There is an irony where, when we say "there are cases like this," we usually end up using the phrase "there is no decency."
The Common Enemy
Disputes among the upper organization (between C-levels, between department heads, or between team leaders) are bound to occur. The very fact that diversity - difference (where difference is not treated as wrongness) - can be accommodated within an organization itself necessarily presupposes countless preconditions of soundness.
Just like remote work, for example. (This too is a very cunning frame... remote work is not a question of "to do or not to do," but of "can it be done or not." It is also not a question of the employee's attitude, but of the manager's capability and seasoning. Strictly speaking, this is because it is a question of whether management is possible or not. It implies the possibility of countless such tasks. So conversely, in the case of a job seeker, what needs to be checked about remote work is not so much whether it has been implemented as how long (the duration) it has been implemented and how it is being managed.)
Of course, I'm well aware... how many such organizations are there in the world, and how many moralists who think the way I do are there inside an organization?!..
And yet, even so, a minimum of adultness? courtesy? respect? - a basic line - must be maintained. Even if our thoughts and values are different, even if we cannot acknowledge the other side at all.
Just as, while a father (or mother) is disciplining a child, the mother (or father) must not, on the spot, shield or defend the child's wrongdoing,
just as, when the father (or mother) is not there, the mother (or father) must not, as if venting emotion, habitually grumble to the children about negative feelings she has toward the partner and seek their agreement to her anxiety and resentment,
just as parents must not openly show in front of their children the sight of fighting emotionally and ending the fight only with blame and no conclusion, vague and inconclusive,
just as the frame of always cornering one side and creating a so-called "common enemy" through a "1 vs. many" structure is a cheap and short-term? scheme that drives the family toward catastrophe,
so within an organization, a minimum of mutual lines must be kept. (Otherwise, either let them go quietly, or quietly leave yourself.. though, of course, at that level of position there is pride, a spouse and children, so consistency between word and action would be even harder.)
By this point, it has become natural for an employee from another floor and another department (especially one with long tenure in many respects) to laugh out loud in the middle of the office, saying because of the department head's decision, "What a hassle this is - for you, for me, for your team";
by this point, even at meetings with external partners, mockery of our company's situation becomes a perfectly fine snack to bond their relationship with us.
The crowning touch is that there are C-levels who do not see this, or who see it and pretend not to, or who even take their side.
But it seems some organizations very calmly abuse this as if it were a strategy or their own know-how. This attitude is an entirely different problem. It produces an entirely different, more serious side effect.
An organization (its culture or atmosphere) that treats one specific person among the C-levels like an outcast (of course, surely not... but is openly criticized)
causes department heads, team leaders, and even other C-levels to ride that mood and criticize that person without anyone telling them to.
Even practitioners who never had any close conversation start to grab a line in the upper organization and to blame that C-level whenever any difficulty arises.
Once that happens, all the work that has to be done in the organization and the people in charge of it are - liberated? - from any responsibility for their own work. And every problem... even problems with the company dinner venue or its time... all responsibility falls back to that ostracized C-level.
For an organization, personnel is everything.
For that reason, those with personnel authority - and the organization itself - that look at this kind of internal atmosphere yet have no interest in the smell (organizational culture) and silently look the other way (which is the same as 'a tacit endorsement') must be the first to be cut out, or an audit committee placed above them.
A corporation is a person. And the lifecycle of a corporation, like that of a human being, is such that cutting out a cancer and surviving are, depending on the situation, not necessarily the same problem...
Negative Emotions
Negative emotions are scary. They are also extremely contagious. That is why they are often used as a key device for gaslighting in office politics.
The brain is vulnerable to emotion. Before any relationship with someone is formed (strengthened or worsened), wrinkles of emotion are already etched into the brain.
It is like the way we say "I will live (or not) like my father (or mother)!" and end up resembling them. In particular, by survival instinct, we are vulnerable to negative emotions (negative bias). Maybe that's where the saying "you become the very thing you curse" comes from?
In the end, before the product we ourselves are making even reaches the customer,
we begin sneering at the very product we are making,
at the department we are supposed to collaborate with,
among team members who are supposed to empathize with one another,
citing all sorts of stories and reasons.
Anxiety and the politics of anxiety
Where, after all, did it begin?
Was it not anxiety?
Then where did that anxiety begin?
Probably because there were no adults.
It is because there is someone (or someones) who has only authority but not real authority (the kind that wins voluntary empathy and recognition by leading by example) and no sense of responsibility.
The most efficient yet outdated way to control? an organization, especially a growing one, is precisely to fan anxiety. That is why, as I mentioned earlier, the resoluteness of the top decision-maker (not as a personal acquaintance but as the representative of the organization) is more important than anything in this matter - in the management of organizations that hold personnel authority.
To care only about one's own face within the organization or about ownership of decision-making, rather than the organization's growth in the market, is like giving up victory in the war for victory in a battle.
In such an organization, those with personnel authority prefer and recruit, ahead of capability, manner of speaking; ahead of passionate people, those who have stayed in the organization for a long time.
