The Authentic Organization

Thank you very much for the resources on authentic work that you suggested to me, in email and in the comments of my recent request. Now I have another favor to ask of you.

I’m planning on pulling together and submitting a proposal for this book soon. (And yes, I will post it all here first.) In addition to the outline, the market research (thank you) and so forth, one of the most important pieces of this proposal will be sample writing. You can help me select that writing by identifying the most compelling three to five posts in this blog.

To review the posts, you can just scroll back chronologically, if you want. Or you can use the site map. Or you can dive directly into the two categories that are likely to have the most promising material: You’ll find longer pieces that are already in the style that I intend to use for the book in the category entitled The Text. Shorter pieces that are not necessarily as well developed are usually in the category entitled The Ideas.

Can you do that for me? I’m too close to this material to tell and it’s quite clear to me that the core readers of this blog are a remarkably thoughtful and knowledgeable bunch. The three to five posts that you find most compelling would really give me something to work with.

Just feel free to submit your suggestions in the comments. You can just put in the titles, or you can add links, or you can even add your reasoning, if you feel like taking the time for that.

Thank you!

I’ve been in a cull-de-sac for much of the first half of this year in regard to my book The Authentic Organization. I had a breakthrough of sorts in the last few weeks, which involves a slight broadening of focus, a likely change of working title, a revised outline, and a request to my readers for some assistance. I write to you now to make that request.

I need to compile a superb reading list on the topic of authentic work. This list will naturally emphasize books, but I am open to academic papers, online articles or entire blogs, audio or video shows, and even just the names of experts. But mostly I’m interested in books. I will put this list to use in several ways, including: (1) I will use it as part of the market research for my book. (2) I will compile and publish the most interesting titles as a sort of reading list, with credit given to those who suggested them (unless you prefer to remain anonymous).

Each of us probably has their own notion of what authenticity in our work means, but that’s what many of my articles here have been exploring. Feel free to adopt a pretty liberal notion of the idea and when in doubt, go ahead and include the resource.

Please submit your suggestions (and links to them) in the comments. For spam prevention reasons, if you’ve never commented before, your first comment will be held up for approval, but after that your comments will appear immediately. Feel free to submit as many resources as you want. The most important thing is that you include the URL to the resource.

Imagine this scenario: You receive an unexpected inheritance that enables you to quit the job that has eaten up so much of your time, get some well-deserved rest, and then spend the time you previously dedicated to the job (and commuting to the job and recovering from the job) on your kids and your art. (This scenario assumes you have kids and are an artist.) I have never met anyone who would sincerely say that this would be a “work-life balance” problem. But why not?

The gut level answer is because there is no longer a job overwhelming you therefore things don’t feel out of balance. Of course, that suggests that it’s not a matter of balance at all, since you would expect the scale to tip radically out of balance if you removed one side entirely! But, unless you are trying to be literal about it, never having to hold down a job for money doesn’t really feel out of balance, does it?

This gut level is very important, for it signifies the passion and pain that’s wrapped up in this issue. I’ll return to it shortly, but there is another level at which we need to look at this scenario. It turns out that how we define the word ‘work’ really matters.

Are making art and raising kids not work? Of course they are. There are people who would point at an artist and tell them to get a “real job” and there are plenty of people who are clueless about childrearing, but these activities are both work in any meaningful sense of the word. If since they are in fact work, as was the job you quit in this scenario, then aren’t you working just as much as you were before? And in that case, isn’t there just as much of a “work-life balance” problem as there was before?

Balance versus Boundaries:

I was pleased by the thoughtful feedback I received on my recent piece on Why Work-Life Balance is a Bad Idea. Most people understood quite clearly that I wasn’t critiquing the notion of “balance” altogether. Balance is a useful concept and generally a wonderful aspiration. The physical metaphor of the word is powerful enough that we can truly feel it in our bodies. Without balance, we don’t go where we want to go. Without balance, we fall down.

