A Day at Works

As we generally more concern about salary, benefits and position; we generally taken for granted about culture of the new company we applied for. We tend to forget that productivity, the key of career and salary increase, is a result of job satisfaction. We tend to run for higher pay-check and position without even glimpse on respect, “accountable flexibility”, atmosphere, support/ friendship, and challenge. Worse scenario is when we enter a new company with pay-check increase, but actually the position is a temp, or without understanding that the belief and value of ourselves is incompatible to what company value and belief in.

How actually corporate culture affects its employee?
The essence of culture is what company belief and value –in. These 2 will reflected to more tangible aspect of culture, namely expressed value and artifacts. Example of expressed value is “HP Way”, an employee guidance for working at Hewlett Packard. Example of artifacts is office layout, and dress code –remember how IBM called Big Blue, since the employee always wear blue suit which reflects it’s belief in professionalism, and hard work (value of IBM).

What will effect employees most, is artifacts such as:
· Working hour. Is it tight to schedule just like an army, of flexible just like an artist?
· Dress code. Do company has uniform or casual, which suggest creativity and personal responsibility?
· The office space / layout. Private space or open space which suggest openness, interaction, and teamwork.
· Extra office events for socialization. Is it strictly business or also invites personal interaction?
· Working atmosphere. Is it teamwork or individual and hostile environment?
All of these surely influence your heart and head, which in turn determine your performance, expectation and job satisfaction.

How we can detect corporate culture (belief & value, expressed value and artifacts)?
The truth is that you will never really know the corporate culture until you have worked at the company for a number of months, but you can get close to it through research and observation. Research, before you are interviewed and observe during your interview.
During interview, observe how employees interacts, how they are dressed, also observe their level of courtesy and professionalism. Furthermore you can ask questions to gain information:
· How are decisions made – and how are those decisions communicated to the staff?
· What role does the person who gets this position play in decision-making?
· Does the organization emphasize working in teams?
· What are the organization’s priorities for the next few years?
· Are there established career paths for employees in this position?

If you get a chance to meet with other employees, you can ask one or more of these questions to try and get a handle on an organization’s corporate culture:
· What 10 words would you use to describe your company?
· What’s it really like to work here? Do you like it here?
· Around here what’s is really important?
· How are employees valued around here?
· What skills and characteristics does the company value?
· Do you feel as though you know what is expected of you?
· How do people from different departments interact?
· Are there opportunities for further training and education?
· How do people get promoted around here?
· Around here what behaviors get rewarded?
· Do you feel as though you know what’s going on?
· How effectively does the company communicate to its employees?

Ancient Greek philosophers identified 3 ideals: truth, good, and beauty. Chinese add in the 4th: abundance.

Science is dedicated to pursuit of truth, and technology to its application. Ethics and morality, to pursuit of the good, Aesthetic to beauty, and Economics to abundance.

Although management or economics mainly to pursue abundance, working without truth, good & beauty would be suffering.

Management should embrace technology, guided by ethical values, & in aesthetic way. How?

Aesthetic is related to creation & re-creation. Work should be creative to innovate something new. This could happen when company re-fresh mind, heart & body of her employees, it is promoting fun & enjoyment.

[1] Suspect flattery. Sincere compliments from a coworker or a boss are nice, but outrageous flattery is often an attempt to draw you into a psychopath’s snare. If you feel your ego is being massaged, you may be dealing with a psychopath. Be careful.

[2] Take labels and titles with a grain of salt. Just because someone is older, has a higher position or more degrees, or is wealthier than you are does not mean his or her moral judgment is better than yours.

[3] Always question authority when it conflicts with your own sense of right and wrong. This may be hard to do, but it is crucial to your own career and well-being.

[4] Never agree to help a psychopath conceal his or her suspicious activities at work.

[5] If you are afraid of your boss, never confuse this feeling with respect.

[6] Realistically assess the damage to your life. If it’s too great, you may have to leave.

Remember that living well is the best revenge.
source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss-fasttake.html

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn’t the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he’s renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It’s the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths — the 1% of the general population that isn’t burdened by conscience.

Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life “games” they can win — and take pleasure from their power over other people.

On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary figure to that crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long relied on his advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.
“These are callous, cold-blooded individuals,” Hare said.
“They don’t care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse.” He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life’s savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said.
Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. “Why wouldn’t we want to screen them?” he asked. “We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?”

It’s Hare’s latest contribution to the public awareness of “corporate psychopathy.” He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving authority to the film’s premise that corporations are “sociopathic” (a synonym for “psychopathic”) because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests — “shareholder value” — without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It’s a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren’t just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We’re worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they’re lifting profits and stock prices, we’re willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.
But wait, you say: Don’t bona fide psychopaths become serial killers or other kinds of violent criminals, rather than the guys in the next cubicle or the corner office? That was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, Hare began his work by studying men in prison. Granted, that’s still an unusually good place to look for the conscience-impaired. The average Psychopathy Checklist score for incarcerated male offenders in North America is 23.3, out of a possible 40. A score of around 20 qualifies as “moderately psychopathic.” Only 1% of the general population would score 30 or above, which is “highly psychopathic,” the range for the most violent offenders. Hare has said that the typical citizen would score a 3 or 4, while anything below that is “sliding into sainthood.”

On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the predatory killer, there’s plenty of room for people who are ruthless but not violent. This is where you’re likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as “moderately psychopathic”; our quiz on page 48 lets you try a similar exercise with your favorite boss. And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience. “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” Hare told Fast Company. “There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You’ll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one’s position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something.”

There’s evidence that the business climate has become even more hospitable to psychopaths in recent years. In pioneering long-term studies of psychopaths in the workplace, Babiak focused on a half-dozen unnamed companies: One was a fast-growing high-tech firm, and the others were large multinationals undergoing dramatic organizational changes — severe downsizing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures. That’s just the sort of corporate tumult that has increasingly characterized the U.S. business landscape in the last couple of decades. And just as wars can produce exciting opportunities for murderous psychopaths to shine (think of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic), Babiak found that these organizational shake-ups created a welcoming environment for the corporate killer. “The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change; in fact, he or she thrives on it,” Babiak claims. “Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior.”

And you can make a compelling case that the New Economy, with its rule-breaking and roller-coaster results, is just dandy for folks with psychopathic traits too. A slow-moving old-economy corporation would be too boring for a psychopath, who needs constant stimulation. Its rigid structures and processes and predictable ways might stymie his unethical scheming. But a charge-ahead New Economy maverick — an Enron, for instance — would seem the ideal place for this kind of operator.

But how can we recognize psychopathic types? Hare has revised his Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply “the Hare”) to make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into two subsets, or “factors.” Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the “selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others” category. It includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions. Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints “chronically unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle,” the hallmarks of people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative accounting.)

This view is supported by research by psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey, who interviewed and gave personality tests to 39 high-level British executives and compared their profiles with those of criminals and psychiatric patients. The executives were even more likely to be superficially charming, egocentric, insincere, and manipulative, and just as likely to be grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy. Board and Fritzon concluded that the businesspeople they studied might be called “successful psychopaths.” In contrast, the criminals — the “unsuccessful psychopaths” — were more impulsive and physically aggressive.

The Factor 1 psychopathic traits seem like the playbook of many corporate power brokers through the decades. Manipulative? Louis B. Mayer was said to be a better actor than any of the stars he employed at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will to evoke sympathy during salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford hired thugs to crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants, and stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover. Lacking empathy? Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted profanities at and summarily fired hundreds of employees allegedly for trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint. Remorseless? Soon after Martin Davis ascended to the top position at Gulf & Western, a visitor asked why half the offices were empty on the top floor of the company’s Manhattan skyscraper. “Those were my enemies,” Davis said. “I got rid of them.” Deceitful? Oil baron Armand Hammer laundered money to pay for Soviet espionage. Grandiosity? Thy name is Trump.

