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Dear Visitor, Here is a term you've probably never heard of before--"cathexis." It is a
psychiatric term originally coined by Freud. I first read about cathexis in
Scott Peck's famous book, "The Road Less Traveled." Peck describes cathexis as
the process by which the people, places and things we freely invest in become
part of us. If we freely invest in our employees, for example, they literally
become part of our identity, or sense-of-self, and we subsequently defend them
as though they were part of us. Here is an article that I wrote about the
mysterious process of cathexis. Let me know what you think. Best
Regards,
Paul Herr
Author of Primal Management
Cathexis--The Most Important Word You've Never Heard Of!
Management theorist like Fredrick Taylor and
Alfred Sloan promoted a cool, rational approach to management that has held sway
for over 100 years. Taylor, the father of scientific management, was a
mechanical engineer by training who sought to create efficient, machine-like
workplaces. Alfred Sloan, another engineer-turned-theorist, wrote, “loneliness,
distance and formality” are the CEO’s duty and in business you need to be
“rational, not personal.”
I suggest a different approach—when working
human beings, you need to be rational and personal because
purely-rational workplaces disrespect human nature and throw sand into the
motivational engine.
How do you treat your employees? Do you mentor and
coach them and take pride in their accomplishments, or do you prefer to keep it
impersonal and “businesslike.” There are many reasons why managers and
supervisors might prefer cool, arms-length relationships in the workplace. Here
are a few of the common ones:
• I may need to fire or discipline the
employee, which would be difficult if we were buddies,
• If I take a personal
interest in the lives of my employees, I might be accused of favoritism,
• My
company discourages friendships with employees for legal reasons,
• What if I
get burned and my employees are uninterested in forming a relationship with me
and reject my overtures,
• If the employee leaves for another job, my
investment in the relationship is wasted.
In addition to these logical
reasons, here is one related to our biology—research indicates that the human
mind can only process around 200 meaningful relationships. Researchers plotted
primate group size versus primate brain size and made a startling
discovery—group size and brain size are linearly related. When human beings are
plotted on this graph, our predicted average group size is around 200. Beyond
this number, the theory contends, we don’t have the brain power to keep
track.
This may explain why human beings are so commitment-averse and why
starting a relationship feels like so much work. I, for one, get a bit queasy
when I contemplate a personal commitment, as if my brain is warning me to
think-twice before investing.
The Other Side of the Coin
As
you might have guessed, this is not the whole story. There is another side to
this coin—namely the benefits that come with deep interpersonal relationships in
the workplace. I’ve been studying human motivation for 30 years, and I’ve
concluded that Western societies are emotionally dyslexic or emotionally
disabled. Ever since the writings of Frederick Taylor and Alfred Sloan, business
schools have taught us to put cool, dispassionate rationality on a pedestal, and
ignore the emotional engine humming at the core of human nature. My contrarian
conclusion—impersonal management is a gargantuan, costly mistake.
There
are two trends in the business community that give me hope for a more
emotionally-balanced and productive future: Dan Goleman, starting with his 1995
book, “Emotional Intelligence,” made it acceptable to utter the word “emotion”
in a business context; and, more recently, the consulting community has
convinced corporations worldwide that emotionally-engaged employees are a
highly-desirable business asset that correlates strongly with financial success.
Each consulting firm defines “engagement” somewhat differently, but a
statistical study of the various employee-engagement surveys by the Conference
Board in New York concluded that “engagement” boils down to an emotional
connection between employee and employer and between the employees themselves. I
agree with this definition, but, sadly, such connections are uncommon since only
20% of employees report that they invest in relationships at work
(Gallup).
Gallup Organization has eight million employee surveys in its
worldwide database. Each survey in the database consists of numerous individual
questions. The Gallup Organization continuously mines this vast database looking
for meaningful correlations between survey responses and hard business outcomes,
like improved profitability. What question do you think best correlates with
tangible organizational outcomes? The answer is startling from a traditional
management perspective but not from an emotional-intelligence perspective—“Do
you have a vital friend at work?”
