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Self-Empowerment: How to Survive your Job Barbara Bertagni
1. Be operative! We live in a society in which development has become a keyword, development at all costs, continuous growth, economic growth, professional development and purchasing power growth. Magazines, surveys, books and manuals - not only of widespread distribution - are most often oriented defining a successful manager as a “skilled man,” elegant, projecting the image of wellness, ever-moving and performing in every situation: at least 14 hours a day among meetings, work travels, interviews, phone calls, office activities; 20 days of holiday in a year in appealing places where, as advertising tells us, “you can have fun, relax and at the same time get back in top shape;” leave few days in a year that are dedicated to their training. The manager role within organizations seems to become always more complex: acting in organizations where uncertainty rules, where flexibility has become a keyword, where everything is highly shifting and rough, and manager's leadership is often suggested as the solution to manage chaos. Managers are expected to actively build their role, shaping and adjusting it day after day to their own company needs and to market upheaval. This process occurs within company realities that leave little or no space for personal choices, together with an agenda full of daily appointments often built by others, with targets to reach not always understandable and sharable, during a series of organizational rituals that, even if useful in order to keep anxiety down, require a role-playing game sometimes hard to manage. What are some keywords? Action, velocity, pleasure, success, wellness, self-control, anxiety containment effort and annulment of any space for questions, as everyday life searches for answers towards prompt needs and ponders about the meaning of questions that might bring stagger and anguish. There is no space for the rise of dreams, affections and projects not aligned with the company needs and rhythm. There is no time to protect the inner slowness, neither to feed ourselves with our fragility. We have to run to chase the promotion, the project success, the competitor company buyout, the purchase of the yacht and benefits improvement. Meanwhile as time flows, "marketplaces" change and we have to run more than ever to remain at the same status, but at the same time we start to get old and, sometimes, a strong experience breaks into our life (birth, mourning, break up, love...) and it opens a reflection glimmer, letting us notice how much we have become strangers to our own selves, until the point when we know ourselves no more. Success accomplished at this level becomes a weird dimension in which professional growth does not match with personal development but often in top managers' stories we find the feeling - or the awareness - about a life lived, but not chosen, lead by automatic pilot, without a real space for choices, captured by an ascending career vortex in which they "cannot say no."
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2. Empowerment risks The manager, as a post-modern subject, finds himself involved in a relationship web "more complex and mobile than ever" and lost in the daily theater illustrated by Goffman in which his identity is built on a continuous representation on a life stage. Person and role blur one in the other; a man reduces himself to his role, feeding himself with organizations' rituals and myths in which he works. The subject feels uncomfortable in the "simulation," as he stands to play the game imposed by the roles with the ending immersed in it to the point of "being played with," therefore constantly left hanging in balance together with the risk of being overwhelmed by the same game that allows him to exist and represent himself. It seems like the manager is reciting Laing's poem: "They are playing a game. They are playing by not playing a game. If I show them that I see them playing I will breach the rules and they will punish me. I have to play their game, not showing that I see them playing.� It seems that reaching success implies a self-representation as a person of success, in order to allow someone else's look to give back the sense of our success, generating thus the feeling that we are successful persons for real. Inside this logic self-empowerment is frequently required and often a consultant acts inside the same logic, proposing his action and answering the request. There comes then the management adviser, the change agent, the coach, the tutor, the mentor, the counselor engaged in helping the manager by defining targets and strategic actions, finding solutions to his problems and developing his competencies. Too often the acting logics follow the same "development at all cost" logic spreading in almost every sector of our society. These are very brief paths (because time, you know, is never enough), often managed exclusively by phone (because the time and costs that we are raising for travel is not reasonable) by professionals "certified" by a mass of new associations, that will verify if the management scheme of communicative interaction will be applied and the main deontological rules featuring every helping relationship followed. Are there any psychological competences? No, because it is not about the mind. Are there any philosophical competences? No, because the approach is absolutely concrete and operative and its better not to lose time by chatting about philosophy. I do not think this is a serious approach. Often for the modern manager the time for himself is dedicated to the strengthening of specific skills, physical exercises, refreshment of hedonistic senses, but hardly ever is it a reflective time. When the adviser agrees to this request without opening a space to analyze the question, but simply by working on the given target in order to supply the comforting answer, he acts inside the same weird and directive logic leading to the prevalence of the role for the person.
3. Self-empowerment strategies A characteristic of our society is, indisputably, to interpret the reflection as not an action, but as being a waste of time.
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Nevertheless, only a deep reflection and a space of authentic relationship with oneself could grant to the manager that the life he is living is his own and not someone else's and only in this way is it possible to aim to live a life of excellence in which the roles we play will not become armors hiding us from ourselves, but dimensions that allow us to express, develop and achieve. Working through an effective empowerment perspective means working together with a person in the role: improving his self-awareness, promoting a reflection about targets and values, ensuring an elaboration space for emotions and experiences. The aim is to bring into question the answers taken for granted, trying to look at what we do, what we are and what we say, from a different perspective. We must help the person to focus on himself, rediscovering and bringing to light his values; leading him to gain a better awareness over his role inside the negative and positive events of his life; revaluating the priorities; planning the needed steps to reach his own objectives; pondering on his experience, emotion and conduct in order to revise his own behavioral modalities; finding space through the comparison in order to comprehend the behavioral schemes inside which he's used to working. All this demands the adviser to know how to move at a “meta” level in order to attend the manager in reflecting into his own paradigms and let him clear the way he looks at things, at the world and therefore at himself. He will clarify his own meaning of success, self-fulfillment and happiness. Moreover, the psychological competence is necessary to build the work alliance, in order to support the manager during this delicate path and to encourage the enactment of change. Working in an empowerment perspective means looking at the future: the adviser does not search for a historical truth during the interviews, trying to match the manager's report with his bibliography, as he knows that we become the story we tell, regaining in a new way the ownership of our past experiences and looking at the present and future experiences through the light of a further determined perspective. “Things happen to people who know how to narrate things.” The comparison begins from concrete situations and from future targets, granting an equal relationship between the adviser and the manager aiming at the comparison, the support and selffulfillment.
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