Gunnysacking is a term for storing up hurt feelings, anger, affronts, and unresolved conflicts, and, when the weight of the psychological gunnysack becomes too heavy to bear, unloading it, often to an inappropriate degree in an inappropriate context.  We all gunnysack to some extent but, most psychologically healthy people find ways to keep their bags relatively light. 

Organizational leaders are not immune to gunnysacking.  I have discovered that a surprising number operate for many years under the oppressive burden of a heavy bag and use a crisis mode of operation as an authorization to unleash long repressed feelings of anger and frustration by figuratively beating their fellow employees about the head with their overloaded gunnysacks.  In layoffs this takes the form of those in power “getting” both functions and people that frustrated them in the past but were protected by a more tolerant organizational culture. 

 Gunnysacking is unhealthy for both those who practice it and for the prognosis of organizational survival.  Leaders who see it happening need to move quickly and stop it. They need to help those wielding those heavy bags find better ways to lighten them. If that won’t work, they need to carefully consider the costs in terms of productivity and morale, of retaining people who are more concerned with pursuing a personal vendetta than helping the organization recover.

 If, in the heat of the battle for organizational survival, you are tempted to form a coalition to “get” a person or a function for the wrong reasons, resist it. It won’t help you, the person you are targeting, or, most importantly, the organization.  If you find yourself the victim of gunnysacking, don’t try to get even; that only compounds the problem.  Try to discover what past event lies unresolved in the other person’s bag and muster up the courage to directly confront the issue.  Gunnysacking is alive and well in today’s downsized organizations.  Effective leaders need to move rapidly to confront it and personally refuse to succumb to its temptations.

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.

With downsizing and economic uncertainty, organizations today are incubators of destructive stress. Raw emotions are rampant. Employees at all levels are struggling with dashed hopes, bruised egos, fear, anxiety, and mistrust.  In order to help rebuild productivity and commitment, business graduates need to get their hands dirty, engage with employees in the heart, not the head. In order to do this, they need to let go of the cult of rational analysis and understand that what have been pejoratively called “soft skills” are actually the currency of the realm in hard times.    

Management as a profession of scientific, clear, and antiseptic methodology was a myth in the early days of Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” and is totally irrelevant to the needs of today’s organizations.   Many new managers, particularly newly minted, inexperienced MBA’s and undergraduate economics and business majors come to the business world with the expectation that it is a place of rationality, subject to objective analysis and thoughtful, quantitatively based decision making.  This is somewhat a result of their own naiveté, but more from being subjected to quantitatively biased curriculum and the teaching of professors who have spent their entire lives in classrooms – from grade school through graduate school, then into the role of teacher – and have never actually worked in a business.  Those professors who have industry experience, too often gained it during the “good old days” when things were more predictable and people were seen as long term assets to be nurtured and developed over a career as opposed to the current paradigm of people as costs to be reduced.  Here are three things business schools need to do in order to be relevant to today’s business organizations.

• Move beyond the traditional – usually fragmented and disliked – organizational behavior course, into actually teaching the two core competencies increasingly valued in today’s business environment: self-awareness and interpersonal skills. Faculty must have the ability to help students examine their motivational patterns, reduce their blind spots, and develop and practice coaching, and transition facilitation skills. This requires getting past academic turf issues and partnering with disciplines such as psychology and sociology as well as a much more experiential pedagogy including internships and practicums. 
• Rectify the lopsided imbalance of head skills with an equal dose of heart skills.  As safe and sterile as it may seem, managers can’t analyze people out of their pain.  They need to connect with them at the heart and not the head. When employees are in the midst of a crisis of identity and purpose, they are not interested in strategic analysis, demand curves, or decision trees.  They need “high touch, low tech.”
• Find faculty who have the ability and desire to understand and deal with the real issues faced by organizations. Business organizations are struggling to come to grips with a new, short term, provisional, psychological employment contract. Unfortunately, tenured, research oriented, quantitatively focused, business school faculty members are often unable to generate the necessary empathy and requisite transition facilitation skills to be of much help to students who will face this “real world.” 

Organizational Preference Questionnaire

In this questionnaire you are asked to rate your organization in regard to cultural and systems preferences in regard to the psychological employment contract between organization and employee.

©2011, Noer Consulting

 Organizational Preference Questionnaire Scoring Key

 15 -30:  Strong old psychological employment contract orientation.

 21-45:  Tendency toward old psychological employment contract orientation.

 46-59:  Middle of the road.

