Trends come and go in waves. I believe the hype of “We as an organization are one big family” was born in the early 2000s in the United States, together with the new internet companies like Google, Meta, and others. About ten years later, this trend reached Germany. Playing table tennis together during breaks, various evening activities, and weekend events were supposed to strengthen the team spirit. You could mainly find this trend in start-ups, but over time, larger companies and departments within them also adopted these practices.
Of course, there were sceptics from the start - people who remained convinced that work is work and free time is free time. Later on, stories spread about individual employees - especially from the major US tech companies - whose health suffered from the lack of separation between work and home.
I must admit that I personally got swept up in the hype - at least in my mental image of what an ideal employee should be: someone who gives everything, or at least almost everything, to their company. So yes, I let myself be influenced cognitively by the trend, while my feelings were sending me very different signals early on. At the time, I was the mother of two small children and therefore played a crucial role in our little family. Every dinner with colleagues, every bowling night, every one- or two-day offsite workshop became a burden to me. I felt bad for having such a negative perception. I thought something was wrong with me. Today, I know better - and even systems theory proves me right, although I didn’t know about it back then.
Systems theory places the human being outside the organization - essentially in the organization’s environment. Within the organization, only the roles and the communication and decision-making pathways between those roles are embedded.
From my perspective, it is liberating for individuals that they are connected to a company or organization only through their role. This allows them to set boundaries, to go home after a certain number of working hours, and to freely decide how much they like their colleagues. They even have the freedom to quit without feeling guilty if they need a change - for whatever reason. Of course, this separation of person and role does not exclude the possibility that an employee may carry out their role with passion.
The organization, on the other hand, does have a duty of care, which it should meet responsibly, but it does not have to react to every emotional fluctuation of its employees. The organization may expect its employees to perform their respective roles under normal circumstances, even if they are currently experiencing stress in their private lives, for example. It is also legitimate for the organization to have a clarifying conversation with an employee if they are not fulfilling their role as agreed. Here, too, the clear separation between role and person is helpful. So it is also in the organization’s best interest that people are not part of the organization itself.
This in no way means that we cannot or should not interact with supervisors, subordinates, and colleagues in a fair, professional, and appreciative manner. But respectful and appropriate behaviour is something entirely different from self-sacrifice - regardless of the direction.
Dysfunctions within an organization can also be identified more easily when we first leave the human element aside. How often do we see a role being refilled repeatedly within a short period of time? Only after a while does the thought arise that the problem was not caused by the people who held the role, but by the organization’s own structures or processes. Perhaps the role was not clearly defined, not well integrated into communication and decision-making processes, or lacked the necessary authority, etc.
Another strong reason to separate organization and person is the simple fact that they have different needs - and if we look closely, there is little to no overlap between them.
- The organization’s interests typically involve strong revenue and, in connection with that, a large volume of high-quality production.
- A person’s needs include, for example, self-fulfilment, autonomy, human relationships, and well-being.
This contradiction is best balanced through a contract that the individual and the organization enter into: the person commits to fulfilling a specific role, and the organization compensates the person with money for doing so. This may sound trivial, since every employee usually has an employment contract. But this explicit focus of the contract on the role - as described above - is, in my view, a foundation for healthy, fair, and appreciative collaboration. Nothing more and nothing less.
How well does your organization distinguish between the person and the role?
This text first appeared in my newsletter "It's innovation Wednesday". It is published once a month. For subscription click here