- Training and Coaching since 1988
EMOTION MANAGEMENT: ANGER
8 June 2020
Transforming distance into relationship
5 November 2020
The idea of a “liquid society“, a world in which the sense of community is waning, marked by the weakening of human relationships and dominated by a single constant, uncertainty, is the image that Zygmunt Bauman has conveyed to us to describe the world in which we live. A vision that took shape in the minds of many of us during that sort of gigantic social experiment that was the lockdown, showing at the same time the fragility of a system incapable of slowing down without inflicting wounds that are difficult to heal. To be modern, said Bauman, ‘came to mean, as it does today, being incapable of stopping, much less standing still’.
While it seems clear that the emergency is far from over, we are becoming increasingly aware that we are on the eve of a possible major change in the world of work. It is a scenario that many are wondering about. Some processes of change, imposed by the digital revolution, had already been in motion for some time, but the last few months have produced an acceleration that no one could have imagined, causing the number of remote workers to explode. Yes, of course, we know that smart and remote working are different situations, but there are many who think that having demonstrated in the field the feasibility of remote working will produce permanent changes in organisations.
It is said that fish do not wonder about the water they swim in, but sometimes it is small signs that point us in the direction of change. Something has happened in the language: to have needed to define ‘in presence’ the normality of work means to describe, probably unconsciously, but much more clearly than we had hitherto understood it, the importance of physical space in relations between people.
The challenges of education
The future is therefore rushing towards us, anticipating changes, in time probably inevitable, about which it is nevertheless important to reflect and prepare. For a long time, working meant going to a precise place, a physical space, which represented a social environment of aggregation capable over time of generating a “sense of belonging” and “idea of community“. All of this took place in a defined time, punctuated by precise rituals that separated the time of work from the time of social relations – private and community – what with the advent of modernity would come to be known as ‘leisure time’. We then realise that we are facing an epochal, anthropological turning point, which transforms, dissolving them to a large extent, the anchorages to the physical dimension of work, those referring to the concepts of speed, space and time. The dislocation of teams in different places, the destructuring of time organisation, the whirling increase in the speed of communication systems determine a radical change in relations between people. The transformation of these references, which have remained substantially unchanged since the beginning of the industrial revolution, generates disorientation if it is not accompanied by a different awareness, based on the formation of new knowledge and skills.
Smart workers will need to develop self-management skills, self-organisation, decision-making autonomy, the ability to define a context (a frame of reference in a scenario with more blurred boundaries), goal orientation and strong accountability for results. And it is quite evident that with these characteristics, especially if the smart worker is an employee, the classic concepts of delegation and control must be redefined.
But the most important and difficult change concerns the culture of leadership, because it requires what we are now used to defining, with that levity that often accompanies the use of English terminology, “a change of mindset”, when in reality we are faced with a transformation that it would be more correct to define as anthropological. Indeed, it is not possible to talk seriously about leadership without evoking the concept of ‘power’ and with it the symbolic elements through which we are used to imagining it. Is there a stronger, simpler and more direct one than that represented by ‘space/territory’? Power has always been characterised by the domination of territory, those who have more power dominate and control larger spaces, in all the forms we can imagine (abusing time in a meeting, for example, is perceived as space occupied at the expense of others). Ethologists have taught us that in this respect we are as territorial as many animal species.
Imagining, then, a work team in a “hybrid” situation, with a large part of the people predominantly occupied in smart working, I think it is important to ask: will our managers be able to operate as effectively, deprived of that infinity of daily relational interactions, and of all possible forms of immediate, direct, often “on sight” control of their collaborators? (Fear of loss of control is one of the aspects revealed by the surveys). How much of their role was built on real knowledge and skills, and how much on a more subterranean, instinctive and unconscious dimension of leadership, resting on pillars that are slowly dissolving? These are perhaps uncomfortable questions, but they require careful reflection, because to imagine this scenario as any other reorganisation is a simplification that can lead to major problems.
The literature on leadership is vast: an effort that has, however, never led to a universally shared definition, partly because the greatest limitation lies precisely in the attempt to objectivise it. Looking at leadership “in the relationship” is what the systemic vision of communication has taught us; then it is not difficult to see in that “one up” “one down”, which then is not very different from the idea “I win, you lose”, the culturally most difficult aspect to overcome. We have spent many words to make people understand the difference between authoritarianism and authoritativeness; to continue in this direction means to ask managers today to be able to redefine their leadership style: to renounce some of the classic privileges linked to hierarchical rank, to put themselves more at stake in the relationship, to accept to go down a few rungs to show themselves willing to “play symmetrically“.
