Once in a while, I have a conversation with someone during which I shock myself by disclosing something I had long held as private and personal. In the right circumstances, any sort of secret can just bob right out of my mouth, like an apple dropped into deep water that finally makes its way back to the surface with ebullient energy; it’s me, I’m out!
One such moment I recall was in the unlikely setting of an osteopath’s table in a small treatment room, tucked high in the air amongst the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. I can’t really recall what led to this particular disclosure, I had been going to the osteopath for some time so I was obviously relaxed in his company. As he adjusted my uncooperative L3 and coaxed my Transverse Process into a more helpful attitude, we found ourselves chatting about one of our common characteristics: our complete lack of hair (in relating this story I am aware that I have recently blogged about baldness and maybe one story has dislodged the other in my mind but I would make clear this is not an obsession – we use the tools at our disposal…).
I found myself admitting to him something I don’t think I had ever admitted to anyone else – I admitted that sometimes I still dream that I have hair. Instantly, he dropped my bent torso with a start and took a pace back from the table; “so do I”, he shouted enthusiastically, with real joy in his voice. What followed was a sharing that I need not retell here but my shock was in how easily a thing that had long been held close became open. We bonded.
I had a similar experience a couple of years ago with a colleague in my last school. This man, erudite, knowledgeable, an archetypal polymath, is a repository of seemingly infinite resource. We were engaged in one of our scheduled weekly conversations when I shared with him a word that I had recently acquired. The word was ‘bloviate’ which means to talk at length in an inflated or empty way – we will all know a bloviator (which may not be a word) – and as I mentioned it to him and we celebrated this addition to my lexicon, so another apple bobbed to the surface.
In this unguarded moment, I shared with him that, as a child, I used to read the dictionary. I would allow the old red-covered Chambers Etymological to fall open in my hand and I would note down all the words I didn’t know on a particular page. Sometimes I would write alliterative poems with all the words I had just learned. I loved words, what they meant, where they came from, how they might be dropped into casual conversations to impress. As I spoke, his cheeks coloured and his eyes opened wide, “so did I”, he shouted with the delight of a person who has just found the key to a magic box. We bubbled and chuntered about our secret exchange and our newly shared understanding for the rest of the meeting, both agreeing that we had never disclosed this to another and both resolute that this was not a story that should ever be made public…
We deepen our connections with others by letting our secret apples bob to the surface. To do this in our working spaces, we have to feel culturally welcomed and comfortable. I am reminded of Julia Middleton’s work on Cultural Intelligence. In an enjoyable TED talk she speaks about the ‘flying dead’ – people who move from culture to culture in a global age without ever stopping, without having or making the time to stop, to learn what is going on around them. They are ‘dead’ to the morays and the nuance of the places they visit and so they simply carry around their own cultural understandings in a personal bubble.
Middleton writes and speaks about the concepts of ‘core and flex’ and I find these concepts helpful in considering organisational culture. On an individual level, it is impossible to begin to understand the culture of another person until one has reflected upon one’s own core and own flex. The archetypical polarity would be between a person who is so flexible that she has no identifiable core and a person who is so rigid in her behaviours as to have no flexibility at all. The former will adapt to any circumstance and be a social and moral chameleon; the latter will adapt to nothing and reject all forms of immigration, be it ideas, values or people. Neither extreme generates trust.
Modern society requires us all to play the three card trick: be flexible, be open, have clear values. The balance is all. We create culture in our organisations by building from and adhering to a common set of values…but when do our organisational values ‘the way it is around here’, stop being part of our iterative flex and start being part of our core? And when they have become part of our organisational core, what keeps them from becoming entrenched in a way that they exclude the influx, the immigration, of new people, new ideas, new ways of doing things?
A strong set of lived values must be a good thing for any organisation but when they have been based upon understandings developed in ‘start up’ mode by a founding group of employees, the danger of weaponising these very values against organisational immigrants (ie new staff) becomes greater. ‘That’s not the way we do things’ will not be an unfamiliar expression to anyone reading this blog.
The answer? Is not simple. Imposter syndrome is a real thing. The precautions that we can take include empathetic onboarding and induction; a willingness to ask the opinions of our immigrant population, while they are still new to the territory and able to be objective without being criticised; and developing a habit of reviewing our organisational core to see whether it has grown tumours that need to be removed.
We recruit new people to add new value and thinking to our teams, not for them to be brainwashed into our old behaviours.
Middleton, Julia. Cultural Intelligence. A&C Black Business Information and Development, 2014.
