For Bert Whitehead, CEO of Cambridge Connection, a financial-planning company in Franklin Village, Mich., an epiphany came when, after announcing he would be away on a business trip, he noticed a stealthy rejoicing rippling through his offices. Today, he knows why. "Nobody was ever quite good enough," says Whitehead, who refers to himself as a moody stress-generator. "I had a mother I could never get approval from, and I had unknowingly really adopted that into my management style."
That highly rational, utterly left-brained executives are delving into their pasts illustrates a new strain of organizational therapy coursing through the inner sanctums of corporate power. The basic concept: that people tend to recreate their family dynamics at the office. The idea is being fanned by organizational experts, who say that corporate strivers can at times behave a bit like thumb-suckers in knee pants, yearning for pats on the back from boss "daddies and mommies" and wishing those scene-stealing co-worker "siblings" would, well, die. Boardroom arguments can parallel spats at the family dinner table. Office politics can take on the dimensions of Icarus blowing off his Dad -- or Hamlet offing Uncle Claudius.
Buttressed by new research in workplace dynamics, more high-profile coaches and consultants are applying family-systems therapy to business organizations, to grapple with what has come to be seen as a new frontier in productivity: emotional inefficiency, which includes all that bickering, back-stabbing, and ridiculous playing for approval that are a mark of the modern workplace.
A two-year study by Seattle psychologist Brian DesRoches found that such dramas routinely waste 20% to 50% of workers' time. The theory is also gaining more resonance as corporations become ever more cognizant that talented employees quit bosses, not companies, and that CEOs often get hired for their skills -- and fired for their personalities.
Source: BusinessWeek Online, May 10, 2004