Note: CONTENT WARNING - some of this content is about upsetting, disturbing or triggering events & attitudes. Seek competent help - including professional - if you need it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that linked articles may contains names and/or images of deceased people. READER CAUTION IS RECOMMENDED! For anyone distressed by anything in this post, or for any other reason considering seeking support, resources are available in Australia here, here, and here. In other nations, you will have to do an Internet search using terms such as “mental health support - <your nation>” (which, for instance, may lead to this, this, and this, in the USA, or this, this, and this, in France [biased towards English-language - my apologies]), or perhaps try https://www.befrienders.org/.
I have just done another post in my recovering from a corporate life series (details below), and there is one point I wish to add about one behaviour that added to the damage done:
- company-biased, anti-human feedback
I have touched on this in previous posts on this and my main (spirituality/Paganism) blog, but the aspects of this that I wish to particularly (if briefly) mention today is:
when promoted up the chain, I have encountered some companies (not all) that will take what was extraordinary at a lower (or, in some cases, any) level, and declare that it merely “meets expectations” ...
That is extremely discouraging, to the point of being emotionally damaging to sensitive people, and contributed - in my case - to the sorts of problems I encountered - including, in particular, burnout.
Basically, why bust my guts doing exceptional things if they are trivialised into invisibility?
Some people may find that ... a mark of belonging to that upper level, I suspect, but I certainly don’t - and if any management is incapable of adapting systems to suit differing characters, then they are, in my opinion, incompetent.
It harms the performance and loyalty of staff, and thus harms the company - especially when people leave your transactional system suddenly for something that is better for them and the people in their life that they care about.
When people ask for feedback, or when planning feedback systems, it is important to remember that they are human beings, not machines, and if you are trying to set up a system that is based on producing ultra-loyalist, verging on slavish, roboticised worker drones, including management worker drones, you deserve every failure (especially loss of mental diversity, flexibility and innovation from the barriers you are setting up to creative, original, innovative people - not to mention the problems of more cynical staff) and liability problem (someone one day will quite possibly take legal action that includes such matters) you encounter.
Feedback used to have a focus on the worker; companies recognised that happy, fulfilled workers would be more productive than miserable robots. There was a push back on that started somewhere, I don’t know where, by some ... less astute managers who, in their incompetent assumption that all humans - or all humans in that company - are like them and motivated by the same things as them (which I speculate are quite possibly the KPIs that the manager gets rewarded for ... ), and that led to the inclusion of company goals, which was probably a fairer balance, but then went further and left the worker with no acknowledgement or plans for what mattered for them.
If you are stuck in a such a system, I hope you have the good fortune I did to find managers who are capable of working around the imposed limitations to give you a breath of sanity, hope, and meaning.
That post I mentioned is:
- Post No. 2,735 - Recovering from a corporate life - Episode 28: A review of my energy levels and activity over the last six months (14th March, 2024).
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan
Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post.
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