“What do you do?” asked a friend of mine as we drove to a music festival in Bilbao, 10 years ago. I had taken two calls from the car. In the first, I was part of team negotiating a €15M deal; on the second, I was asked to approve the purchase of a washing-up liquid. It’s not that one is better or more important than the other but the incongruency had not struck me until her simple question: “what do you do?”.
Frustration at work leads to multiple defective and ineffective outcomes. From the organizational perspective, it is inefficient, whining, energy sucking like the dementors in Harry Potter; but far worse, from the employee perspective it can lead to anxiety and stress which, it is no exaggeration to say, can be life threatening and toxic to relationships, both within and outside of the organisation.
So why do we feel frustration? I have a theory that a major source of professional frustration falls into 3 buckets:
1) the people “above” us disappoint us by being apparently irrational or incompetent
2) the people “below” us don’t live up to our expectations
3) realising that those above and below feel the same about us.
The conclusion is: everyone is somewhere in the middle, most of the time – this is inescapable. If you plot your career on a bell-curve, there will always be someone you answer to (a boss, an investor, a client…). This is the essence of my theory of Middle-Out Management i.e. Management is neither bottom-up nor top-down but actually “Middle-Out”. This is a different vision of work and workplace design.
My thesis is that the traditional vision of hierarchy as a vertical power structure while useful (and perceived to be) essential for corporate governance and for approving holiday requests, risks not accounting for human dignity and satisfaction at work. And this is a source of major frustration and this inefficiency, disengagement, and conflict in the workplace.
My friend’s question “what do you do” lead me to a reflection on exactly that. What DO I do?
I realized that what was making me frustrated was a misalignment of my expectations of spans of time. Frustration boiled when I was pulled (sometimes seemingly violently) from one span of time to another. For example, while thinking about and building a 5-year investment or strategic plan, a demand to deal with an immediate service recovery would provoke significant frustration. It is worth labouring here that one has no more inherent value nor dignity than the other. They are just different. But the crucial difference is the span of time. An illustration:
• The front-desk team’s span of time is the next client interaction.
• The shift manager’s span of time is the next 12-hours.
• The assistant manager is thinking in terms of the next week, maybe month.
• The GM is thinking about the month and quarter.
• The Regional Manager about the quarter and the year.
• The Divisional VP about the year and beyond.
• The EVP about the next 5 years
• The CEO about the legacy of the company.
So, this is not a vertical hierarchy, but a horizontal hierarchy based on spans of time. Frustration occurs when you drop one of those roles into the other; when my expectation is misaligned to what I am pulled to do. In other words, when you ask someone whose span of time is “next client interaction” to be involved in or be accountable for the month and quarter; or when you ask the owner of the quarter to deal with an immediate customer interaction, you will create a violent cognitive dissonance and provoke frustration.
Bringing this to the surface explicitly can help us to understand what is really causing the frustration we feel, and therefore hold the space for it (a phrase I have learned recently which I interpret as a kind of magnanimous patience and listening). After all, most requests to step out of our span of time are probably not unreasonable or toxic per se. But the unconscious ripping from our moment can be felt very violently. Developing mindfulness in these situations will alleviate allow the frustration to be understood and dissipate or ideally not arise in the first place.
I still don’t know the answer to my friend’s question. But until I discover it, I am trying to develop magnanimous patience and listening. I am trying to be explicitly aware of the source of my own frustration, and especially when I may be the source myself. For the former, I am learning; for the latter, I apologise. taken two calls from the car. In the first, I was part of team negotiating a €15M deal; on the second, I was asked to approve the purchase of a washing-up liquid. It’s not that one is better or more important than the other but the incongruency had not struck me until her simple question: “what do you do?”.
Frustration at work leads to multiple defective and ineffective outcomes. From the organizational perspective, it is inefficient, whining, energy sucking like the dementors in Harry Potter; but far worse, from the employee perspective it can lead to anxiety and stress which, it is no exaggeration to say, can be life threatening and toxic to relationships, both within and outside of the organisation.
So why do we feel frustration? I have a theory that a major source of professional frustration falls into 3 buckets:
1) the people “above” us disappoint us by being apparently irrational or incompetent
2) the people “below” us don’t live up to our expectations
3) realising that those above and below feel the same about us.
The conclusion is: everyone is somewhere in the middle, most of the time – this is inescapable. If you plot your career on a bell-curve, there will always be someone you answer to (a boss, an investor, a client…). This is the essence of my theory of Middle-Out Management i.e. Management is neither bottom-up nor top-down but actually “Middle-Out”. This is a different vision of work and workplace design.
My thesis is that the traditional vision of hierarchy as a vertical power structure while useful (and perceived to be) essential for corporate governance and for approving holiday requests, risks not accounting for human dignity and satisfaction at work. And this is a source of major frustration and this inefficiency, disengagement, and conflict in the workplace.
My friend’s question “what do you do” lead me to a reflection on exactly that. What DO I do?
I realized that what was making me frustrated was a misalignment of my expectations of spans of time. Frustration boiled when I was pulled (sometimes seemingly violently) from one span of time to another. For example, while thinking about and building a 5-year investment or strategic plan, a demand to deal with an immediate service recovery would provoke significant frustration. It is worth labouring here that one has no more inherent value nor dignity than the other. They are just different. But the crucial difference is the span of time. An illustration:
• The front-desk team’s span of time is the next client interaction.
• The shift manager’s span of time is the next 12-hours.
• The assistant manager is thinking in terms of the next week, maybe month.
• The GM is thinking about the month and quarter.
• The Regional Manager about the quarter and the year.
• The Divisional VP about the year and beyond.
• The EVP about the next 5 years
• The CEO about the legacy of the company.
So, this is not a vertical hierarchy, but a horizontal hierarchy based on spans of time. Frustration occurs when you drop one of those roles into the other; when my expectation is misaligned to what I am pulled to do. In other words, when you ask someone whose span of time is “next client interaction” to be involved in or be accountable for the month and quarter; or when you ask the owner of the quarter to deal with an immediate customer interaction, you will create a violent cognitive dissonance and provoke frustration.
Bringing this to the surface explicitly can help us to understand what is really causing the frustration we feel, and therefore hold the space for it (a phrase I have learned recently which I interpret as a kind of magnanimous patience and listening). After all, most requests to step out of our span of time are probably not unreasonable or toxic per se. But the unconscious ripping from our moment can be felt very violently. Developing mindfulness in these situations will alleviate allow the frustration to be understood and dissipate or ideally not arise in the first place.
I still don’t know the answer to my friend’s question. But until I discover it, I am trying to develop magnanimous patience and listening. I am trying to be explicitly aware of the source of my own frustration, and especially when I may be the source myself. For the former, I am learning; for the latter, I apologise.
Author: Christopher Holloway MIoD