 60-75: Tendency toward new psychological employment contract orientation.

 76+:    Strong new psychological employment contract orientation.

              Leadership Subscale (Questions 10, 12, and 13)

 3-6: Strong old psychological employment leadership orientation.

 7-9: Tendency toward old psychological employment contract leadership orientation.

 10-11: Middle of the road.

 12-15: Tendency toward new psychological employment contract leadership orientation.

 16+:  Strong new psychological employment contract leadership orientation.

 Perspective:  Many people are conditioned to the old psychological contract and feel uncomfortable with the seemingly harsh and temporary nature of the new contract.  The reality is that motivation and commitment are not reduced by the new contract, but in many cases are increased.  A very effective use of this instrument is to promote a discussion among organizational stakeholders.  Please be aware that this is a copyrighted instrument from Noer Consulting.  Any group usage or copying is a violation of copyright law.

I recently became aware of a new label – “organizational transmutation” – used in the context of organization development.   

 I’m leery about fuzzy labels with no behavioral or operational anchors.  About 30 years ago there was a buzz in OD circles concerning organizational “transformation.”  This involved morphing from one state to another with some degree of facilitation by OD professionals.  It kind of fizzled for lack of clarity and any real pre and post behavioral anchors or measurement criteria. 

 Transmutation sounds like another one of those terms.  In some ways it sounds a bit like the old concept of re-engineering.  The big difference is that re-engineering had a basis in hard data and involved changing measurable sub-processes and, unfortunately, triggering people reductions.  

 I think terms like transmutation and transformation can lead to misunderstanding and, at times, devaluing OD and we need to be careful about using them.  Clear behavioral and operational criteria for even such common OD terms as “culture change” are really important.  Management in today’s economic environment tend to scoff at fuzzy terms and, intriguing though they may be, we need the discipline to apply behavioral measurement criteria to what we do and need to language our profession in terms that line managers can understand.

Here is my October Greensboro News & Record column: 

Election signs are popping up, rhetoric is heating up, and many voters seem fed up.  With the municipal primary only two days away and the general election following in just over three weeks, we are being asked to pick a leader (mayor) and members of our city’s leadership team (council members). 

Part of our frustration is caused by the talent pool – we’re stuck with the characters on the ballot.  It’s a bit like choosing up sides for a softball game.  We know some of the players but we’re not all that impressed with either their individual or team past performance.  There are some new ones who tell us how good they are but we just don’t know how they’ll do in the heat of battle.

 Much of our irritation is caused by the environment in which our would-be leaders must operate.  The economy is down, mean spirited partisanship is up, and one dimensional, shallow, sound bite solutions are the political currency of the realm.  Too often, our incumbents seem content to collude with this environment and either lack the talent or courage to stop politicizing and nit-picking the symptoms and work together to deal with the underlying disease.

During a team-building session, I once asked a group of business leaders to write a metaphor of the way they worked together. What they came up with has direct application to our city council. Here’s a condensed version:

 “We’re like a bunch of ants clinging to a slippery log, careening down a raging, flood-swollen river. We’re scrambling all over, forming coalitions, having meetings, writing reports, pushing some of our fellow ants overboard, and all the while arguing about where we are going and who should steer. In the meantime, that log is going where it wants to, and we know there are lots of rocks and waterfalls downstream.”

We need our city council to worry more about controlling the water than trying to steer the log.  We need them to subordinate their conflicting, self-fulfilling political agendas and work as a team before the log hits the rocks.  We need a mayor that has the skills and orientation to build a team and lead for the future rather than manage for today.

Because of multiple constituencies, convoluted decision making processes, and public scrutiny, political leadership is difficult – in many dimensions harder than in private enterprise.  Non-the-less, our next city council needs to do much better.  There are three things we can do to help them.

First, vote.  It isn’t that hard to get to the polls.  National elections certainly have more pizzazz, but local elections more directly affect our day-to-day lives.  Not voting and complaining about the results is an issue of integrity.  Not voting and not caring about the results is an issue of irresponsible apathy.  Not taking the time to understand the candidates’ values, perspectives, and history and just picking someone because of name recognition, race, or gender is foolish.  

Secondly, when voting for mayor, choose someone to be a leader, not a manager.  Although the roles sometimes overlap, there is a fundamental difference between leadership and management. Managers are focused the present; on rules, procedures, and adherence to policies. Leaders are concerned with the future; on vision, values, and purpose.  Leadership guru Warren Bennis says most organizations are over managed and under led. We don’t need that said about our city council.  In todays short-term, politicized environment it’s easier and safer to manage than lead, but we need a mayor with the courage to go against-the-grain.