So, given all that, why did I say that work-life balance is a bad idea? The antagonistic relationship set up between work and life in that phrase, when of course work is a part of life, has several negative corollaries. But I’m expressing myself very precisely. I was not, as one reader suggested, saying that “wanting work-life balance is a bad thing”. I was saying that the phrase is a bad idea, a flawed concept. As I said, I support much of the work-life balance movement, but ideas have power and this one paints us into a corner.

Admittedly, the title was deliberately provocative and I deserve every challenge that was forthcoming.

Most importantly, does this critique of work-life balance as a concept leave people with little protection against their jobs taking over their lives? Several readers expressed reasonable concern about this. Michael at Inhumandecency wrote that people want to “avoid worrying about their work 24 hours a day”. L. VanDervort wrote that “given no constraints, employers (or clients) will push for more time or productivity. They care not if your life is integrated or balanced. They just want more.” Resonance wrote that “I’d like to have my work duties not expand to take up all the time I’m not eating, sleeping, or showering, but it’s not in anyone’s individual interest to lower their demands on me”.

If we take ‘work’ to mean a job or paid employment, then I agree. Although there may be sweet exceptions worth studying, we do indeed need to be vigilant wherever someone has that sort of hold over our labor.

Furthermore, as readers clearly understand, the fact that we ourselves internalize our employers’ anxious demands for our time makes this entire dynamic a sharp and double-edged sword. As a coach and counsellor, I focus a substantial portion of my work on finding the line between the real pressures the employers and the forces of our economies bring to bear on our boundaries and the pressures we ourselves bring. Together, those pressures are indeed a deadly combination.

In regard to this exploration of “work-life balance”, what’s clear in our discussion is that we have been using the word “balance” when what we really seem to mean is “boundaries”. Boundaries keep things in their place. Balance suggests the same amount of two things on either side of a scale. Boundaries keep one of those things from oozing past the edge of its platter and taking over the other side.

Such boundaries are about us shaping the relationships and roles that, in turn, shape our lives. I’ll quote my readers on this. L. Vandevort wrote: “Balance is about knowing where to establish boundaries. Life with no boundaries is at the whim of everyone else.” Resonance wrote: “When I deliberately designate time as non-work time, it allows me to do things that are priorities for me but not for my co-workers.” Michael wrote: “Some want to have more than one passion in their lives, and make sure that they can have a job they care about without having to annihilate their interests in art, athletics, or social causes.”

Work as Self Expression:

The desire for boundaries doesn’t necessarily imply an alienation from work. On the contrary, if we’re alienated sometimes the boundaries come quite easily. Even if we love our work, poor boundaries can be destructive. As many of us experience, a love of work can foster the internalization of the pressures from which we would all like refuge from time to time.

The concern about fostering alienation that I articulated in my earlier article has nothing to do with the idea of boundaries or balance. It has to do with setting ‘work’ and ‘life’ in opposition to each other. Good boundaries don’t lead to alienation, but this false opposition does.

The idea of work should be reclaimed from our employers for our own use. We can’t wait to reclaim the word only after we have fully reclaimed the work itself. We’ll never find authentic work for any but a few lucky ones if we abandon the rhetorical landscape.

As we’ve learned all too well in the world of politics, framing matters. The importance of framing is something I’ve seen reflected in many years of seeing how their language and ideas allows people to slip back into an alienated posture in regard to work, even as they are fighting to transform it. It’s for this reason I chose “LifeWork” as the name for my career related practice.

There are barriers to work as self-expression, but they are not the obvious ones. Sonia Lyris wrote: “I think you can’t help but make work one thing and not-work another as long as work has money as compensation and not-work has something else as compensation.” But that’s an association we make, not a fact of life. Since when is ‘work’ only that thing for which you get paid? Do slaves not work? Do volunteers not work? Aren’t there other forms of compensation for work as well, such as the relationships involved, the craft and the learning, or even the outcomes themselves? Aren’t there things other than work that are compensated with money, such as owning for a living?

She goes on to describe exactly what every smart employer does: Find ways to get employees to give of themselves to something they may or may not really believe in. Since people are in fact wired to give of themselves, this often works. Over and over again. And I think we’re seeing the toll it takes.

