Self-care and instrumentalisation
Self-care and instrumentalisation
It’s Friday afternoon and I have activated the out-of-office reply in my email (apparently one calls that OOO now). I’m going to be on holidays for two weeks. I will also pause my weekly reflections during this time.
The last few weeks have been very full. I would not say stressful just yet, but getting there. I started this job with a clear intent not to work like crazy but find a good balance of work and non-work time (to be clear, this is not about work-life-balance, work is a central part in my life and I’m enjoying it greatly). Working a lot is a thing in our organisation. Somebody described the situation as ‘heavy work overload.’ It’s really hard not to get sucked in, not to feel guilty to want to balance both work tasks and non work tasks and also within work, to balance reading, reflecting, meeting and production time. There is a huge lure to get into that space of busyness, with lots of things to do but not really making any progress.
These reflections reminded me that the roles we take up at work have the tendency to intstrumentalise the people who hold that role - or for the people to instrumentalise themselves for the role. I got the idea from a paper I read quite a while ago titled Organization Unbound (Nilsson 2007). It is a long essay on “The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations” (it’s really worth reading if you have the time and are interested in organisational development). Here’s an excerpt (p.14):
Another important dynamic to understand in any role system is that people come to be seen, and to see themselves, instrumentally. The function associated with the role is what mediates and defines the relationship. To me (and to yourself) you not only do accounting, you are an accountant. Accounting is what you are for. It is both the center and the limit of my experience of you. I might acknowledge intellectually that you are much more than an accountant. But if my daily interactions with you are rigidly circumscribed by your balance sheets and income statements, I end up thinking of you primarily in terms of what you can do for me and for the organization. You are an instrument, with no fundamental value other than your usefulness. Perhaps I seem to be stating this idea to [sic] strongly. Most of us acknowledge that accountants are people too. But the role dynamic is not simply about how we describe each other. We are perfectly capable of recognizing the limitations of our descriptions, after all. The role dynamic is about how we interact with each other. That is, I may believe at some superficial level that you are a whole person with essential value of your own unconnected to what you can do for me, but if I relate to you mainly in terms of what you can do for me, my superficial belief won’t matter much. Insofar as roles are our primary mode of interaction, we will continually reinforce a sense of compartmentalization and instrumentality in each other.
That scares me because, indeed, we use the concept of roles to describe the different functions in our foundation - people are then assigned to roles.
Here another quote in which Nilsson describes his own experience working for a non-profit organisation that worked in community organising (p.43):
The approach the organization took to its staff – in other words, the approach we took to each other – was primarily instrumental. We were there not to live and experience the organization’s values but to serve them. There was no person or group to blame for this state of affairs. The board and the executive director experienced the same dynamics as everyone else. They too were instruments. The organization itself was an instrument. The question of how one could be expected to facilitate democracy or build community when one’s daily relationships with other people contained little of either was simply not asked. Nor is it asked by most social change organizations. The giving arrow tends to fly in only one direction, and we accept this, because the work seems so important, so noble. When you are trying to lift people from poverty or give voice to the voiceless, what can your own seemingly smaller problems and yearnings matter? The fact that this attitude might make us relationally incapable of putting the organization’s values into practice is seldom considered. In fact, such instrumentalism is the hallmark of modern social movements and their children, social change organizations.
It is easy to instrumentalise yourself, particularly if you work for a noble purpose like supporting young people in developing counties or combating climate change. We need to give our whole selves to that task. But does ‘giving our whole selves to the tasks’ really mean we need to work long hours, write lots of emails, go to lots of meetings and be involved in as many things as possible? I think the answer is obvious. So how to find a balance?
Firstly, I don’t think it can be done by an individual, it needs to be a shared way of being in the organisation. The organisation, after all, is a collective of people who interact with each other. And whether you are seen as an instrument is a function of the relationships between the people and between you and yourself. Also if the values the organisations adopts are truly lived is a question of the relationships, that is not happening in the individual.
Secondly, I believe we are far away from a organisational paradigm where we could truly live such a model. Even our own organisation, which is adopting a ‘Teal’ way of organising, recognising the need to bring your whole self to work, still does not feel truly unbount.
‘Unbounding’ an organisation means to get away from organisations that are optimised to deliver the mission and values described in lofty words in some strategy document and thereby bounding people into roles, turning them into instruments, all the while ignoring the fact that these same values are not lived in the organisation itself. What Nilsson says is that we should not define an organisations value and then work for them, deliver them, but we should live the values in our work - and allow the organisation to shape around that.
A symptom of that is that it is often decried to talk about the organisation itself, our shared values and the way we want to work together. One of my colleagues recently asked something along the lines of ‘when can we go back and do our work?’ Or in other words: ‘when can we go back to be the instruments we all signed up to be?’ I think this misses the point that having conversations about how to live the values we adopt inside the organisation is as important as the work we deliver towards the outside. If I want to be provocative I could even say it’s more important. Only if we truly live our values, we will show up that way and inspire others to do the same. Which reminds me of something my mother used to tell me: you cannot tell a child how to behave, they anyway copy your behaviour.
I’m not going to go any deeper here but rather dedicate myself to my novel, my can of beer and lean back, looking forward to the two weeks of holidays ahead. (I have to confess, though, that I’ll need to do some work still …)
Reference: Nilsson, Warren. 2007. “Organization Unbound - The Spiritual Architecture of Organizations.” Working Paper.
The Paper Museum
From a new blog I discovered (h/t Tim G.):
My daughter (age 13) follows a YouTuber who makes videos of herself measuring objects or spaces using everyday things (she often uses Barbie dolls as the unit of measure), and the fact that my kid is willing to spend her time watching someone do this thrills me. Because I want her to connect to the fact that we can change the rules. (and the rulers, get it?! Ha!)
Read the whole thing. It’s worth it. We are making so much up that we think is ‘real.’ So much!
Photo
Photo from the Saxon Switzerland, where we will spend some time hiking during our holidays. Photo by Sangga Rima Roman Selia on Unsplash