Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers

Something is missing in work. Everyone knows it. It isn’t the pay. It isn’t the working conditions. It isn’t even management. Management, as we know it, is quietly disappearing. So what is it? The spirit is being driven out of work. Work is no longer fun. Work is no longer good for the soul, no longer "love made visible." Kahlil Gibran writes:

Not only has work become more mechanical, it has become more nonsensical. Most work is the non-doing doing of non-thing things, or make-work. Work is no longer mainly by the sweat of the brow, but the merry dance of the "little gray cells." To exercise these little gray cells, work needs to be treated as creatively as play. Otherwise, work leads to stress, burnout, and ultimately, moral and physical collapse.

Even the ethics of work have changed. What once was considered work – working hard and being loyal like good Boy or Girl Scouts – is now obsolete. Working smart is the order of the day. Compliance is not enough. The command and control dictates of management are dinosaurs, no longer sufficient to meet the changing and accelerating demands of the market place. In fact this management practice gets in the way of productive work.

Even if it takes more brains than brawn, there still is a problem. Work has lost its poetry. Work is like a dime store novel, it has gotten a bad name. Companies, as incredible as it may seem, are making the workplace more like a playground for kids. Adults have been shrunken to the emotional equivalent of adolescence and fixated there. As a consequence, workers have gravitated to learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Most workers are suspended in terminal adolescence whining about how bad they have it, when they’ve never had it so good. They berate their bosses and the company. They have a "woe-is-me" helplessness while they’re too self-indulgent to realize they have the power.

There is a good chance you’re one of these dissonant workers! If so, you’re likely to be suffering from one addiction or another to cover your numbing frustration. Meanwhile, the economic landscape is painted with optimism. "Can’t be anything wrong," you say, "look at the Gross Domestic Product. The United States is going great guns, right?" If this is so, why don’t you have a happy face?

Obviously, the present economic climate is impressive. So what? Inside the figures tells another story. Pareto still reigns supreme. It is very likely that 80 percent of your effectiveness comes from 20 percent of your effort. Put another way, 80 percent of the productive work done in your workplace is probably accomplished by 20 percent of the workers. It doesn’t stop there.

The way you work, and your attitude towards what you do, spills over into what you are, and how you behave in society. You are not a separate entity from your work. You are your work. Chances are you don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re not working, so you fill the void with white noise.