a clearly competitive, stressed, burned and browed-out, obsessively materialistic and male-dominated world.

Again this is so widespread that it is to be considered statistical « normalcy ». there are no big happy and cooperative family-like companies such as all pretend to be. They all diligently follow emerging fads, the evolution of politically correct linguistics, and quickly learn how to talk the new talk while never redirecting from their initial walk.

All companies are thus dismally normal, posting brilliant public equivalents of Facebook feeds to better conceal their inside shadows, even to themselves. They all make up glorified and differentiating selling stories to better forget the darker side of their daily reality. And so burn-up, brown-out, turnover rates, harassment scandals, governance issues, legal class actions and corruption cases, etc. yearly increase.

So if we own up, what do we do ?

Yes, if we do admit that normal organizations are created and managed by humans who all display patterns that originating from our normally dysfunctional families, some of them also better defined as toxic, then what ?

Well, it so happens that defining the systemic problem where it really resides is 90% of the solution. Family therapy, for instance, has helped modify interactive patterns in dysfunctional homes for decades. Since the mid eighties, such systemic strategies have sparked the development of what is today, forty years later, the very performing field systemic deep-coaching for teams and organizations. This approach now helps re-configure dysfunctional processes and cure otherwise toxic systems in professional and corporate systems, from small local networks up to multinational corporations.

• And everyone is yearning to develop their capacity to participate in healthy teams, to grow the skills that will equally ensure a more harmonious family life, a truly collaborative presence in all their collective systems.

It is important to point out here that such a systemic-coaching approach to transform patterns in collective systems is absolutely not psychologically focused, addressing individual personalities. Nor is it conceptual, involving the installation of new expert-based procedures and technological tools.

• A truly systemic approach is almost exclusively focused on modifying historically and culturally engrained system-wide interactive processes. These processes, positive and negative consititute teh very fabric beneath our relational habits. They are the root-causes of all our normally-dysfunctional and outrightly toxic organizational symptoms.

Without wanting to sound pessimistic, undertaking this work within our companies and organizations today could very well slow down, maybe eveneradicate the indicators of our worldwide destructive patterns. Those that lead to financial and human burnout. Systemically speaking within companies and families, these patterns are indeed more local and internal mirror processes at the origin of global warming and financial overheating.

• Unfortunately within most governing bodies today, measurable actions and results seem to indicate that whatever lip service is everywhere paid to the issue, it is really not being taken very seriously. We all need to adress the dysfunctional collective within each of us.

consequently, should anyone decide that it is high time for them to stop wagging the dog, systemic solutions do exist. Furthermore, once we have admitted the real issue (again, 90% of the current problem would then be solved), and with some determination, the remaining ten-percent journey can be much quicker and cheaper to achieve.

Especially if one considers that our other alternative is to blindly keep the elephant in the room, continue doing what we have been doing and pretend that we will thus achieve totally different results.

______________________

Alain Cardon MCC, September 2024, Metasysteme-Coaching

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