No, the barriers to self-expression in work are about much more than money. They are the result of (at least) three things:

First, we buy into the idea that work is owned by someone else, that thing we get paid for, separate from life itself. Second, we give up control over huge parts of our lives to other forces. Some of this time is to employment, because we see no other way to feed ourselves and our families. Some of this time is to family commitments, which we may or may not take ownership of or choose to see as creative. Some of this time is devoted to habits and addictions. Third, we withdraw our identity from what we produce and shift it to what we consume. Some of that is because of how we feel about what we call “work” and some of that is because we feel our culture facilitates the establishment of affiliation and identity through patterns of consumption.

Better Ideas About Our Relationship to Work:

There are many better ideas out there that could replace the notion of “work-life balance”.

I tossed out the idea of integrity or wholeness in my earlier piece, but didn’t develop it very much. Naturally, some people are very worried about that concept, because to them it implies a lack of those very boundaries that we just discussed. But I would suggest that the opposite is true. Boundaries and integration go together. Maybe it’s just the biologist in me, but it seems that good boundaries are what make integration work. Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy.

It’s true, as Patty Hill pointed out that “the opportunity for such integration is limited”, but that doesn’t make it less of a valuable aspiration. First, the more we think of work as being our productive role in the world, rather than just that particular productivity for which we currently receive a formal paycheck, the more opportunities we will find for integration. Second, even traditional employment exists on a continuum and may present small opportunities here and there, even if it’s as simple as the “Take Your Child to Work Day” that Patty also mentioned. Sometimes, especially in social entrepreneurial situations and in many parts of civil society, the opportunities are far deeper. We have to see these doors in order to open them.

In addition to the theme of boundaries, there were two other suggestions for better ideas, neither of which is really inconsistent with the idea of wholeness.

The first one returned to the notion of balance, but dispensed with the dysfunctional opposition of work to the rest of life. For example, Patty Hill suggested that there is “a real struggle with Work-Family balance”. Of course, it’s employers (who, I repeat, do not own the idea of work) who find it hard to “respect family needs and events”. But that is a very real problem, particularly in the United States, as compared to the European social democracies. And as Kivi Miller, a “self-employed, work-at-home professional with two small children”, pointed out, it’s a problem even for people who are their own boss.

This idea of work-family balance is part of the very sensible larger notion that, as Michael pointed out, people have “multiple distinct domains in their lives that are worthy” of their attention. If one of these utterly displaces another, then people don’t feel whole. It would be like the lungs crowding out the heart.

The second alternative idea was presented by Nancy Barros, who wrote, “I would just like to say the ultimate for me is not work-life balance but rather life-work process. As we all know it is not the destination but what we experience along the road called life that gives us the greatest pleasure, satisfaction and rewards.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s how we engage the tensions and connections between work and the other parts of our lives that matters most.

Which seems as good a place as any to stop, for now.

Although I am firmly allied with the mission and spirit of all the professionals and organizations who use the term “work-life balance” as something to strive for, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s fundamentally flawed, a dangerous trap, an all-around bad idea.

Superficially Sensible

The concept is enormously popular – over 10 million results for “work-life balance” on Google as of this writing – and it’s easy to understand why.

• In the United States, the average number of working hours is probably the highest it’s been in seventy five years.
• Five million workers in the UK put in almost two months worth of unpaid overtime a year.
• Ninety percent of working adults said they are concerned they do not spend “enough time” with their families.
• Seventy percent said they don’t have a healthy “balance between their personal and work lives”.

It would certainly seem, on the surface, that “work” and “life” are out of balance.

Plenty of people will come to the defense of the idea of “work-life balance”. The defense basically comes down to this: “What? You think work and life should be out of balance? If not that, what could you possibly mean?” Most people seem either shocked or a little confused when they hear the assertion that work-life balance is a bad idea.

