In the late, 1990s, and I do not recall which specific summer
it was –the heat of the road was scorching dry near the Kshipra river, as I
braved the industrial fumes of a factory in whose precincts we were attempting
to foray an Organization Development intervention. I was interviewing a workman
on the shop-floor of a soya mill in Indore’s industrial hills. In trying to
understand how the workman made emotional reserve for the workplace
environment, I was curious as to how the respondent would perceive the health
benefits facilitated by the employer. Given the wage limits determining
coverage under the Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), I was keen on
knowing how their services were accessed and consumed.
From the more direct and forthright portrayal of his
employer’s orientation to health benefits, he was now coming to the zone of
interface between the firm and its environment. He was beginning to get comfortable
in responding, but looked distraught enough to warrant my curiosity. I asked
point-blank in youthful bravado, if it was to do with harassment for bribes at
the ESIC. Even more relieved, he was coming to the poignant zenith of
disclosure. In chaste Hindi he quipped “Saab,
ab yeh mat puchiye hamein, ki machli kitna paani me – ya paani kitna, machli
mein”. (“Don’t ask me how much of the fish is in the water – or how much of
water is in the fish”). The rustic
diplomacy that descended from the man stumped me, and had me in a long pause of
the interaction there.
He was at once acknowledging the phenomenon of corruption,
and also pushing back on the enquirer in me to hold my reserve enough to hold
up the workman’s dignity. Such conversational brilliance seldom befalls me from
the dust and grime of India these days. The respondent now strikes me as having
self-esteem expressed with a poise that is unlikely to have been achieved
without reflective oscillations between tempest and salvation in the struggle
to stay employable in an economically unforgiving social context.
In the recent months gone by, I have come to a certain insight
during the curation of data. My clients who take up assessments before they
determine their development goals, come from managerial cadres, and find the
transitioning to leadership a platform on which a lifetime’s effort is met with
a decisive crossroads. Here are some trends below. Indeed, they are to do with
self-esteem, but its correlates are not also linear or entirely generalizable.
Nonetheless, they may represent a sliver from which we may infer many
possibilities.
Let me begin first by acknowledging the root inspiration for
this piece of writing. I have had several people talk about self-esteem as
being a unidirectional trait – that it is either low or high, but have also
classified it as a human psychological need that requires fulfillment. On the
other hand, Nathaniel Branden who first extolled the virtues of self-esteem has
also made allowance for it to be treated as an accomplishment or an act of
achievement. Some treat it as an inner
dynamic of the person, while others are open to the influence of the person’s
external environment in playing a role in the nurture or development of
self-esteem. So let me quote Nathaniel Branden himself here :
Self-Esteem is
1. Confidence in our ability to think, confidence in our
ability to cope with the basic challenges of life and
2. Confidence in our right to be successful and happy,
the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants,
achieve our values, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts.
For purposes of reflection, here are a few of my insights,
or let’s say formative hypotheses from immersive engagements with professionals
in Indian work contexts, that have sprung up from self-esteem confines.
1.
Gender has a role, but it is a social bias
more than a personal bias to begin with – and it’s effect at the workplace is likely
to be in a continued state of flux. I have in the recent past seen two kinds of
effects with regard to self-esteem among women coachees. The first one is the
more difficult to address via coaching in the workplace. Due to social gender
stereotyping, as in a barrage of media through rite, ritual and unquestioned
convention, women tend to develop low self-acceptance. In fallacious extension
of physical might of the male, they surrender even psychologically to the will
of the male. They try to overcompensate with a striving to self-correct as if,
their concept of self will be decided on norms set by the male. This leads to
approval seeking at the workplace too decades after receiving gender
discriminating signals, when in fact, mastery over an instrumental skill may be
more important. Self-esteem eludes them for not being able to accept one’s
imperfections without hating oneself. The other ‘syndrome’ at work is about women
with self-esteem developing an uncritical socialisation style of the more
dominant male gender. This includes an unassailable forthrightness to the point
of being curt and at times appearing exploitative for lack of empathy with
others. Even after women become aware of
the roots of their behavior, coping with their realities has often been a
struggle to stay the distance, due to long years of operant conditioning.
For women who
have self-esteem, that is a dynamic balance between self-acceptance and
self-improvement, exerting their interpersonal power in emotionally congruent
ways has been easier, especially when organizations structure opportunities suited
to their career pursuits. It has been more of an unspoken nightmare otherwise,
despite their social facility in implementing task demands in less benign
opportunity structures.
2.
