Explaining Step by Step for Employees
Reminder of the full picture: or return to overview.
The Employee Tension
Does 'Employee' Mean You?If you work in an organization, then this account aims to describe how you achieve. The text uses the 3rd person term 'employee' or 'staff member', but you might want to substitute the personal pronoun 'you'. You know what it is like: decide where you agree, or where you think the account is inaccurate.
The duality facing and pressuring employees as they decide and choose at work is:
● personal preferences
i.e. values, needs, interests, career concerns
versus
● demands of duty to the employer
i.e. accountabilities, policies, procedures, situational pressures.
In the diagrams below, formulae use the abbreviations P (for preferences), D (for duty) and B (for balanced) to designate the required Centres.
Employee Choices
Taking Action in the Pragmatic Mode (CL1)
Employees must take any . This Centre is balanced because such action must be duty-based, and it is in the interests of the employee to do his duty.
Discharging a Role in the Structuralist Mode (CL2)
is now limited to as defined in the contract of employment, the job description, or as part of a valid assignment. Accountability for everything else is not the employee's concern. Again, holding any role is a personal choice, even if work-life is unpleasant, or difficult.
Compromising in the Dialectic Mode (CL3)
Any member of staff can find themselves in a clash with others at work—and such clashes divide into two Centres again.
Some clashes flow from the demands of duty. In these, a person must seek to outcomes i.e. the person benefits and the other party benefits—the organization may even benefit too.
Other clashes relate to personal preferences e.g. for promotion, for a particular assignment or posting. Although an employee has a right to press for their preferences, no-one ever gets all they wish for, and is a fact of organizational life. (The alternative is to leave the organization, or be forcibly dismissed.)
Dominance: A person's future may or may not be with the organization, and the power imbalance is enormous. So a person is obliged to put their own interests ahead of the demands of duty—but not too far. There must be a degree of alignment if employment is to continue satisfactorily for both sides.
Having a Direction in the Rationalist Mode (CL4)
Values are intrinsically personal (otherwise the value is being mouthed but not held). Some of these must coincide with and other staff—otherwise working would be unpleasant if not intolerable for all concerned. The typical employee is far more preoccupied with than Board-level strategies. However, in a well-run organization, these role-based objectives will be set to align with and deliver organizational strategies.
Getting Informed in the Empiricist Mode (CL5)
The use of information applies and again shows up in two distinct Centres.
The spontaneous preference of an employee is to use the capability and expertise that led to their appointment. Together with past experience and common sense, it shapes the that they obtain through a .
An employee is also expected to that fits with their role and assigned tasks. Extracted data has many uses: e.g. to provide evidence for plans, to offer leverage in bargaining over controversial issues with other departments, to provide justification for making a particular decision.
Dominance: The use of corporate data must be dominant, partly because what that data says will be a factor in personal appraisal, and because the use of such data is needed to engage effectively with others and perform duties appropriately.
Becoming Creative in the Imaginist Mode (CL6)
Imaginative realities also show up in two distinct Centres.
A person must activate and foster for their own benefit. Any organization that does not enable this is wasting the talents and energies of its staff.
An employee may not fully agree with the general aspirations of top management. Still, it remains a duty on each , and it is only sensible to cooperate with others and take advantage of the energy and willingness that they release.
Dominance: Shared aspirations must be given more weight than one's own. Employment requires one's own aspiration to fit with the organization, not the other way around. There should be empowerment of personal aspirations—if not, then perhaps it may be time to part ways and look elsewhere for a more suitable position.
Riding Social Forces in the Systemicist Mode (CL7)
The of most concern to an employee focuses on how their own and any changes brought about by social and technological forces. Everyone is a representative of wider society while simultaneously being a representative for their organization. So as each employee experiences the impact of social changes, they will feel it is both in their interests and part of their duty to bring those influences (i.e. new values, new skills, new technologies) to bear in their work.
Think it Through
The framework is visible in full by clicking at the top. It naturally resembles the organizational achievement Tree, but the Centres are all different because an employee's inner tensions and choices are different.
Channel names have been left unchanged because I presume they remain applicable, however they will function differently too. You are invited to think through for yourself the details of channel operation, and consider dysfunctional connections at the same time. Perhaps the names do need changing.
- Now see how this must be modified for an entrepreneur, whose inner tensions and outer pressures are rather different from those of an employee.
Originally posted: 29-Sep-2011