Why do I feel like a machine at work?
So many say to me, “I’m just a number at my company”. As an executive coach I hear these words so often. And each time, I hear the hollow words, the aching soul that just longs to feel like that are part of or organization that is more human. But what does that mean, more human?
Our current pace of life involves endless complexities and demands placed upon companies by the stock market, competition, government regulations and a global pandemic. This causes much pressure to produce, to perform, to beat out the competition. If you stand still, the competition will eat your lunch.
Make money and get along
As we prepare to enter the second quarter of 2021 and year two of a global COVID pandemic, what have we lost in our corporate cultures if so many talented, highly trained and credentialed people feel like they are nothing more than a machine? How did we get to such a place in corporate America? In western corporate life? Is this current corporate culture what baby boomer leadership has left us as their legacy?
I remember when I started my first job out of college in the 1980’s with a degree in international business and a minor in French, one of the owners of the company said to me, “Sachsenmaier, all you need to do here is two things: make money and get along!” At one level, this septuagenarian gave me basic wisdom from his own decades of his vocational journey. When he said these words, I walked back to my office and thought to myself, “something is missing in that command.”
Fortunately for me and unfortunately for that company, I was on a quest for a more meaningful corporate life. After a few years, it was time to move on. I packed my bags to begin a decades’ long search for a corporate life and culture that would awaken and deepen something in me as a human being. I did not want to be a highly-paid corporate machine.
Looking for human corporate culture
After almost 40 years of a corporate and vocational journey, I am coming to the realization that, although I never had words for it before, I’ve been seeking a more human corporate culture. You may be asking “what does that mean?” Others of you may be saying, “yes, that’s what I’m looking for too.” So, what do I mean by a more human corporate culture? Ironically, the basic elements that cause human beings to thrive in families, marriages, and friendships are some of the same things that make people thrive at work.
Guess what? I am the same human being at home as I am at work.
One vital aspect that creates and sustains thriving human corporate culture is authenticity.
Authenticity: Freedom to be me
Often at work, I feel I must over-accommodate and over-adapt to other people’s expectations of who I am and how I am to behave. Then I have entered into “role and soul deterioration.” I am out of alignment with my true self. I am not centered and grounded in the fullness of what makes me uniquely me. I have left my “home-base,” so to speak. And when we don’t live and work from our home base, our lives, our very souls begin to wilt.
How did we corporate Americans get so far afield in creating and molding work cultures where few are thriving as human beings and are living more like a corporate machine. As more and more millennials take the helm of leadership, we can pause to ask ourselves these hard questions. We can look inside our own corporate souls and be bold and courageous enough to choose a better path. We can choose a corporate path and culture that awakens transformative human leadership so work and life overflow with dignity purpose and beauty.
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