In the most recent wave of scandals, Enron’s Fastow displayed many of the corporate psychopath’s traits. He pressured his bosses for a promotion to CFO even though he had a shaky grasp of the position’s basic responsibilities, such as accounting and treasury operations. Suffering delusions of grandeur after just a little time on the job, Fastow ordered Enron’s PR people to lobby CFO magazine to make him its CFO of the Year. But Fastow’s master manipulation was a scheme to loot Enron. He set up separate partnerships, secretly run by himself, to engage in deals with Enron. The deals quickly made tens of millions of dollars for Fastow — and prettified Enron’s financials in the short run by taking unwanted assets off its books. But they left Enron with time bombs that would ultimately cause the company’s total implosion — and lose shareholders billions. When Enron’s scandals were exposed, Fastow pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay back nearly $24 million and serve 10 years in prison.

“Chainsaw” Al Dunlap might score impressively on the corporate Psychopathy Checklist too. What do you say about a guy who didn’t attend his own parents’ funerals? He allegedly threatened his first wife with guns and knives. She charged that he left her with no food and no access to their money while he was away for days. His divorce was granted on grounds of “extreme cruelty.” That’s the characteristic that endeared him to Wall Street, which applauded when he fired 11,000 workers at Scott Paper, then another 6,000 (half the labor force) at Sunbeam. Chainsaw hurled a chair at his human-resources chief, the very man who approved the handgun and bulletproof vest on his expense report. Dunlap needed the protection because so many people despised him. His plant closings kept up his reputation for ruthlessness but made no sense economically, and Sunbeam’s financial gains were really the result of Dunlap’s alleged book cooking. When he was finally exposed and booted, Dunlap had the nerve to demand severance pay and insist that the board reprice his stock options. Talk about failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions.

While knaves such as Fastow and Dunlap make the headlines, most horror stories of workplace psychopathy remain the stuff of frightened whispers. Insiders in the New York media business say the publisher of one of the nation’s most famous magazines broke the nose of one of his female sales reps in the 1990s. But he was considered so valuable to the organization that the incident didn’t impede his career.

Most criminals — whether psychopathic or not — are shaped by poverty and often childhood abuse as well. In contrast, corporate psychopaths typically grew up in stable, loving families that were middle class or affluent. But because they’re pathological liars, they tell romanticized tales of rising from tough, impoverished backgrounds. Dunlap pretended that he grew up as the son of a laid-off dockworker; in truth, his father worked steadily and raised his family in suburban comfort. The corporate psychopaths whom Babiak studied all went to college, and a couple even had PhDs. Their ruthless pursuit of self-interest was more easily accomplished in the white-collar realm, which their backgrounds had groomed them for, rather than the criminal one, which comes with much lousier odds.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people’s feelings. This makes it easier for them to “play” us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor’s expertise in evoking ours. While they don’t care about us, “they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them,” says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.
Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. “People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don’t have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it,” says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). “It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us — and so evil. Good people don’t want to believe it.”

Of course, cynics might say that it can be an advantage to lack a conscience. That’s probably why major investors installed Dunlap as the CEO of Sunbeam: He had no qualms about decimating the workforce to impress Wall Street. One reason outside executives get brought into troubled companies is that they lack the emotional stake in either the enterprise or its people. It’s easier for them to act callously and remorselessly, which is exactly what their backers want. The obvious danger of the new B-Scan test for psychopathic tendencies is that companies will hire or promote people with high scores rather than screen them out. Even Babiak, the test’s codeveloper, says that while “a high score is a red flag, sometimes middle scores are okay. Perhaps you don’t want the most honest and upfront salesman.”
Indeed, not every aberrant boss is necessarily a corporate psychopath. There’s another personality that’s often found in the executive suite: the narcissist. While many psychologists would call narcissism a disorder, this trait can be quite beneficial for top bosses, and it’s certainly less pathological than psychopathy. Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Perils of Visionary Leadership (Broadway Books, 2003) portrays the narcissistic CEO as a grandiose egotist who is on a mission to help humanity in the abstract even though he’s often insensitive to the real people around him. Maccoby counts Apple’s Steve Jobs, General Electric’s Jack Welch, Intel’s Andy Grove, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Southwest Airlines’ Herb Kelleher as “productive narcissists,” or PNs. Narcissists are visionaries who attract hordes of followers, which can make them excel as innovators, but they’re poor listeners and they can be awfully touchy about criticism. “These people don’t have much empathy,” Maccoby says. “When Bill Gates tells someone, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ or Steve Jobs calls someone a bozo, they’re not concerned about people’s feelings. They see other people as a means toward their ends. But they do have a sense of changing the world — in their eyes, improving the world. They build their own view of what the world should be and get others recruited to their vision. Psychopaths, in contrast, are only interested in self.”

