Talk about a dream, try to make it real
You wake up in the night with a fear so real
Spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t came Well, don’t waste your time waiting
Apart from using elevators in which we look steadily downwards out of fear of meeting the gaze of other people, we spend a great part of our lives at work, often inserted in an organization that should allow us to work and live in a collaborative environment, in which the value is collective and is related to the sum of individualities, single professionalisms and capacities of all of us.
But is it so? Are organizations so attentive towards people´s needs and conditions?My impression is that organizations often are veritable jungles, a “tough” place to live; a place in which you are chewed, torn to pieces and expulsed in a fraction of a second together with everything that you in time have been able to build as regards conscience, career and relations; a place in which you often spend the most of your time trying to avoid the worst and to figure out the right line of action; a place in which maybe work, ability and capacity are important, but often not essential.
A place where many people travel eternally trying to drive past others with the blinkers on, ready to surpass anybody who tries to remain ahead of them. And, as Bruce Springsteen sings: “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive” in his album “Born to Run”.
A kind of smart folly of rational fools ready to run in any direction, since the important thing for them is the race and they do not ask themselves why they are racing. And when you ask why, the reply is always “for the career, knowledge, relations”, the same motives for which you may be dismissed from the race. Often during conventions and seminars you hear phrases like: “The value of our company lies in people”, “We take care of our resources”, “Without our talents, our company would not exist”, “Our company is very attentive to the needs of our collaborators”, “Our company is based on values and to us people are always a top priority”, “We are continuously looking for the best, those who make a difference”.
This is what they say: stories, or rather, fairy tales?
In fact, one says (or speculates) that the value of companies is represented by human resources (human “resources” is a synonym of basic hypocrisy), repository in which knowledge, competence, professionalism and meritocracy constitute the true credo. This is what they tell us.
That which people experience and feel personally may be represented through an image, an analogy which is different from these stories: the Roman ships in which many slaves were gathered and forced to row (it was thanks to the slaves that the ships would travel across the seas and reach the ports) and a figure (a figure such as a modern administrator of human resources) drumming on an enormous drum to indicate (impose) the rhythm, his rhythm. Talking about slaves… Often companies fill their mission, their ethic codes, their communications with the expression “human resources” and these human resources increasingly show that they are getting farther and farther away from human beings made of flesh and bone.
Can we move to Ireland or India without changing the company value in any way? Can people be considered to be so neutral?If this is the case, why then waste time, resources, ink, paper trying to value/publicize the “company culture”?
How is it possible that organizational structures are represented as neutral boxes characterized only by a title, whereas it is known to everybody that the true contents of the boxes and the work performed are so closely connected to the names and surnames of those who they wish to insert or who already are inside one box or another? How is it possible that the company has not been able to represent the fundamental and obvious difference between the work performed by/together with one employee and the work performed by/together with somebody else?
Can we talk about individualism or are we dealing with valuing ingenuous people? What can we say about talents? We search for them, show them off, tear them away from our competitors with ferocious selections; the “talents make the difference”, “our talents”?
So many evaluation procedures to find them and then what? So many words to convince them that they are in the right company for them (but then you do not understand why others in the same company or others in other companies that are less right for the job are not dismissed).
Often, talents in the company are considered as different and it is troublesome to assume the risks involved with having relations to a different person, a talented child in pre-school often causes reactions in the teachers who contact the parents to protest against the vivacity of the child, against his scarce attention and maybe his exuberance hinders the correct performance of the activities. Just like pre-schools, companies and schools do not give much space, accept or value diversity: they often search for it, invoke it even, but then, at the end, they fear not being able to handle diversity and not being able to satisfy the requirements necessarily made by a different person.
What if it were devious to talk about “talents” and “difference”? Maybe the true challenge for organizations does not lie in handling professionalism outside the norms as exceptions?
Maybe the true difficulty for the company, in which the organization and the business fall dramatically, lies in creating thoughts and an awareness, especially in the ordinary individualities: the smile in the voice of the switchboard operator, the precision of the reply from an accountant, the ability of listening to suggestions, the necessary space to express disagreement, the respect for other people's time.
I am increasingly and deeply convinced that many companies that think they have a need for people with great talents really need small human individualities, not abstract “human resources”, but only people.
There is an increasing need to price small and great individualities that are present, rather than trying to identify what is missing (which instead ought to be carefully analyzed and planned, without trying to manage it in a hurry only to try and recover lost time).
People to know and price so that they can free themselves from the dream of winning the lottery.Now, Mister, the day my number comes in
I ain’t ever gonna ride in no used car again