That confusion itself derives from being blinded by the frame of reference created by the very phrase in question. Bad ideas have a way of trapping us within their own terms. Bad ideas prevent us from assessing their utility by restricting us to the wrong questions. In this case: How do I keep my work in balance with my life? But that doesn’t sound like a bad question, does it? It sounds utterly sensible, until you look at the consequences.

Five Unfortunate Consequences

The consequences of the work-life balance idea all stem directly from the inherent meanings of the phrase: First, “Work” and “Life” are two separate things. Second, “Life” is in jeopardy from “Work” and must be protected from it. Third, the way to protect “Life” is to have it in some kind of equilibrium with “Work”. Inherent in the idea of work-life balance is fundamental separateness and opposition of work and life and therein lies the problem.

The fact is that work is a part of life, not in opposition to it. The fact is that what we all seek is joyful work-life integration, not some sort of painful detente. The fact is that work-life balance is the sad refuge of those who have decided that work is not worth saving.

There exist useful ideas that don’t fit the facts, but work-life balance isn’t one of those. Instead, there are five very unfortunate consequences to it: It reduces work to a job or a paycheck. It writes off work as an arena for change. It reinforces consumer culture as the dominant source of meaning in life. It encourages the retreat from the public sphere. And it jeopardizes the very private sphere it seeks to protect.

What is work? When we stop and think about it, we know that it’s not just what we get paid for. (We have a better word for that. It’s called a “Job”.) If we volunteered to do it, it would still be work. Similarly, there are things that we do for free that are justifiably called work. And yet, we persist in using the word to describe a necessary evil, something sadly distinct from play or love, from family or community. It helps us resolve the cognitive tension that comes from doing something we, at least at times, dislike. The result is a vicious cycle of distancing and neglect.

By writing off work as a part of our lives, we write it off as an arena for change. We think only of containing work (keeping it in “balance”) so that we can get on with the rest of our lives (which we call our “Life”). But to write off something as profoundly part of life as work is like writing off our bodies. These things are so connected to everything else, that we fight a losing battle, retreating further and further until there is almost nothing else that defines us as who we are.

One of the most powerful frames of reference left to us after we write off work as a source of meaning is our role as consumers. After all, work is about our role as producers in our culture. When we give up on work, a lot of what is left to us is the choices we make about what to buy and the relationships that are mediated by what we buy. We think about how we spend our money, rather than how we spend our time. And of course, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It may well be that one of the great drivers of consumerism is the consent we give to have work stripped of meaning.

It gets worse. By retreating from agency in our work lives, we lead a retreat from agency in the public sphere in general. Our political thinking shifts away from systemic analysis and citizenship is reduced to expressions of culture or concern with effects on private life. Even if we are otherwise engaged citizens, so long as we willingly pay a tax of a third of our weekday hours, the bulk of our productive energies are going to fuel an economic machine that commodifies every aspect of our lives.

Thus, in the end, even our so-called private life can’t be an authentic expression of ourselves. The human spirit being what it is, there will always be elements of our best selves that sneak out, no matter how commodified our private lives have become. Nevertheless, the choices available to us in our private lives are shaped by the world of work and at best we get to draw a smaller and smaller circle around the parts of our lives that are truly ours.

The Integral Alternative

The obvious alternative to the schizophrenic concept of work-life balance is healthy work-life integration. If our productive roles in the world were integrated with the rest of our lives, then they would be as much an expression of who we are and who we’re becoming as anything else. Just as importantly, there would be synergy. Work would support and be supported by our relationships, our home life, our community, our role as citizens.

This is not a new idea. Political thinkers of many persuasions have explored both the history and the future of a holistic notion of work. It’s been discussed by anthropologists, utopians, and career coaches alike. But the forces lined up against it are substantial, far more so than the mistaken survival driven notion of balance.

It’s important to acknowledge the numerous barriers to the concept of work-life integration. There are the obvious economic and social challenges. It’s a far taller order than retreating into a smaller and smaller circle of private life. There are also psychological barriers. The notion of balance has such appeal precisely because it allows us to temporarily dodge the tension that comes from aiming for what we really want.