Social
Intelligence has a role – and it’s role in learning about human
preferences and effectiveness is enlightening us due to insights from
neurosciences and social psychology both. For example, Baron-Cohen has a
theory of extreme male and extreme female brains, that speak to laser logic for
the male and adroit empathy for the female prototype. In a biological frame, it
is known that boys are ten times more likely to develop Asperger’s syndrome and
four times more likely to develop autism symptoms than girls. While this may
lead to some needless stereotyping, the language of making the journey from
shallow feminine to deep feminine and further to shallow masculine and deep
masculine is also known (Richard
Rohr’s work for example).
The sad news is that we do not
design organisations yet on this principle of wholeness, as the norm is to yet
pass around numbers that speak to gender ratios, barely scratching at the
surface of deep tensions society presents. It has already embedded within it
through its social mores, rites of passage and rituals of dysfunctional
control.
Goleman
accedes thus in his book on Social Intelligence “ Neuroscience has
discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn to
an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That
neural bridge lets us affect the brain – and so the body – of everyone we
interact with, just as they do us.”
In the multiple interactions we
have in social milieu we’re part of, the effervescence of connecting with other
people, transpire deep connect, even subliminally. At the same time, we’re
bombarded with information highways that causes us to disconnect with others,
despite symbols of connectivity that surreptitiously compound social, emotional
and possibly economic costs as well. I often surmise for fellow professionals,
that one of the most silent epidemics among cadres I coach is that of
maladapted masculinity – of being unable to get to the point of vulnerability or
authentic change potential, in growth hungry corporate settings – where appearing
to be weak is seen as taboo. Humility
is a underrated strength.
3.
Empathy is a divisible compound – Several
years ago, when I was being trained to be a developmental coach, I was
introduced to a competency known as Accurate Empathy. In experiential learning
of the theme, we were impressed upon to listen in for data in conversations
that were of intent, feeling and content nature. While that may still be useful
in listening deeply, empathy itself runs through neural circuits that signify the
following forms from top-down to the bottom-up brain circuits
a.
Cognitive Empathy – the ability
to focus on what other people experience without losing touch with one’s own
emotions
b. Emotional
Empathy – the spontaneous attunement to others’ feelings in
bodily resonance
c.
Compassion/Concern Empathy – the proximal
action oriented care and concern for others
So what’s that do with
self-esteem you may ask? In my experience in dealing with professionals across
sectors, it is astounding to note that one can be mind blind – that is
impervious to empathetic concerns even as one’s self-esteem is intact! This is
a trigger for sparking off structured opportunities in interactive variety. On
the other hand, it is also possible to have the female brain of Baron-Cohen
extremes in the male, with low assertiveness of personal power or poor
self-acceptance in frank, planful, and organized males. This makes for
challenging coaching conversations and indeed creative exploration of
possibilities in empowering the present for meaningful futures.
4.
Systems Thinking draws more from inner intuition
and is yet more data-intensive : - I go back to the shop-floor
worker who summoned to my attention his immersive experience in his social
context. With faculties available to him, and without a handheld device to
support his data processing, he curated that moment between us in a
communicative finesse that makes for the roots of effective decision making,
strategic engagement and forthright diplomacy. He analysed his data, reviewed
its shortcomings, risked an opinion in the face of social class divides, and made
no compromise with the truth. In creative embedding through metaphor, he
swelled his chest at the zenith of disclosing his dilemma from the zone of
human values, with no sign of dogma or inane open-endedness. He vulnerably
embraced an opportunity for his own development with an unabashed pride, making
his self-esteem a product of apparently irreconcilable self-improvement and
self-acceptance. His leaders were grappling with larger system cognition
assuming that internal systems of human resource management were sufficiently
dealt with. He had his theory of everything he experienced with laws of general
nature implicit in the norms of his phenomenal world; including of course the
permeability between social systems. Today’s challenges that afflict modern
managers are not only about resiliently navigating ambiguity – but also in
specifying the data slices from which to prune insights as a curator of ever
burgeoning big-data, even to do with disease outbreak lead signals.
As I round off this piece, am
reminded of a few talismans in intervention practice. One is that of working on
the system, rather than on units within it per se. So, when organisational
malaise is detected at a systemic level, one may believe that individuals at the
level of units, or professional systems at the level of groups may self-govern
in autopoetic
abundance. When dealing with individuals as in some examples from which this
piece is inspired, one sees organisations and systems of the past creeping in
on the present in unkempt and unresolved tensions, so much so that system
levels of the present may perpetuate if not precipitate similar individual
malaise if left festering in the present. Do we have much choice but to deal at
both ends of the whole together? In closing, perhaps, just as it is self-acceptance
and self-improvement for self-esteem, organisation sponsors may have to
consider the individual and the larger system, and not merely a specific
symptomatic part. What’s been your experience on this frontier?
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