This finding is perfectly reasonable if
we look at human beings as a social species that has survived for millions of
years by hunting and gathering in small, intimate bands. Employees strive not
only for monetary pay, but also to be esteemed and respected by the tribe. The
never-ending quest for self esteem, I suggest, is the ultimate form of currency
that drives the behavior of both our employees and our customers. Without a true
social group, however, companies don’t have access to this crucial motivational
driver.
Connecting the Marbles
Corporations today rely less
on relationships to motivate employees and more on rules, regulations, money,
and fear-of-being-fired. In other words, most corporations are not true social
groups. Rather, they are pseudo-groups held together by artificial systems of
control. This is not an encouraging trend considering that corporations are
populated with Homo Sapiens.
I use the following metaphor to describe
artificial groups in my book, Primal Management. Imagine a glass full of
marbles. Now imagine flipping the glass over so the marbles are trapped inside.
The glass represents the artificial systems of control that characterize most
companies and the marbles represent the employees and managers trapped inside.
Since there is nothing fundamental holding the employees together in this
scenario, lifting the glass would cause the marbles to scatter. The downside to
this sort of artificial organization is low productivity, high turnover rates,
high absenteeism, reduced innovation and high levels of interpersonal friction
and infighting.
Now let’s start over with a fresh glass of marbles. This
time, however, we are going to establish authentic, committed relationships
between the marbles beforehand. These relationships act like glue, so when we
lift the glass, the marbles don’t scatter--they stay together and continue to
function in a coordinated and unified fashion the way nature intended. I call
this sort of natural organization a superorganism—a group of human beings who
think and act as one. Which type of organization would you rather work for, the
natural one held together by authentic relationships or the artificial one held
together by money, systems and fear?
Human beings, I suggest, are built
to be self-managing, self-organizing and self-motivated without the need for a
thick rule book or an army of overseers when they are embedded within committed
and tightly-bonded workgroups. Companies that recreate this sort of natural,
low-bureaucracy, low-oversight ecosystem, unleash human potential instead of
stifling it. Companies that follow my advice can convert a rag-tag collection of
squabbling individuals into a powerful superorganism that dominates the
marketplace.
Cathexis—The Most Important Word You’ve Never Heard
Of
If you accept my reasoning thus far, the million dollar question
becomes—“How does one create emotional connections between employees and
managers and between the employees themselves? Psychiatrists coined the term
“cathexis” to refer to the emotional-bonding process. Cathexis is the biologic
process underlying relationships of all types.
Parents cathect with their
children, for example, by virtue of the enormous time and effort invested in
raising them. Once a cathected bond is created, the child, for all intent and
purposes, becomes part of the parents—part of their identity. Once a cathected
bond is in place, the child’s defeats are experienced as the parent’s defeats
and the child’s successes are experienced as the parent’s successes. In a very
real sense, the parent and child are one.
The cathexis process does not
only operate between parents and children. Anything can be brought inside by
freely investing effort—even our employees. The investment-tracking mechanism
responsible for this mysterious process is housed in the ventromedial prefrontal
lobes. If this brain area is damaged, as it was in many lobotomy operations,
human beings no longer care about their social investments, and do not react
with anger if their investments are threatened. I call this brain area “the
vault” that stores our valuable social investments.
It is not hard, in
principle, to create cathected relationships. All managers need to do is: (1)
value their employees, (2) invest in their employees, and (3) be willing to go
to bat for their employees. In other words, we need to take personal
responsibility for the health and welfare of our corporate tribes. These three
steps are absolutely necessary to becoming a consensus leader and creating a
positive dynamic in the workplace.
If managers aren’t willing to do these
things, then I cannot help them. They are stuck with what they’ve got—a
motivational engine firing on just a few cylinders. If managers cannot commit,
then they shouldn’t expect their employees to commit either.