The cheaper concept of balance is rhetorically dominant right now, if its millions of results on Google are any indication. Right now, there are exactly 346,000 results for “work-life integration”. By the time you read this, there should be 346,001. Will you add the next one?

After a lengthy break from the book caused by calamaties not worth describing here, I am back with the first draft of a high level outline of the book. It’s full of abstractions, of course, as something with one paragraph per chapter is likely to be. But something resembling a vision for the book is beginning to take shape. 

1. The Prisoner’s Journey: Losing the Battle for Meaning in the Workplace

In the Hero’s Journey, the protagonist ventures out into the world, endures and overcomes hardship, and returns to their community forever changed. People in the typical job tell something like the opposite of this uplifting narrative. We can look at nine very different jobs – attorney, social worker, teacher, sales manager, engineer, retail clerk, factory worker, service employee, and political aid – and find that they all tell a tale of losing the heroic battle for meaning in the workplace.

2. Work is a Dirty Word: The Personal and Social Costs of Inauthentic Work

As opposed to the simple meaning of effort directed at a purpose, the word “work” has come to mean on oppressive obligation with which nobody could possibly identify, except as a means to an end. Indeed, search for meaning in church, home, and even in our shopping, because we are told to leave that search at the door, when we go to work. Although not all jobs are entirely or equally alienating, by and large the modern organization is an engine of inauthenticity. Whether measured in terms of human well being, environmental or social impacts, or simple loss of meaning in our lives, the costs of this inauthenticity are vast.

3. The Origin of Meaning: Defining the Language of Genuine Work

Words have power. The word “authenticity” derives from a Greek word pertaining to origin and authorship. It’s a much abused but powerful word that speaks to deep issues of integrity and genuineness. Along with words such as alienation, meaning, candor, work, freedom, and community, this forms the beginning of a vocabulary for exploring the authentic workplace.

4. The Economics of Fear: Barriers to Authenticity

Fear comes in many flavors. We fear disappointment, disapproval, failure, and loss in many different forms. We also experience undirected fear, in the form of what might be called generalized anxiety. Together, fear and anxiety play an enormous role in economy of work. The breakdown of communities and the structures of labor markets both reflect and reinforce that role, yielding a system in which people get stuck, both materially and psychologically. Whether it’s as tangible as health care or providing for children or as intangible as status and sense of identity, the barriers to authenticity are very real.

5. Purpose, Practice, People, and Pay. The Four Sources of Work Satisfaction

It can be useful to think of work satisfaction as flowing from an abbreviated version of Maslow’s Hierarchy: At the bottom of the hierarchy is the material reward, which in modern economies comes largely in the form of a paycheck. Next is the relationships we form with the people we work with and the people we serve. Higher still is the set of skills and abilities that we display and develop in the actual practice of our work. And highest of all is the purpose of the work itself. Deep integrity in our work comes when these four sources of satisfaction are holistically related to each other. When they are poorly related to each other, we get situations like a previously wonderful task becoming loathsome drudgery when it’s turned into a job. The most important question about sources of satisfaction is about their impact on the ability of the person to make authentic choices.

6. It’s Never Just a Job: The Destructive Power of External Rewards

The other important aspect of the relationship between sources of work satisfaction is the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for the work. There are scores of studies showing how rewards that are not intrinsic to a task are ineffective and counterproductive, particularly on their effect on motivation. Furthermore, there are higher order systems impacts and feedback loops affecting work cultures, management structures, hiring and training, and leadership, all of which profoundly undermine the authenticity of the organization.

7. Outcomes Matter: Organizational Vision and Mission

The most significant way in which an organization connects authentically to its people is in regard to the common enterprise that brings them all together. The reason the ultimate purpose of an organization is often avoided or finessed in conversation is precisely because of how much that sense of ultimate purpose matters to people. The classic concepts of vision (a shared view of a better world, however modest) and mission (a shared sense of how to pursue that vision) play an important role in making room for people’s best selves.

