Being a Human Being at Work

I just finished reading the article from Lars Daalgard — General Partner at Andreesen Horrowitz — in the NYT about the importance of daring to be human at work. You rarely find people speaking so freely and reflected about the necessity for everyone to show that they are vulnerable human beings — no matter in which context.

For me it has been a long journey to figure out why people in a professional environment put on this professional mask. Lars says: “I think it’s because we’ve been brought up thinking that when you’re in a business role, if you show any emotion, then that’s the opposite of being tough.” — I think it goes much deeper than that.

The massive increase of information has changed the workplace

We need to thoroughly ask ourselves the question why people in a professional setting act differently. Is it really about how people were brought up or is it because of the environment they are placed in. When we look at the history of the relationship between work and human beings we find some interesting clues. When the organisational structure of the church was the dominant organisational structure of the Western World, the human being equaled his job. The pope was the pope. When he went to bed at night he went to bed as the pope. The uniform that he wore clearly defined him as the pope. Around 300 years ago this has changed in our society. The human being and his professional role became more and more separated through more innovative forms of organisational structures. This wasn’t a big issue until the amount of information that needed to be processed by each professional role started reaching levels where a clear separation between the human being and his professional role had to be made — otherwise the professional role would have been overloaded. This is how the term work/life balance came into the game.

The gap between the official corporate structure and the ideal corporate structure

The reality is that the currently dominant organisational structure does not allow for the employees to bring humanity to the workplace. Why? Because the speed of the technological advancements and the massive increase of information generated on our planet (in the last 12 months more information was generated than in the entire history of human kind) has led to a giant decrease of efficiency in the traditional professional environment. The difference between the way that an organisation should be structured in order to cope with the speed of the outside world compared to how it is (officially) structured becomes larger day by day. Corporations try to solve this with the common tools of change management. There is a big correlation between the increase of data and the amount and the frequency of change management projects in traditionally structured corporations. Change Management Projects try to close the gap between the official structure and the informal structure that was created to still be somewhat operationally productive. But as soon as the Change Management Project is finished again an informal structure is created very quickly. Because only in this informal structure you get shit done. And informal structures are based on relationships.

(Mis)using relationships becomes an advantage in traditional workplaces

As a rational human being the most rational thing to do in such an environment is to (mis)use relationships at the workplace to move stuff forward. In fact having a good relationship to key decision makers (e.g. your boss) will make you have a much bigger impact then you focusing on working productively. This creates an environment where politics and manipulations become a valid tool to get shit done. An environment where you have to make a good impression when your boss walks past you. An environment where other people who want to make a good impression on your boss might talk negatively behind your back. An environment where you need to figure out who the important guys are and where anytime spent with unimportant people is wasted time. An environment where having a lunch with the right guy and making the right joke brings you further professionally than years of work. The natural reaction to such a hostile environment is the professional mask. As a human being you are trying to protect the things that are most valuable to you (your mom, your mistakes, your passions) and carry as little of it as possible to this evil workplace.

Before we expect of the people around us to be more human, we need to change the environment that these human beings are working in — not superficially, but substantially.

Get my blog posts by e-mail. Sign up here.