Stay in your lane, but please compliantly transform
Have you ever felt like the only way to make management happy is to stop caring? This is a classic symptom of a pervasive pattern in the corporate world. It goes something like this:
You are recruited for a position. The recruitment process vets you to find out if you are smart & experienced enough to “handle” the very important and difficult job they are recruiting you for. They want someone who “challenges the status quo.” The job must be difficult since many others have not been able to do it, and you feel like it will be a good use of your experience and skills. This time, it will be different. You are happy they see it that way too.
As you prepare for your first day, you psych yourself up for all the ways you are going to show up for this fresh & exciting challenge. And on your first day, your hopes are high as you receive your flowers & have delicious coffee while exchanging niceties with your new colleagues.
But then, it becomes time for you to start “performing”. There are problems and you are here to help solve them. You slowly begin to realize you are supposed to solve them the way the people who hired you want you to, reductively. Yes, they have brought you in for your experience, but they have a vision for how they expect you to solve them which is more important than your experience. They want you to use your experience, but only to do what they want you to do. They want you to perform, but it turns out to be more like a circus performance than an application of skills. “Why didn’t they vet you for your acting skills, instead?” you wonder. You need to stay in your lane it you want to stay safe. Think inside the box. But, if you could do it while pretending that you are thinking outside the box, that would be even better.
This pattern is related to a double bind that is ubiquitous in traditional companies that are at the peak of their growth curve. Leaders know the company needs to change, so they embark on a “transformation” and attempt to bring everyone on board with it. Some even go so far as to imply, “if you are not with us you are against us”, and convince themselves that people who are not “transforming” are “afraid of change.” Ironically, at the same time, they expect people to compliantly “stay in their lane”, which is the opposite behaviour of someone who is transforming something.
An inconvenient observation is that “transformational change”, like evolution, cannot be planned out and executed. When looking at the history of evolution, you only know something is evolutionary — or transformative — after it occurs. And often in the process, the people who appear to be the most degenerate are the ones who are fighting for the changes that will be transformative. Companies need to be able to transform and maintain operations simultaneously and this requires a more nuanced approach to looking at what we expect from people and what we consider troublemaking.
In Robert Pirsig’s second and severely underappreciated book Lila he talks about Dynamic and Static Quality, and outlines a concept that lies at the heart of this dilemma. He writes: “Any static mechanism that is open to Dynamic Quality must also be open to degeneracy — to falling back into lower forms of quality. This creates the problem of getting maximum freedom for the emergence of Dynamic Quality while prohibiting degeneracy from destroying the evolutionary gains of the past.”
Perhaps due to the innovation obsessed narrative of our time, knowledge workers feel their work matters more when they are involved with dynamic change. But most of the positions available that claim to relate to innovation and transformation are actually about preserving static quality. And it would be healthier to just admit this.
What is missing in the innovation narrative is the nuance that it is also a good thing to preserve the status quo. Many of the ingredients of status quo are worth preserving. Knowledge is a necessary ingredient to dynamic quality. “What’s good is freedom from domination by any static pattern, but that freedom doesn’t have to be obtained by the destruction of the patterns themselves (Pirsig).” In our quest to give the appearance of transformation, we are expecting everyone to pretend to be rocking the boat, but then punishing the ones who are actually doing it.
In my work, I talk to senior leaders candidly about their problems and I also speak with middle management and individual contributors on a daily basis about theirs. Most leaders in companies want change and innovation. But they are most often not willing to take the risk that opening up to dynamic change entails. And they are certainly not open to “allowing” their staff to take those risks. They are inadvertently creating a double bind where workers are told they should innovate, feel empowered, be creative and courageous, but they are not giving them the freedom to take the risks required to do so.
Meanwhile, the people in the organization who want to spark dynamic changes, who think they were hired to challenge the status quo in ways that would possibly lead to transformation, are often seen as troublemakers. People who do not understand their “circle of influence” and do not “stay in their lane”.
What would be very useful and increase psychological safety would be that we make it okay again to be realistic about what jobs are about. Not every job needs a boat rocker. In fact, most don’t. It is much less psychologically damaging to employees that employers are authentic about the reality of the work instead of saying one thing and doing another.
Perhaps it is time we admit that many employees who are thriving in the status quo are the ones who would also be perfectly happy accepting their pay check in exchange for the safety of driving in their lane. And we could be smarter about how we employ the outliers and troublemakers: let them look for new routes, new intersections, and dangerously get out of their lane. We often forget that flowers need the bees.