We can’t understand our experience of work without considering the family we grew up in. Our relationships with our parents, caregivers, brothers and sisters in childhood shape how we relate to people and groups in adulthood. They particularly inform how we treat authority figures, peers and people we manage and lead – in positive and negative ways. We can often repeat behaviours like work colleagues were those important family members without realising it. We can also choose jobs and companies because they give us a chance to replay old roles and situations.
So as well as earning a living, we go to work to repeat familiar family situations.
Let’s start with authority figures. Everyone has a boss and everyone has feelings about them. For example, how many people do you know who joined a company because of the boss and left a job because of one? Good or bad, the question is whether those feelings are a repetition of those we had for parents or other caregiving figures and if they are still appropriate for the current situation. Do you feel unappreciated no matter how hard you try? Do you constantly challenge and contradict them or do you find yourself wanting to please and impress? Do you think they like you or dislike you? Does everything you do have to be perfect?
Whatever the truth for you, there is a strong chance that your feelings will influence your behaviours with your boss. So it’s important firstly to be honest about those feelings and take them seriously. Then to reflect on how far they fit the reality of the current person or situation: were they really critical of your work, or is that what you heard; did you take on that extra impossible project as a ‘development opportunity’ or were you just worried about disappointing them?; did you avoid asking for a raise because you assumed you would be rejected?
The same rule applies to our colleagues at work. Nearly everything we do in our jobs requires interaction and cooperation with other people – more senior, at our level, or more junior to us. We can find pleasure and satisfaction in collaborating, building friendships and alliances with colleagues that make work feel rewarding and often compensate for its challenges. But there can also be challenges and conflict in those relationships.
These often come down to the same simple feelings we had (and continue to have) towards siblings. Feelings about whether someone is treated better than you, or given more attention, or whether you are treated more or less fairly. Do they seem to get away with bad behaviour? Do you find them irritating, entertaining, naive or unreliable? And if so, how might this affect your behaviour around them or feelings about yourself at work?
A helpful parallel to explain this is the experience many of us have when we go home for a family event as adults. Without trying, and almost instantly, we slip back into the roles we had in childhood. The same jokes, arguments, feelings and behaviours. Like a spell has been cast on the house and you are doomed to feel 5 or 13 or 17 forever. If you think of work having the potential to cast a similar spell, and you find that you are stuck in relationships that get in the way of your productivity, effectiveness and enjoyment, perhaps consider who those people remind you of and vice versa.
This is the second in a series of articles about what work is for, focusing on meeting three needs that go beyond earning a living, and the problems it can cause. They are informed by my education and training in systems psychodynamic consulting, leading and coaching and draw on the research and writing of thinkers in the Tavistock tradition as well as my own professional experience. The next article will look at the need to feel like part of a group.
If you are interested in executive coaching that draws on this way of understanding our personal, role and organisational experience of work, please get in touch.
Tom Jukes-Adams - Executive Coach 