Work Is Your Work
The first time we were in an organization was in our families. Families have missions, roles, budgets, norms, values, and inclusion and exclusion criteria. As a result, as the earliest employees of our families, we took in our families' culture entirely and lived it in such a way that optimized our inclusion and aimed to avoid our exclusion. Without family, children are too vulnerable to survive; as a result, when we get rejected or feel like we might be rejected, it has a painful quality.
Humans are meaning-making machines, and we can’t help but see (and create) patterns everywhere. It’s one of the brilliant ways we navigate the world adaptively and creatively. We can see any chair and extrapolate that we can sit on it. Said differently, we recognize the chair pattern and enact our past behavior to support efficient navigation of our world.
This tendency is AMAZING when we are talking about chairs or ordering coffee but can be less helpful when discussing navigating group dynamics. We are constantly scanning the environment, looking for what is familiar. When we see a pattern, it pulls up an old track that is resource-efficient. Imagine that your subconscious is scanning your work environment and notices a person with decision-making power guiding the group. Maybe they even have a boomy voice and sometimes express themselves passionately in a way that feels parental to you. Bingo! A match. This person must be a ‘parent,’ and lo and behold, your childhood script comes right up to help you navigate the situation.
I don’t know about you, but my childhood track is NOT the kind of blueprint that I’d want to model an organization after. But for most of us, this happens just outside our awareness, so we are tricked. We aren’t aware of utilizing this old script and, therefore, find ourselves with feelings and behaviors that are familiar and frustrating without knowing how to get out.
In most cases, this type of situation leads to misaligned, ineffective, and unsatisfactory teams in the workplace. The more senior the players in the group, the more detrimental this trap is to the broader functioning of the organization. In this case, the impact is about as significant as it can get.
Teams, like families, aren’t created at random. In a family, our personalities are shaped by the teaching and nurturing of those around us. In a workplace, hiring managers will select (usually unconsciously) employees and colleagues who are familiar to them in some way. This means that the likelihood of team members having what’s called interlocking pathology is very high.
There’s a drive within humans to heal, and that drive inadvertently draws us to recreate stuck patterns in our lives again and again until we heal them. Work is not an exception to this phenomenon. It is entirely possible that we select team members who have childhood patterns that exactly trigger or reinforce our own. This can be a brilliant setup! Because our struggles are often the source of our greatest gifts. This type of interlocking team can be exceptional. However, it can create a tinderbox situation if the interlocking happens without awareness, trust, and skillful navigation. Without these factors, the interlocking setup will inevitably lead to our spectacular ruin rather than our exceptional success. Awareness of our patterns is the first necessary step in transforming Interlocking pathology into Lockstep Collaboration.
Reflect: Look through the list of types of “pseudo-love” attached. Check any of those that feel familiar. What role did you play in your family to get the love and resources you needed? Take note.
Awareness is necessary but not sufficient for change. As such, being aware of your team’s unique interlocking pathology is just step one. Step two is constructing behaviors and habits that support creating “corrective emotional experience” rather than re-creation dynamics.
Let me unpack this psychobabble for a moment. A corrective emotional experience is a term developed in 1946 by psychoanalysts Franz Gabriel Alexander and Thomas Morton French that refers to the experience of being triggered (feeling unsafe) and having a different result from the source of the trigger. For example, if I relate to my boss like my father. I might assume that asking for clarification will get me yelled at, “Don’t you know anything!?!” As a result, when I work up the courage to ask for clarification, I wince in anticipation of that hurtful message. If that hurtful message doesn’t come, maybe even instead, I get, “Kari, I know that expressing that you don’t know something is hard. Thanks for taking the risk! I’d be happy to clarify my statement.” Then, my activated nervous system starts to calm down and begins the long healing journey of learning that not all men are my dad and asking for clarification doesn’t have to mean getting yelled at. So, the experience was corrective in teaching me that it could be different.
It takes incredible dedication to create cultures of healing rather than hurt. It requires time, courage, awareness, and coming back to the table to share with others how we are impacted by them, even if it makes us feel embarrassed, ashamed, or scared. It also requires us, as actors, to be mindful and aware of others and how they are different (and dangerously similar) to us.