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Dolphin Relationship Aquarium
WHAT MAKES WORK MEANINGFUL?
THINKING ALLOWED
DENNIS JAFFE, Ph.D.: It's great to be here. MISHLOVE: You know, most of the classical literature on the world of work and the world of labor focuses in on the topic of alienation. The existentialists, the Marxists -- I mean, revolutions have been based on this notion that workers are alienated from their work. It's a major problem today, I would think. JAFFE: Well, the modern form of alienation, and the modern word for it, is burnout. We have a lot of people who are de-energized, bored, apathetic, totally disconnected from their work. What I think is happening -- and some people have even suggested that there's a major shift in the whole way in which people work together -- is that people are seeing it's not inevitable that organizations be run in a way where one person has power, has all the fun, gives the orders, and then everybody else is passive, inert, dependent, and alienated or burned out -- that there's another way to run the organization where power is seen in a completely different way, and where the experience of being in the organization is very, very different for everybody. MISHLOVE: In other words, what you're saying is there are other ways for workers to empower themselves besides engaging in Marxist revolution. JAFFE: Right. Well, revolution was the old form of throwing off the bosses, and I think in a lot of studies of revolution the real difficulty came when people threw the owners out and then they had to run it themselves, and they found themselves getting into the same patterns of dominating each other and a kind of repressive use of power. MISHLOVE: Because they hadn't really changed their basic methods of communication. JAFFE: Well, the inner thing is somebody is in charge, and somebody is being told what to do. MISHLOVE: What you're suggesting, I gather, then, is that for individuals to find meaning in their work, they have to, in effect, take charge of their situation somehow. JAFFE: Well, it's ironic, but to use it as a starting point, a workplace where everybody is in charge -- I mean, it's an interesting concept, but it isn't really so fantastic when you look around at a lot of the kinds of things that happen in the workplace. You know what you do; you know where you fit in; you know kind of what the whole place is trying to achieve, and how things are organized; a and then pretty much you can be in a situation where you are in charge of figuring out how to do that. Whether you're a hotel clerk, or even nowadays working on assembly lines, you can be much more in charge of not only what you do, but also see yourself as contributing to the whole organization. MISHLOVE: It sounds idealistic in some ways, and yet I would imagine that there are some drawbacks. I mean, look at the Reagan White House. We can't let everybody be in charge. JAFFE: Well, that's an interesting example, because we joked a lot that right before the whole Contragate thing there had been a cover story in Fortune magazine -- Reagan the manager saying, "Well, my way of managing is to get good people and just cut them loose to do their best job." And then everybody's saying, "Well, here we have Oliver North," the Reagan manager par excellence." I think that what went wrong is that's one part of it, is empowering people, and I guess you have to say that in the Reagan White House there was a sense of empowerment, certainly in the National Security Council staff, but what there wasn't was a trust of other people and a trust of open communication, which is another part, I think, of the new style of management, where you're going to manage yourself. There's a concept that we call alignment, and that's where everybody knows what direction they're going. Using the White House example, people just did not really know how to fit in with each other's efforts, and there certainly wasn't an effort made to really fill people in, to get suggestions, to say, "Well, how can we do this better?" The new organization is what we call very richly entwined, because people have to speak to many, many more people in order to get their job done. That's another aspect of empowerment, is you really have to do a lot of checking in and maneuvering, as it were. END of Part I Join us next month for a continuation of this interview.
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