Finally, when selecting council members, we need to pick candidates with the ability to function as team players.  This requires voters to assess their flexibility, values, and history of working in groups.  This is important because the system dictates that our representatives are elected as individuals. However, to function effectively, they must operate as a team in the service of the common good, not solely for the benefit of a narrow band of constituents.

Difficult though it may be, helping mold an effective city council is not mission impossible.  Compared to our gridlocked, dysfunctional federal government, we are much closer to the action locally and can be heard.  The first step is to vote responsibly.

Bank of America and Yahoo are two very different organizations but both suffer from layoff survivor sickness.  They are involved in massive downsizings and, after all this time, have still not learned the lessons of the new paradigm or what I call the new psychological employment contract. Tying employees in over the long haul was a central premise of this old paradigm. The unwritten, psychological contract was that as long as employees fit in, did their job, and conformed to organizational norms and standards, they could keep their jobs until retirement or until they made the decision to leave.  The new paradigm is much different.  It is somewhat similar to the professional athletic model that states that as long as you perform to our standards or we can afford you, you can stay; however by no means can you count on a job for your entire career.

 As a result of buying into the old paradigm efforts of organizations to tie them in over a total career, employees tended to define themselves in terms of where they worked – their organizational affiliation.  This organizational definition resulted in employee self-esteem being placed in a dependency relationship to an organizational affiliation.  A question I often ask is, “If who you are is where you work, what is at threat if your job is at threat?”  The answer is a lot more than a paycheck. 

 The lesson that many organizations need to learn is that they need to attract employees by the work, not a long term commitment.  The lessons that employees need to learn is that who they are is not where they work, and that putting all of their psychological eggs in the organizational basked is a very bad strategy because the basket can and will be dropped and the eggs will be broken.

I was cleaning out some files when I came across this Haiku by John C. Johnson of Minneapolis.  It’s very powerful and extremely relevant to today’s downsized organizational world.  I particularly like the third stanza.                                                

Rejected from my own dreams by characters that look like me.

Like the parrot in my aviary, I wasn’t strategic enough.

I wasn’t warned of the health hazards of security.                                                

So your approving nods didn’t mean I was on the high talent list?

I missed the memo that said the game I learned had been changed.

I deferred my life to the promise of pension and heated parking.

So now I go, but you friend, avoid the coffee break to say goodbye.

           Here is my September 11th Greensboro News & Record monthly column: “Lessons from 9/11: Abandon Bigotry and Hate, Pursue Healing”

           Ten years ago we received a wake-up call that jolted our sense of security, left us feeling vulnerable, and created an identity disequilibrium as we pondered why we were so hated. Now, a decade later, it’s appropriate to reflect on how we’ve healed and what we’ve learned.  

            In other traumatic wake-up calls – the unexpected death of a loved one, news of a fatal illness, a blind-sided job loss – the triggering event tends to eclipse that which came before it.  It’s as though the event leaps out in stunning, three dimensional color and previous life recedes into black and white.  The September 11, 2001 attacks were no different.  Key to recovery is getting back to black and white and taking refuge in the seemingly trivial acts of day-to-day living. It’s important to remember and calibrate our lives with the way things were in pre-trauma “normal.”  A good index of our recovery is a review of contrasting newspaper headlines.          

            Compare the vivid images and descriptions of chaos and destruction in the Extra September 11^th and the September12^th editions of The Greensboro News & Record with headlines the day before.  A lead front page headline on September 10^th was “Truck Carrying 150 Hogs Overturns on I-85.”  There was an editorial piece about Gibsonville’s plans for a town green.  The sports section carried a story about the Panthers victory over the Vikings, and what proved to be an overly optimistic estimate of the contribution of their new quarterback, Chris Weinke.  The front page of the regular September 11^th edition featured a story about 50 dead cats found in a home.

            Ten years later it’s not dead cats or 150 hogs on I-85.  The newsworthy animal event on August 26^th of this year concerned one wayward heifer on an I-40 exit ramp that, unfortunately, had to be shot.  The news that’s important to us today may seem, when compared to the trauma ten years ago, mundane and provincial, but it’s actually a sign of our recovery.

