David Bates of Tree of Life Coaching was kind enough to send me a mail with a connection he saw on arrod.

He wrote:

In your 22nd October article (Blog: The general malaise) you comment on how common a feeling of malaise is among many people. I agree completely - how else do I make a living as a coach? What you don't mention, but what I think you put your finger on in your article of 11th February (Article: Life coaching) is the clash of values between individuals and organisations, and I would suggest that underpinning this is Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

In the west there are large portions of the population who have their basic material needs met. As people feel more materially secure they often start searching for a meaning to what they do - and all too often their jobs and lives do not make the sort of positive difference to others that they would like. This has also coincided with a breakdown in respect for and trust in the traditional structures of authority including government and church who may in the past have supplied a degree of direction and meaning for the population. Hence the malaise.

If your new mission is "to improve organisations' revenue with innovation" including with people, you may be interested in the work of Richard Barrett who wrote "Liberating the corporate soul". He takes Maslow's hierarchy of needs and extends it for both people and organisations. This means it is possible to look at how the values of the organisation and those of its employees relate to each other (if at all!). Given your own experience of finding that your values and those of the organisation you work for don't match, I'm sure you'll appreciate the importance of being able to investigate this area and make it explicit.

Well, you can see why I was so pleased to get this mail! This has lead to lots of out-thoughts and connections regarding motivation and developmental levels.

The first thing that struck me when summarising the concepts of Maslow's Hierarchy (Concept: Maslow's hierarchy) was the identification of the steps on the motivational needs ladder with developmental levels. Put simply, until the basic needs are met one cannot grow and develop, which all the higher levels of needs are about.

Then, David's comments on the concept of extending Maslow's model to organisations made me consider how organisations might also be at developmental levels, and if the organisation's level is different from your own how the clash of values and feeling of malaise inevitably follows.

In this I see a parallel between views of the purpose and needs of a person and those of an company. What I mean is that a company can be seen as just existing to make money and satisfy shareholders. Any attempts to satisfy customers and treat staff well are merely by-products of the main purpose - to redistribute profit to shareholders. If we viewed a person in the same way we might say that a person exists solely to pro-create and spread their genes as far and wide as possible.

However, Maslow points us in a different direction from these primitive, animalistic views of people towards a more human and spiritual picture. If we apply this to a company maybe it can also rise above it's 'physiological' needs for cash-flow and customers towards 'higher' goals of innovation, making people's lives better, and maybe even transcending to the state of revolutionising their entire industry.

David then makes the point that the reason for the generality of the malaise is that many people have their basic physiological needs met in the modern society. Most of us would be beyond the first few levels of Maslow's hierarchy. Thus for there to be an imbalance with companies they must be at a different level. I would suggest that companies do not have their most basic needs met. It is not that all organisations cannot break free of these basic needs, but that a large enough number of them do not. Thus the majority of individuals are at one level, whilst the majority of companies are at another.

The reasons why more companies do not surpass their basic level of needs and develop onwards would constitute a whole other article, so I'll try to be brief. Fundamentally the causes are not simple or easily solved. The problem is systemic, deeply rooted in the way things are done. Some key points might include:

1. Measurement of success. Profit is the measurement of success. This is unsustainable because consistently increasing profits can only be achieved at the expense of your customers(as opposed to being in partnership with them). At some point the customers will restore the balance, leading to inevitable economic cycles. A better measure might be the profits increase of your customers.
2. Drive to be the best rather than to be better. This optimises for the minimal possible standard rather than continually improving. This is analogous to simply striving to survive rather than to grow - which obviously links to Maslow.
3. The development level of those in power / degree of leadership. Many organisations automatically select for those motivated by a need for power, rather than those who make the best leaders. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but nonetheless the focus is in the wrong place.
4. The inherent resistance to change of a hierarchical system. Essentially corporate inertia is built up because the organisations are big, and those in power within the organisation are those people who will succeed in that type of system; thus, it is not in their interests to change the system.
5. Culture. Dysfunctional organisations continue because we don't believe that we can change them. They make up such a significant proportion all organisations that we can't vote with our feet, or even be aware that there is a different way. They are thus accepted, but because our culture believes that 'market forces' will remove undesirable elements because people will vote with their feet it is assumed that we condone these organisations. This is not true, there is simply no choice - the market forces model simply ensures that the majority becomes the only choice - it leads to monopolies, or first past the post voting.

However, it seems bizarre to state that the people in an organisation can be at one developmental level and the organisation at another - what is the organisation if not it's people? Surely the developmental level of the people is reflected in the developmental level of the company?

This is surely the root of the malaise - that organisational life does not allow us to express ourselves - that the company is not reflective of the people that form it. The reasons above do not seem sufficient for this oppression, and I hope to be able to understand more on this as I progress with my systems course…





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