The Emotional Cost of Getting Things Done
Organisations measure almost everything.
Performance. Productivity. Efficiency. Customer satisfaction. Financial performance.
What they rarely measure are the emotional by-products generated in the process of achieving them.
Every merger, restructuring, cost-saving programme, outsourcing exercise and transformation project leaves something behind. Not in the annual report. Not on the balance sheet. But in the people asked to make it happen.
The emotional life of organisations is not just what people bring to work. It is what work leaves behind in them.
Take a merger.
The business case looks compelling. Greater efficiency. Reduced overheads. Better use of resources.
But someone has to explain why offices are closing. Someone has to tell staff their jobs are disappearing. Someone has to explain why a role is being relocated to another part of the country.
Usually that someone is a middle manager.
Not the architect of the decision. Not the person who approved it. The person expected to make it happen.
Senior leaders make decisions. Frontline staff experience the consequences. Middle managers are expected to explain why both should be happy with the outcome.
At first there is discomfort. Managers wrestle with the consequences. They worry about the people affected. They question whether the benefits justify the cost.
Then something interesting happens.
Most adjust surprisingly quickly.
The uncomfortable truth is that the discomfort rarely lasts.
The new reality becomes normal remarkably quickly.
What felt unthinkable six months ago becomes business as usual.
Not because managers stop caring. Organisations could not function if every difficult decision generated permanent emotional conflict. The ability to adjust is part of what makes managers effective.
But there is a cost.
Over time repeated compromises create a kind of moral fatigue.
Those who built a service often feel its loss more deeply than those who inherit responsibility for dismantling it. You do not mourn what you did not create.
Experience teaches managers many things. One of them is how to live with decisions they would never have chosen themselves.
Moral fatigue is the cost of implementing decisions you would not have made yourself.
Left long enough, moral fatigue hardens into cynicism.
Left longer still, cynicism can become apathy.
Cynicism is what repeated disappointments sound like.
"We've seen this before."
"The decision has already been made."
"The consultation is about how this will happen, not whether it should happen."
Senior leaders often treat cynicism as an attitude problem. Something negative that needs challenging.
Middle managers know better.
Much organisational cynicism is simply experience speaking.
Cynicism is often treated as evidence that someone has spent too long in the organisation.
Sometimes it is evidence that they have been paying attention.
Consultation is a good example.
Officially, the organisation is consulting.
Unofficially, the organisation is implementing.
Everyone understands the direction of travel has already been decided. The discussion is not about whether the proposal is a good idea. The discussion is about what compromises will be needed to make it happen.
The longer managers stay in organisations, the better they become at recognising the gap between the official story and the real story.
Cynicism is often the result.
Managers are expected to be positive. Enthusiastic. Committed to change.
Some become very good actors.
They learn when to smile, when to nod and when to repeat the approved message.
Some are simply more convincing than others.
The danger is that cynicism can evolve into something worse.
Apathy.
Cynicism is negative energy.
Apathy is no energy.
The cynical manager still argues. Still complains. Still challenges.
The apathetic manager says, "Whatever."
They attend the meetings.
Complete the surveys.
Join the workshops.
Update the action plans.
They continue to perform competently.
But emotionally they have left the building.
This is particularly dangerous because apathy is often mistaken for cooperation.
There is no resistance.
No conflict.
No awkward questions.
Just compliance.
Leaders often worry about resistance.
They should worry more about indifference.
Resistance means people still care enough to fight.
Indifference means they have stopped believing the fight matters.
In many organisations these managers are regarded as mature, pragmatic and realistic.
After all, they are no longer wasting energy challenging decisions. They are no longer asking difficult questions. They are no longer emotionally invested in every initiative.
They have learnt how the organisation really works.
Yet organisations constantly say they want passionate people. People with energy. People who want to make a difference. Dynamic leaders. Creative thinkers.
And they do.
At least when recruiting them.
The organisation celebrates passion during recruitment.
It values resilience during induction.
It praises commitment in appraisals.
Then spends years teaching people not to become too emotionally attached to any of it.
The paradox is that organisations often recruit for one set of qualities and reward another.
They recruit passion and reward detachment.
They recruit belief and reward compliance.
They recruit people who want to make a difference and then teach them the advantages of not caring too much.
Not through malice.
Not through a grand conspiracy.
Simply through the accumulated reality of organisational life.
The compromises.
The disappointments.
The consultations where everyone knows the outcome.
The requirement to be enthusiastic about decisions made elsewhere.
The need to keep smiling while delivering news no one wants to hear.
Most organisations do not crush enthusiasm in a single dramatic moment.
They wear it away.
Slowly.
Professionally.
Reasonably.
Until the manager who once wanted to change the organisation is mainly focused on surviving it.
Most organisations pay close attention to what employees contribute.
Their skills.
Their experience.
Their ideas.
Their effort.
They pay much less attention to what organisational life gradually asks people to surrender.
Their certainty.
Their optimism.
Their belief that they can make a difference.
Perhaps the most important emotional life of an organisation is not what people bring into it, but what they have to give up in order to survive it.
blairmcpherson.co.uk
