Confronting Our Freedom

Interestingly, this shift in thinking may not so much change our behavior with subordinates or with bosses; instead, it changes the context in which we operate. We continue to support, reward, and influence people, but we do it out of our own sense of what is right and wrong. We do those things as an ethical stance, or a philosophical stance, rather than as a motivational strategy. We construct processes that are transparent and as fair as possible. High performers should definitely make more money, but we do not have to rank order people or stamp a number or letter grade on their forehead.

As employees, the moment we accept our freedom, we stop treating leaders and managers as if they were so important. We hope they are smart about the business we are in, but they are no longer the cause of our satisfaction or our performance. They just exist as partners or colleagues to be dealt with, as does all that comes toward us in life. My anxiety, my willingness to accept the fact that I am running out of time, my guilt for what possibilities I have not yet fulfilled, all belong to me and the subjective manner in which I have constructed or constituted my own experience. This is at the center of an alternative story I can live into.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

Most workplaces are breeding grounds for unfulfilled expectations, which easily turn into resentment. Too often we expect things from the institution and its leaders that were unfulfilled for us as children. We want our bosses to be congruent, to walk their talk, to get along well together. We want to be the favorite employee, just as we wished to be the favorite child. There is no more constant and plaintive cry heard from employees than the wish for their bosses to be something more, something different. They claim their bosses don't communicate about what the future looks like....

The gap between what our workplace is and what we wish it to be gives meaning to our being there. Even if we are there only two days a week. It creates a vacuum that can only be filled through the discovery of our freedom and accepting the accountability to re-found our institutions to become places we wish to inhabit. Our institutions are transformed the moment we decide they are ours to create.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

The alternative is to take failures as gift-like reminders of the difficulty and impermanence of life and let this deepen our determination to invest in work that holds meaning and create organizations that we want to inhabit. We could then publicly acknowledge that something did not work. We would not need positioning language that shields people from the truth about their experience. For some unknowable reason, people did not particularly like the new Coke.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

This kind of evil or harm is a form of the shadow that Carl Jung refers to. It is about abuse- the abuse of power, abuse of friendship, a promise knowingly broken and denied for the sake of self-interest, a story told that is true, but what is not told makes it a lie. It comes in the form of official announcements that no one believes. We spin messages to our own people; we present bad news in a way that sounds like we are still on plan and hopeful-as in the New Coke story. Another example is that employees often first find out from the media, not from their own management, that their company or division is being shrunk, reorganized, or sold. Not a big deal, really - or is it?

These small indecencies on the surface are mildly harmful. But they build up and form a pattern of response that erodes community and accountability. In their nature they are evil, though in their form they are bland and disturbingly digestible. They are what makes institutional life so difficult and exasperating. The worst part about evil in organizations is that although harm is done daily, the institutions still work. They make money, serve customers and clients, perform well, and become larger. The fact that dark practices can be coincident with bright results is the paradox that grips us.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

Institutions have a hard time with endings. They act is if they will live forever. It is the arrogance of immortality. We seem to be habitually compelled to sustain optimism, even in the face of contrary data. What we face in the workplace is the possibility of symbolic death- in other words, failure.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

The first response to philosophic thinking and language is to want to get practical. "How does this apply to how I operate in the real world?" "Give a proof of concept." "Why can't you use words that I am familiar with?"

This impatience, while fair game and valid, is also an example of the theory presented here, for the impatience is an example of the experience itself-it is our anxiety. And we want to solve it. We want to transform anxiety-an experience, a feeling, a reaction-into some action that will make it go away. And so we want proof.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

A friendly caution. You may grow weary of all this talk of anxiety and of having to absorb concepts such as consciousness that come with definitions that slip away one minute after they have been articulated.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

Those in power do have the responsibility of using that power with some grace. They need to take the idea of liberty seriously and work to eliminate oppressive controls. This is mostly an exercise in restraint. We need to stop managing people's time, managing their expenditures, worrying about on-the-job Internet journeys and personal phone calls. Go light on supervision, maybe even get rid of the word. Who has super vision anyway? Most of us end up wearing glasses regardless of our institutional level.