Something
almost magical happens when managers overcome their inherent fear of commitment
and sincerely invest in their employees. Employees subconsciously detect this
commitment and investment and begin to commit and invest in return. This is the
first step to becoming a consensus leader and creating a workplace full of
engaged, productive employees.
Commitment and Fear
As I
mentioned earlier, human beings instinctively fear commitment. The brain
automatically steers us away from it because we can only process 200, or so,
relationships. Considering that we spend half of our waking lives at work,
however, it makes sense to allocate half of our relationships to the workplace.
When managers commit and invest, employees become merged with the manager’s
personal sense of identity. The manager’s life becomes richer because the
accomplishments of employees are experienced as the manager’s personal
accomplishments. Instead of experiencing cool detachment in the workplace,
managers experience the warmth that comes with honest and meaningful
relationships. Such managers would not deceive or harm employees, because it
would feel like they were harming themselves.
I received an e-mail some
years ago from a gentleman named Bob Carpenter who had found an early version of
Primal Management on my website and decided to contact me. I subsequently spoke
with him about his fascinating experiences turning around struggling companies
all over the world. Here is my recollection of our first
conversation:
“Paul, I’ve been a corporate turnaround artist for
twenty-five years in thirteen countries and I’ve always been successful. I used
a formula similar to the one you recommend in Primal Management. Most of my
assignments were in Third World countries where employees had been terribly
mistreated.
The employees hated their managers, and they initially hated me.
It took four months, on average, but I always turned things around by showing
respect for the local culture, by attending their ceremonies, and by developing
the human potential of each and every employee. At first they would resist and
try to provoke me. They figured I was just another gringo trying to take
advantage of them.
If I stayed on course, however, things would eventually
change and change suddenly. One day, out of the blue, instead of addressing me
as Mr. Carpenter, they began calling me ‘‘Don Roberto.’’ The prefix ‘‘Don’’
followed by one’s given name is a sign of respect reserved for village elders.
As soon as they started calling me Don Roberto, productivity improved rapidly.
It was an all-or-nothing sort of thing.”
Bob Carpenter’s story has an
important moral—it is not easy to create trusting relationships. You’ve got to
be in it for the long haul—four months at a minimum. When the motivational
horsepower finally changes, it will happen suddenly after months of concerted
effort.
I think all managers should follow Bob Carpenter’s lead. We will
know we are succeeding when employees begin referring to us as Don _______ (fill
in your first name)!
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Carpenter’s
approach may seem like far too much work. Before we reach this conclusion,
however, let’s consider the benefits in our cost/benefit analysis.
You
have probably heard of Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Places to Work For” list.
The “Great Places to Work Institute”, the organization that compiles the list,
has discovered that the main difference between companies that make the list and
those that don’t has to do with relationships. Companies that make the list have
stronger, more-trusting relationships between managers and employees and between
employees themselves.
Alex Edmans, a finance professor at the Wharton
Business School published a study 2008 that compared the financial performance
of companies that make the list as opposed to companies that don’t. Edmans
created a mutual fund out of the 100 Best companies and tracked it for 7 years.
The 100-Best-fund out performed an index fund composed of randomly selected
companies by a wide margin--14.5% annual return on investment for the
100-Best-fund as opposed to just 6% for the index fund. This ought to be an eye
opener for bottom-line oriented investors and managers everywhere. The
moral—relationships matter and impersonal, machine-like workplaces underperform
over the long haul.
In conclusion, any workplace that encourages
interpersonal commitment and investment can achieve something miraculous: a
united tribe in which each person is psychologically bonded to the group and one
another. The extreme opposite is a hierarchical machine-like workplace,
dominated by fear, where no voluntary investment occurs. This sort of workplace
will be inhabited by warring clans who battle one another for resources—hardly a
recipe for sustained financial returns.
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Comments
Best,
Paul Herr
Author of Primal Management