8. Skills Matter: Taking Pride in Our Essential Character as Makers

Human beings are innately curious and innately creative. If they can’t take pride in the outcomes of their work, at least they can take pride in what they are doing and in what they are learning to do. We form genuine peers – whose respect we seek – based more on our craft than on what we have crafted. We love to be good at something and we love even more to become good at it. Most games wouldn’t be so popular if this wasn’t a fundamental human motivation.

9. Relationships Matter: How the Same Task Can be Either Chore or Service

We do things for others. We make things for others. If we can’t relate to the people we’re supposedly serving, then we start to act as though we’re doing what we’re doing for the people who serve along side of us. (This is what happens in the military, among many other places where the scale of service is challenging to comprehend.) We work hard when we are allowed to express our passion for others and we work best when that passion is in alignment with our genuine affinities.

10. True to Whom: Authenticity and the Common Good

Promoting authenticity doesn’t magically dissolve any of the classic conflicts between individuals and the common good, but it does suggest a different sort of container for them. The authentic organization has room for conflict, so that it can be resolved. The authentic organization has room for experimentation, at every level, so that innovation can thrive. Finally, greater effective mobility between organizations, designed so that it serves the organizations themselves, can be an important facilitator of alignment between individuals and organizations. Is it possible to work within an organization, but for a community?

11. Money, Money, Money: The Economic Consequences of Authenticity

The relationship between money (or material resources) and authenticity is a question of integrity. But this question is not answered with a simple yes or no, but rather with rich qualitative assessments of alignment. Gathering fruit to feed yourself and your family might be highly aligned. Gathering fruit as a migrant laborer is less likely to be so. Authenticity, with this consistent emphasis on integrity, clashes with industrial models of social organization and control. At the same time, there is no question that as both consumers and producers, people yearn for authenticity. The economic consequences of authenticity can therefore best be examined at several levels: a personal commitment to authenticity in the context of the modern labor markets, team commitments to authenticity in the context of traditional organizational structures, organizational commitments to authenticity in the context of modern economies, and broader social and economic initiatives, with a goal of authenticity.

12. Toward Human Shaped Containers: Organizational Structures and Practices

The human race’s gift for learning is also its curse. We can adapt to the most appalling of situations and, if they persist, we can develop cultures to perpetuate that adaptation. And in so doing, of course, we often perpetuate the very situations to which we have adapted. These cycles mean that our social forms – including our organizational structures and practices – are well matched to our psyches, and vice versa. But neither are well adapted to our hearts. Some particular business functions seem more and less shaped to authentic human participation

13. Inspiration and Priorities: The Role of Leadership

Although structural elements are informed by and in turn inform the practice of leadership in organizations, leaders have a unique role in supporting or undermining authenticity. Structural elements are often somehow invisible, whereas the actions of leaders become the plot elements of the stories that we tell – in our heads, in our homes, and in our organizations. Leaders set examples. Leaders set priorities. Leaders shape the space available for people in an organization.

14. Idealism and Realism: The Role of the Individual

This is not black and white. Organizations are not just authentic or inauthentic and neither are individuals. Instead there is a continuing dialectical process that unfolds in both the inner and outer contexts of work. Ultimately, therefore, we’re more interested here in the process of becoming than in simply being. That is to say, we’re interested in choice. That then is the role of the individual in the process of creating authentic organizations: to synthesize and integrate both our idealism and our realism as we work to open up ourselves and our organizations.

15. Personal and Social Change: The Promise of the Authentic Organization

Ultimately, there is nothing new about the notion of an authentic organization. Oppressive and alienating institutions have been the subject of philosophical, economic, and political analysis for generations. The power of concept derives from its ability to merge two arenas of change that, in our culture, often remain very separate: the arena of personal change, dominated by self-help books, gurus, therapists, and productivity blogs; and the arena of social change, dominated by activist organizations and movements. Often, they are in conflict with each other and devolve into their own patterns of powerlessness. Their key point of overlap between these two forms of change is in regard to genuine meaning in the work of our lives. That work takes place in organizations.