Before settling in on my passion for beautiful furniture, I worked across many industries in various corporate and professional leadership roles. The view from these lofty roles gave me certain perspectives on industries and organisations and how they chose to operate in their respective fields. Since stepping away from the corporate theatre, I have become increasingly curious as to the way many contemporary organisations choose to conduct their affairs in the community and how they operate internally.
Certain industries have a reputation for being nasty, not in terms of the kinds of products and services they offer, but because of what it’s like to work in them. They may be involved in making some pretty benign things (newspaper publishers, history or philosophy undergraduate degrees, adverts or undertaking building projects). Seen from a distance, they can look like very attractive places to work. But insiders know a different story: these can be brutally mean places to be, awash with personal rivalries, favouritism and back stabbing.
My love of history and times past often shows me though, there are perspectives that can be usefully applied in these circumstances. For those working in modern organisations, there may be solace in a philosophical approach first developed by two Ancient Roman Stoic philosophers: Seneca, an adviser to Nero – and Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome for twenty years. The Imperial Roman court could be a very vicious place – but because it was so powerful and unavoidable, it was deemed philosophically crucial that good people should know how to survive there and try to exercise whatever calming influence they could on the powerful there. Rather than withdraw (as they were often tempted to do), the wise had to work out how to cope inside stormy and unforgiving environments. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius pointed to three helpful moves:
I: Study the nature of the industry:
The initial assumption is that what makes an industry nasty is the kind of people who enter it. One feels that maybe advertisers or publishers or humanities academics are just by nature unusually rancorous and sly – and that they would take their passion for malicious gossip with them wherever they happened to work. In fact, the causality runs the other way round. People are nasty in certain industries not because of who they were at the start, but because of the kind of industry they are in and what it has done to their souls over time. They were once pure; it is the place that has done it to them.
Here are some characteristics of a typical industry which will lead its employees to evolve in mean and twisted directions, whatever they might have been like on graduation day: Success is random and unpredictable. Quantifiable technical skills are not what matter. All one’s degrees are oddly irrelevant here. People operating with broadly similar levels of intelligence and strategies can end meeting with very different fates. Day to day, one has no real clue what is going to lead to triumph, which inspires an atmosphere of perpetual unrest. In the absence of technical skills, what helps people to get on are, it seems, certain kinds of social skills: the ability to work out the fears, longings and hopes of those above one in the hierarchy. A capacity for social manoeuvring starts to seem far more important than anything one has ever been honestly taught. One ends up having to deploy the arts of developing relationships not for the sake of positive professional outcomes but for the sake of advancement and even survival: it makes one appear slippery, fake and deceitful.
The industry may have high goals: on a good day, it’s trying to change the world and do something substantial. It therefore encourages those who work in it to conceive of themselves in grand terms. They aren’t there in order to be mediocre: they have joined up for greatness. This makes any eventual failure for many all the harder to bear and the techniques to avoid it all the more vicious. The top of the pyramid is very narrow and the skills one has in the business aren’t transferable to many other industries. One either succeeds here or nowhere. No wonder the battles are bitter. By focusing like this on the structural problems of businesses, we start to understand people’s conduct as a response to a given environment, which doesn’t make it any more pleasant to be there, but it changes the emotional burden: instead of feeling personally got at, or blaming individuals, one realises that a particularly nasty situation has been created by impersonal forces. It is not X’s fault; they just happen to be a manager or supervisor in this area…
Two: Look at the stars:
In comparison with the stars, our own lives are puny, our concerns and troubles occupy only a minute fragment of time. It is humbling to contemplate the immense order of the cosmos – but also a comfort. It brings perspective. Perspective doesn’t make a problem go away. What it does is reduce the level of anxiety we feel around it.
Three: Cultivate internal security:
Personal history can heighten our vulnerability, if we’ve grown up in a family where love feels conditional on achievement or on having the right attitudes. Approval and success at work – which in a nasty environment are hard to come by – matter hugely when these are what we rely on to feed our sense of our own dignity and lovability. This adds greatly to the intensity of the stress: not only is the workplace slippery and difficult; it’s also hugely important to our fragile sense of self-worth to get on. Another kind of family background might leave someone feeling that while success at work would be nice, it’s not a crucial ingredient of happiness. If you felt loved and valued in a family and at home, you won’t need the same level of validation from your colleagues – and so it won’t be quite so bad when you don’t get it. Fortunately, internal security isn’t wholly dependent on the chances of childhood. It’s something we can also develop by reflecting on where we lack it and why – and by imagining what we are as yet missing. Emotional resilience means devoting oneself to things that are independent of what we cannot control, starting with a healthy degree of love for oneself.
But as I now find a more fulfilling way for self-expression – beautiful furniture, all of this dross and drama of the modern workplace has little relevance in a life being lived well… with purpose, Grace and ease...
