At 10:49 AM 11/9/96 -0500, Beck DeStefano wrote wrote:
>...... I believe depression is a result of loss of
>control and associated anger and fear - the Kubler-Ross postings on LO
>lately have reflected that analysis.
I have found the Kubler-Ross thread very interesting, and am even more
interesetd to see it linked to depression. I have been working in an small
company which to me seems to be both in an arrested stage of mourning and
in a state of "corporate depression". The founder of the compnay died
suddenly last July. He was only in his early thirties, and his wife was a
few weeks pregnant when he died. Since then, it seems that "the evil he
has done has lived after him, and the good was interred with his bones."
He is rarely mentioned at all, but when he is, it is always in disparaging
terms about what an over-optimistic and disorganised person he was - "If
Rob was still here we wouldn't still be in business", and so on. His
entrepreurial spirit, or the tenacity he had to bring his ideas to
fruition are never mentioned. In fact, company is unique in my experience
in not having any company mythology - there seem to be no shared stories
at all.
On one occasion we had a financial consultant come in to talk to the
management team, and her first comment was how depressed they all looked -
both their body language and their clothes - un-ironed shirts, scruffy
t-shirts, food stains, ect. Just no sense of pride at all, despite the
fact the company makes an impressive hi-tech product and the customers
think the level of service is "exemplary".
Some of the people in the company I would say are depressed because they
feel trapped. They have worked very long hours for very little pay,
sometimes for years, and have this huge emotional and financial investment
in the company, which means they feel they have to stay on. But they also
feel that they have made enough sacrifices for it. Some of them are also
trapped in positions for which they have had so training or experience -
for instance the current MD was an R+D person who is trying - and failing
- to keep doing both jobs, and the Customer Service Manager is a software
engineer who knows nothing (and doesn't really want to know anything)
about financial matters. That they should feel this way is understandable.
The problem is that the feeling of helplessness and indecision pervades
the company. Instead of the gap between reality and vision producing a
creative tension that prodcues change, it just produces a feeling of "it's
all too hard and we don't know what to do." In this state, learning just
seem to be too hard. What they keep desparately looking for is not the
hard work of learning or personal mastery (regardless of what words one
would use to describe that), but a quick painless fix that will solve
everything without them having to change personally at all. It also
doesn't help that although there is a communally-written vision statement,
there are at least two conflicting visions of what the company should be.
Having just bounced out of a post-graduate management course with high
marks, lots of enthusiasm to put my learning to good use, and the naive
attitude that a small organisation that said loudly it needed to change
and learn would actually do so, I have found it a very difficult place to
in which function effectively. Or indeed sometimes to function at all! I
found that the state of denial the company is in with regard to the death
of their founder struck a resonance with the death of my sister. She was
an anorexic, and since she commited suicide a few years ago, my family
have simply pretended that she never existed. I couldn't give her a reason
or a way to climb out of the pit she was (though as one of my friends
pointed out at the time, nor could God), and working with this company
brought back all the same feelings of helpnessness in a situation where I
felt I should have been able to help but couldn't.
So in my attempts to find ways in which the company could change, I
haven't found any sabre-toothed tigers to promote "knee-jerk' reactions -
just a number of fellow humans (some of whom are friends) stuck and
hurting in a painful situation. And I find not reacting to that piece of
evolutionary programing impossible!
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that since I wasn't able to do
anything effective, and the situation was adversely affecting my personal
life and my ability to study, I should resign. Having taken control and
done so, I am now a much happier person, and seem to have regained the
ability to focus on things. Of course that still leaves the rest of them
stuck....
Apologies for the length of this, but I would be very interested to know
if anyone else has had similar experiences.
Alison
Alison Glover
acglover@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au
--"Alison C. J. Glover" <acglover@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>