In such organizations, rumor is power.
The line "It's not yet confirmed (exactly), but... only you should know this" - the words that surely could only have been known by me - turn out to be already known by many people. Even off-the-record talk gets passed down through word of mouth and gradually evolves. So-called internal politics, comparable to that of a 'mom-cafe' online community, begins this way.
In the past, given the atmosphere of society, the market, and the generation, even when a company was struggling, there were responsible people who would endure for a long time and keep the organization going. Today, however, given the atmosphere of society, the market, and the generation, even though the company is struggling, there are people who endure for a long time and so the company unintentionally? becomes a zombie company.
Stories like this tend to flow this way wherever you go.
When the CEO and managers do not represent the organization, or have no interest in real authority (not in lording over people, but in the empathy and recognition of team members), the senior who has been carrying the load alone gets a wake-up moment from the situations - never as I'd hoped, only ever doing favors for someone else - is hurt and leaves the company.
And then the juniors who grew well under the seniors' protective shield become the new seniors. But the now-shieldless juniors-turned-seniors are full of complaints. Because things are not as they used to be. And, having watched the seniors getting the short end of the stick firsthand, they hold their own carefully and very cunningly drawn line?.
Being a senior simply means you started first (especially in society) - it is not a measure of being better or worse - so the anxiety from above trickles down all the way to these juniors-turned-seniors and settles there.
They endure. And very well, at that. They empathize, better than anyone, with the upper levels who are trembling with anxiety. And when a problem arises, even without being told, they autonomously and voluntarily handle it well? on their own..
The Workflow of Anxiety
The all-too-common age of anxiety - whether at the global, national, political, or organizational level
- begins with the anxiety of those at the upper level and the selfishness (cowardice) in their attitude toward it.
Is the cause not the absence of so-called adult(ness) - those who block and endure on others' behalf? In organizations like this, those who follow instructions autonomously and voluntarily (those who do not complain in front of one's eyes, no matter what they say behind one's back), and especially those who serve long tenures (sustaining their employment), tend to be preferred. Because that way one (the C-level > manager > practitioner..) can quiet one's own anxiety.
What stands out as truly indecent in all this
is the case where one keeps dragging discontent from inside the home (the company or the team) to the outside.
One starts seeking, from other team member(s), agreement on the uncomfortable feelings one has toward a team member. Such gossip sometimes fizzles out and disappears. Because saying it openly is awkward and might only make one look small-minded. Like the rules of teen culture in middle school and high school, like the unspoken consensus at a college club gathering, they begin to follow their own invisible rules. The result is always reached by majority. And the majority, officially, always says Yes. And the experience of those who have witnessed such situations and outcomes (their own or someone else's) soon settles in as learned helplessness. Just go along, blandly, the way they want.
And so the anxiety that builds up at the team-member level spills over my department and onto someone in another department, and the situation escalates to the indecent case of pouring out grievances about the very company that lets one earn a living and build a career to staff members of partner companies or competing companies.
Here is an irony that's incomprehensible? - the manager who is the problem says Yes on the surface, but always keeps close at hand the very people who curse and gossip about him when he is not around.. Does he really not know? Or is it precisely because he knows?
In dramas, there are sometimes lines spoken to corrupt nobles, Japanese pirates, or pro-Japanese collaborators. Take it easy on what you eat! At the very least, the country has to stay alive for there to be any slush funds for you to skim from, doesn't it?!
If a company is struggling, it is because there are corrupt bureaucrats. Looking at such bureaucrats, the common people are placed in a position where, for the sake of their wife and children, they have no choice but to become collaborators of Japan.
Situations where, instead of work, all of one's energy is poured into seeking agreement on one's own anxiety and negative emotions chase one another's tails, leaving no choice.
At this point another peculiarity is uncovered: 'I knew it would turn out this way.' This is the so-called experienced person's (key player? manager's) gut feeling or premonition. In truth, this is confirmation bias. It is not that the prediction came true, but that the situation was made to fit the prediction. It may be a hasty generalization, but most outcomes are not a matter of choice but of process.
There is one thing that must not be forgotten here. Perhaps this is the very theme of this post -
just as I earlier referred to organizational culture as a smell, and as I said negative emotions are etched into the brain like wrinkles,
even if you are lucky enough to find the cause and exclude the cause through effort, the smell that has settled into a room (the organization) and clothes (the department), or the wrinkles around (one's own or each team member's) mouth and eyes, hardly ever fade.
Of course, even if I - not someone else - leave and go to a different space, the smell that has soaked into my clothes and the wrinkles at the corners of my eyes and mouth, without my knowing it, inevitably come along with me.
It's like when someone who has just been smoking sits down next to you on the subway.
...
Suddenly,
I lift my sleeve and smell my own scent.
Just so.
PS.
Yet, looking carefully, I think this is similar to the various aspects of our country's economy, social awareness, and politics today. Maybe that's why I always feel apologies and sympathy toward the younger generations. Of course, even I myself am hardly above-average? in my own generation, in a position where I'm just thinking, "I'd better just take care of my own business."