Although this might all appear soft-headed, it is actually the opposite. It creates a culture where people are held somewhat brutally accountable for meeting their promises and commitments. When we expect people to act as freely choosing individuals, we take away their excuses, de-legitimize their ability to blame others, and we put light in places where they or we once hid. This would begin to give us a real world.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

[on not trying to control employees, for good or bad] This all is more than a shift in semantics; it is a shift in the social contract. It breaks the parenting bondage. It also dramatizes the cost of our freedom.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

Compensation systems are like a bad marriage. Not happy, but we fear that if we get out of it and look for something better, we might end up worse off than before.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

The struggle to deeply experience our freedom and to live with the weight of full accountability for the world we have created is in itself not a problem to be solved, but rather what can give meaning to our lives. …Existentialism holds that you are totally responsible for your life-situation... The realization that this responsibility is total leads, of course, to anxiety- because of the enormous burden-but it leads also to a sense of power and control, since in your freedom you become a genuine creator....Each person must be reminded that "man and woman are beings who have no excuses." But it must be made clear that total freedom is a sacred fact of life and not a moralistic reproach.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

If we long to triumph in the struggle for our own freedom, then are we committed to inventing ways for our freedom to get institutionalized in our construction of the workplace?

Quoted on May 6, 2025

The dominant belief is that behavior is driven by self‐interest and its belief in barter. Quid pro quo. What's in it for me? That good management is a set of actions undertaken for their effect, not for their own sake. Role model. Vision. Mission. Values. All good qualities, popular but not powerful. When we care about them for their effect on employees, we are bringing the engineering materialism of the behavioral psychologist into the human relationships of the workplace. It is this link that denies the existence of employee freedom and depends on a theory of accountability that requires a lot of hand‐holding and a generous amount of oversight. It is colonialism in action. Frederick Taylorism and scientific management alive and well.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

To capture in a nutshell the philosophic insights that will aid this shift:
1. Freedom is a fact of our existing in the world. “Our freedom, in certain areas, is boundless.” — Peter Koestenbaum (1971)
2. Accountability cannot be imposed or demanded; it occurs as an inevitable outgrowth of that freedom, for we account for what we choose and what we claim as our own agency in making things work. People do not resist change; they resist coercion. “[T]he understanding of free will gives us a sense of supreme accountability… .” — Peter Koestenbaum (1971)
3. As inevitably as the existence of our freedom, we are forced to experience and confront: Anxiety over the choices we have made as a result of our freedom and the uncertainty of tomorrow. Guilt from having said no to either ourselves (existential guilt) or others (neurotic guilt). “‘I‐could‐have‐acted‐otherwise’ structure. The affective, or feeling, recognition of that structure is called ‘guilt.’” — Peter Koestenbaum (1971) Death of others, first, and the anticipation of our own, next. Not just our personal condition, but the fact that institutions have a life expectancy. Evil, which exists because all persons are free, and it will not go away; it is not solvable.
4. And most important—and this is the unique insight of philosophy—these experiences are what give meaning, character, and texture to our lives; they are not negatives or failures that a healthy person should move beyond.
5. Finally, when we can accept the above, we realize we constitute the world in which we live, which is to fulfill for many the promise of being created in God's image. And this can be embodied in our day‐to‐day work, not on weekends and retreats.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

To speak in these terms is usually frowned upon. We are all surrounded with false bravado: "Failure is not an option." The workplace becomes a place of manufactured optimism. We put posters on the wall with positive messages, we hold public meetings claiming a bright future and declaring success, and we then hold private meetings to deal with the reality of missed objectives or painful changes. This duality of public celebration and private realism is our defense against failure. This means we treat death as a mistake, as a sign that management has not done its job, or that workers have not acted accountably, or that technology has not reached its potential.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

If we began to believe that employees are “walking freedoms,” accountable for creating the world in which they live, it would change many of our ways of dealing with them. For one thing, it would take the monkey off the back of the managers to develop, nurture, grow, and guide their subordinates. If people want mentors, let them find them. If people want to learn and grow, let them organize their own apprenticeships and find their own teachers. If workers want to find purpose in what they do, let them construct a larger sense of whatever we do for a living: programming code, constructing the walls of a building, serving a customer. Seeing a larger purpose is a small step in imagining a future that works for all. Every job we do, including living a prison term of twenty years, can have a larger meaning. The organization committed to confronting its employees with their freedom could support these efforts, but not initiate and institutionalize them, as it now does.

Quoted on May 6, 2025

Instead of overseeing, creating vision, becoming a role model for the sake of subordinates, and, in essence, taking personal responsibility for the well‐being of subordinates, a manager would see the task of management as confronting subordinates with their freedom.

Quoted on May 6, 2025