I received a question from a reporter concerning the degree to which employees tie their identities to their jobs and the effect of layoffs on issues of identity.  Here is my take on those questions:

• Most (I think the majority but I don’t think anyone has hard data) employees are involved in a dependency relationship with their employer – not just for a paycheck but for their sense of identity, relevance, and self-esteem.
• As a result of employee relations and management strategies to tie employees in over time, in a sense employees place too many of their social and emotional eggs in the organizational basket.  When the basket is inevitably dropped, employees loose a lot more than a paycheck – they loose their sense of purpose and their primary social and emotional reference group.
• A question I ask employees is, “If who you are is where you work, what do you loose when you loose your job?”  The answer is almost always a lot more than a paycheck.
• I have found the identity crisis is usually vested in the organization, not a job title.  Job titles vary and employees in different companies doing the same work can be called anything from a vice president to a section supervisor.  The time job title identity seems to happen is with top executives during the first month of looking for another job.  They soon both lower their sights, and realize their true issues are with a codependent relationship with an organization, not a specific job title.
• In our culture, most male layoff victims, try to “suck it up” and mask the depth of their codependent identity issues.  They usually need help from a professional to externalize their pent up and debilitating identity issues.  I have found that there is a gender difference.  Women layoff victims seem to find it easer to talk about what they are going through.  This, however, is not always true and there is a hierarchy effect.  The higher a person was in an organization before being laid off the more difficulty they find it to externalize their emotions.
• Another finding from my research is that many managers and executives tend to play out what I call the uninformed rebound effect.  They don’t learn from their experience, move into a new job, and find themselves in a worse situation than the one they left.  They are unable to use a layoff as a wake-up call and don’t take charge of their own life and career.

I think we are living with the results of an employee relations strategy that has backfired in today’s world of downsizing and layoffs.  Most employees are facing an identity crisis and most organizations have norms that prevent being open about it. Here are some points:

Most (I think the majority but I don’t think anyone has hard data) employees are involved in a dependency relationship with their employer – not just for a paycheck but for their sense of identity, relevance, and self-esteem.

As a result of employee relations and management strategies to tie employees in over time, in a sense employees place too many of their social and emotional eggs in the organizational basket.  When the basket is inevitably dropped, employees loose a lot more than a paycheck – they loose their sense of purpose and their primary social and emotional reference group.

A question I ask employees is, “If who you are is where you work, what do you loose when you loose your job?”  The answer is almost always a lot more than a paycheck.

I have found the identity crisis is usually vested in the organization, not a job title.  Job titles vary and employees in different companies doing the same work can be called anything from a vice president to a section supervisor.  The time job title identity seems to happen is with top executives during the first month of looking for another job.  They soon both lower their sights, and realize their true issues are with a codependent relationship with an organization, not a specific job title.

In our culture, most male layoff victims, try to “suck it up” and mask the depth of their codependent identity issues.  They usually need help from a professional to externalize their pent up and debilitating identity issues.  I have found that there is a gender difference.  Women layoff victims seem to find it easer to talk about what they are going through.  This, however, is not always true and there is a hierarchy effect.  The higher a person was in an organization before being laid off the more difficulty they find it to externalize their emotions.

Another finding from my research is that many managers and executives tend to play out what I call the uninformed rebound effect.  They don’t learn from their experience, move into a new job, and find themselves in a worse situation than the one they left.  They are unable to use a layoff as a wake-up call and don’t take charge of their own life and career.

The late Bill Bridges, author of one of the best books on personal change in an organizational environment – Transitions – indicated in both his writing and speaking, that the concept of having a “job” was a very recent phenomenon.   

 According to Bill, in the not so distant past,  people were self-employed as tradesmen, farmers, serfs or noblemen, or warriors/soldiers.  There were no jobs as we envision them.

 Another perspective comes from the work of the German sociologist/philosopher, Max Weber.  He is known as the father of bureaucracy but not in the negative sense that it is seen today.  His concept of bureaucracy was formulated to counter the idea that a person’s class and role was a function of his or her birthright, not of skills or talent.  Thus, he came up with the unique idea of separating the “office from the officer,” and developed a new concept now called a “job description.”

 As downsizing and the new employment contract unfold, many people are finding that their livelihood is more a function of their skills and adaptability than of any concept of a permanent job.  

 As politicians continue to lament the lack of “jobs” and blame each other, they may be going against the tide of what is really taking place.  We seem to be evolving into an economic system where there is no employment permanence and where skills, adaptability, and the ability to learn and adapt is the currency of the realm.  The concept of a long term, continuing set of duties that are verbalized in a thing called a job description may be an artifact of a very short period of economic history.