 Psychiatrist, Robert Lifton, who studied survivors from both the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nazi death camps, writes that a key survival strategy is to “open-out,” not, “close-down.”  We in the Triad may not be able to directly affect meta-geopolitical strategy or fundamentalist Islamic extremism, but we can do our best to “open-out,” and have the courage to be optimistic while engaging in everyday issues and working to make our community a better place.  

            September 11^th, 2001 taught us a dual lesson in daily living.  It’s a derivative of President Theodore Roosevelt’s strategy to “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”  Closing-down, trusting no-one, and stereotyping based on Islamic beliefs or Arabic appearance will result in terminal pessimism and social paranoia. That’s the “speak softly” analogue.  On the other hand, the “big stick” tells us that we need to be wary, provisional in our trust, and understand that despite the way we’d like it, it’s a dangerous world out there.

            Perhaps the most visible “big stick” legacy of September 11^th is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and one only has to go as far as PTI airport to experience it.  As a frequent flyer, I have a love/hate relationship with TSA.  I love it that, in spite of some well-publicized gaffs, they are trying to protect me. I hate the bureaucracy and officious approach. To be fair, the pain of long lines, pat downs, body scans, and institutionally imperious style, is, in the finial analysis, worth the gain in personal security.   

            The folk-rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young had a 1970 hit imploring us to “teach our children well.” Teaching our children well is an eminently descriptive phrase for an essential parental mandate arising from September 11^th.  We can’t rebuild trust with hate and we can’t use the horror of ten years ago to justify bias and bigotry.  We can’t teach our children well by not walking our talk. To use Lifton’s concept, we need to help our children open-out and we can’t do that without being role models of tolerance and respect for differences.   

            In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Swiss physician Elisabeth Kubler-Ross articulated a theory of five stages people go through when told they are terminally ill: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.  There have been attempts to adapt her stages to the trauma of September 11^th but I don’t think it’s a direct fit.  We know it happened and there is no point in bargaining.  Our challenge is to overcome our anger, not be paralyzed by depression, and to formulate our acceptance in ways that facilitate healing.  

Greensboro is not all that far removed from the horror of September 11^th and I know from personal experience that moving from anger to acceptance is a struggle.  I live about a block from where Sandra Bradshaw, a flight attendant who died in United flight 93, lived and her house is on my dog walking route.  Whenever I pass, I think of her children and the tragic loss of her life.

Today’s organizations are populated by angry, demoralized, and risk averse layoff survivors. The skills it takes to re-recruit and help these wounded survivors move back into productivity and help them focus on customer needs instead of their own survivor symptoms are not the traditional planning, directing, and organizing skills of the past. The challenge is that moving managers into helping relationship in tough times is an against-the-grain activity with some significant cultural barriers.  Here are the top four.

The Barrier of Macho, Controlling Cultures: In many organizations, “real” (non-staff, line managers) did not reflect feelings, deal in empathetic dialogue, or ask for feedback. They made decisions, analyzed, and controlled. This was particularly true in financial service and marketing oriented organizations. In today’s world there is a direct connection between helping employees overcome layoff survivor symptoms and the bottom line.  Once managers make this connection they embrace a skill set that will help move the organization forward.  

The Barrier of Left-Brain Bias: The right side of the brain controls our emotional and intuitive perceptions and behaviors. The left brain is involved in analytical, rational thought. In the United States and most other Western cultures, organizations have a strong left-brain bias that results in an overemphasis on formal logic, analysis, and rationality.  In most organizations, even with the increasing evidence of the utility of emotional intelligence, IQ trumps EQ and helping skills are much less valued than controlling and analyzing skills.

The Barrier of Management Science: This is not scientific management as defined by Frederick Taylor (people can be taught to work systematically and can be factored into the production equation similar to machines). Rather, it has to do with the inferiority complex felt by business schools and management training institutions in relation to scientists and their subsequent overreaction as they tried to be “scientific”  Anything that was intuitive, feeling, or smacked of our unique human spirit was driven out of business education for fear that it would look weak and not seem scientific. In an era of downsizing managers need to be equipped with helping skills because controlling and evaluating won’t help heal the layoff survivor wounds.

The Barrier of Fear of Softness: At the zenith of the old paradigm there was a reaction to anything that was deemed “soft.” This included feelings, relationships, empathy, and anything that was “touchy-feely.” Organizations still talk about human resources and training as the “soft” side of management. But not only are people issues as real as financial and production figures, they require just as much skill and strength. In addition, they require authenticity and the risk of self-disclosure. This is much “harder” than hiding behind a memo, a stack of figures, or a quantitative decision matrix.