The concept of, what I call “organizational codependency” is at the root of layoff survivor sickness.  Based on some recent questions, I’ll go through it one more time. It starts with your sense of identity.  If who you are is where you work, there is a lot more at stake than a paycheck when you are threatened by a layoff.  It’s not just your job that’s vulnerable; it’s your self-esteem, identity, sense of relevance, and purpose. The human resource strategies of tying employees in for the long term that evolved during times of stability and predictability have very bad unintended consequences in today’s epidemic of downsizing. We were seduced into a codependent relationship with our employers.  Organizations provided trinkets – key chains, bracelets, watches – to celebrate tenure.  Benefits, services, office size, parking spaces, all rewarded longevity. Recreational activities, group travel discounts, and employee clubs and associations served to channel employees’ social patterns into organizationally sanctioned outlets. The result is that many employees have put all of their social and emotional eggs in the organizational basket, and as the new short-term psychological employment contract between employer and employee unfolds, the basket has been dropped causing the classic survivor symptoms – anger, guilt, fear, anxiety – and triggering codependent behavior – control and manipulation.

Strategies for Breaking Free.  Here are some things you can do to break free of codependency and bring joy and creativity into your work.

Develop Personal Autonomy and a Task Focus. To break the organizational codependency chain, you must maintain internal control, keep your personal power, and love yourself without making that love conditional on organizational approval. The organizational payoff is empowered employees working with minimal control. They work because they are invested in the task and interested in a quality product, not because they need to control or please others to maintain their self-esteem.

Detach Your Self-Esteem from Your Place of Work.  If who you are is where you work, you will do almost anything to hang on. If you derive their sense of identity, self-esteem, and uniqueness from pleasing the boss and remaining in an organizational system, you are in an organizationally codependent relationship. You have given up your uniqueness; your focus and energy are external, artificial, and bent on pleasing.  It is a bad bargain at the best of times; a fools bargain in today’s new reality.  The person you need to please is yourself and you need to let go of an organizationally imposed identity. 

Ground Your Self-Definition in Good Work.  Discovering our core purpose and grounding our self-esteem in work that is congruent with that purpose is the foundation to an organizational detachment strategy because we index our self-esteem on our tasks and our work, not the organization where we happen to perform those tasks.  Pleasing the boss or impressing the system may happen as a consequence of good work, but these consequences are not good work’s primary intent.  Good work is all about finding work that is nutritious to our human spirit.

Cultivate a Diffuse Root Strategy.  Breaking organizational codependency begins with a conscious decision not to rely on our employer to nurture all aspects of our lives. The fundamental change that must occur can be most easily illustrated by comparing two types of plants. One plant gets all its nourishment from a single taproot, just as an employee’s self-esteem, identity, and social worth can all be nourished by a single organization When we have a social and emotional taproot into an organization we will manipulate, cajole, control, and scheme simply to hang on. Considering the option, manipulating and controlling make sense. What happens if that single taproot gets cut?

Another plant variety has a diffuse root system, reaching out to different areas of soil. Emotionally healthy individuals reject the simplicity and seductiveness of having all their needs nourished through a taproot into the organizational soil. Through planning and effort they can develop a diffuse root system. They have a number of roots into the community, professional associations, families, clubs, religions, and friends from outside their place of employment. If the organizational root is cut, they can still function and grow.

The Pain is Worth the Gain. Breaking organizational codependency is an against the grain experience for most of us.  It requires fortitude to let go of an organizationally imposed identity and venture into the unchartered waters of personal autonomy and relevance.  Others can help us, but in the final analysis, it is an individual act of courage.  The gain, however, is well worth the pain. Finding work that is in congruence with our unique gifts and human spirit and grounding our self-esteem and purpose in that work is a magnificent quest that will not only help us, but our organizations, and our society.

There are more and more signs that the US is evolving into an “either or” job culture.  Middle management has been hit hard by layoffs and technology is replacing the need for middle managers as either communicators or distributors of work. 

 The experts predict that this change is permanent and that we are rapidly moving toward an employment landscape of low paid, commodity-like service workers and well paid, technology savvy, knowledge workers.  There will be no middle.

 Since the US has maintained its standard of living by a very large number of well paid, mid-level employees, I wonder what the future will be like with no middle.  I’m not optimistic that we can continue our standard of living and our economy as it was in the past.

I write in Healing the Wounds about the value of making the psychological employment contract more explicit.  The reason I think this is a good idea is that it reduces the ambiguity and erases the, often not valid, assumptions about job security. 

 This concept of “putting it in writing” is counter cultural to many organizations.  I think this is in order to give the organization flexibility and not tie them down.  Sometimes I hear organizational spokespersons saying something like, “We’ve worked for years on a handshake.  Why reduce it to writing?  Don’t you trust us?”   The unfortunate answer is no!  Even with the best intentions, organizations can’t really predict the future and employment continuality.

 My recent experience on a cruise ship reinforced my belief in the clarity and value of contractual relationships.  Everyone in a cruise ship – including the captain – has a clear contract that spells out all aspects of their employment relationship.  This explicit contracting does not hinder their focus on customer service.  In fact, the clarity frees them to focus on their jobs, not their security.

 Business organizations can formulate renewable contracts with the agreement of the employee and the organization.  This would actually be much better than the current performance appraisal process since it would be much clearer and more focused on the specifics of the work.