Maccoby concedes that productive narcissists can become “drunk with power” and turn destructive. The trick, he thinks, is to pair a productive narcissist with a “productive obsessive,” or conscientious, control-minded manager. Think of Grove when he was matched with chief operating officer Craig Barrett, Gates with president Steve Ballmer, Kelleher with COO Colleen Barrett, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison with COO Ray Lane and CFO Jeff Henley. In his remarkably successful second tour of duty at Apple, Jobs has been balanced by steady, competent behind-the-scenes players such as Timothy Cook, his executive vice president for sales and operations.
But our culture’s embrace of narcissism as the hallmark of admired business leaders is dangerous, Babiak maintains, since “individuals who are really psychopaths are often mistaken for narcissists and chosen by the organization for leadership positions.” How does he distinguish the difference between the two types? “In the case of a narcissist, everything is me, me, me,” Babiak explains. “With a psychopath, it’s ‘Is it thrilling, is it a game I can win, and does it hurt others?’ My belief is a psychopath enjoys hurting others.”

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it’s extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego — something he promotes rather than plunders. “The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self,” Babiak says. “A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game.” That was the profile of Fastow and Dunlap — guys out to profit for themselves without any concern for the companies and lives they were wrecking. In contrast, Jobs and Ellison want their own companies to thrive forever — indeed, to dominate their industries and take over other fields as well. “An entrepreneurial founder-CEO might have a narcissistic tendency that looks like psychopathy,” Babiak says. “But they have a vested interest: Their identity is wrapped up with the company’s existence. They’re loyal to the company.” So these types are ruthless not only for themselves but also for their companies, their extensions of self.

The issue is whether we will continue to elevate, celebrate, and reward so many executives who, however charismatic, remain indifferent to hurting other people. Babiak says that while the first line of defense against psychopaths in the workplace is screening job candidates, the second line is a “culture of openness and trust, especially when the company is undergoing intense, chaotic change.”

Europe is far ahead of the United States in trying to deal with psychological abuse and manipulation at work. The “antibullying” movement in Europe has produced new laws in France and Sweden. Harvard’s Stout suggests that the relentlessly individualistic culture of the United States contributes a lot to our problems. She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest. “If we continue to go this way in our Western culture,” she says, “evolutionarily speaking, it doesn’t end well.”

The good news is that we can do something about corporate psychopaths. Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just as much as they are born among us. But unless American business makes a dramatic shift, we’ll get more Enrons — and deserve them.

source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

The standard clinical test for psychopathy, Robert Hare’s PCL-R, evaluates 20 personality traits overall, but a subset of eight traits defines what he calls the “corporate psychopath” — the nonviolent person prone to the “selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others.” Does your boss fit the profile? Here’s our do-it-yourself quiz drawing on the test manual and Hare’s book Without Conscience.

For each question, score two points for “yes,” one point for “somewhat” or “maybe,” and zero points for “no.”

[1] Is he glib and superficially charming?
Is he a likable personality and a terrific talker — entertaining, persuasive, but maybe a bit too smooth and slick? Can he pass himself off as a supposed expert in a business meeting even though he really doesn’t know much about the topic? Is he a flatterer? Seductive, but insincere? Does he tell amusing but unlikely anecdotes celebrating his own past? Can he persuade his colleagues to support a certain position this week — and then argue with equal conviction and persuasiveness for the opposite position next week? If he’s a CEO, can he appear on TV and somehow get away without answering the interviewer’s direct questions or saying anything truly substantive?
SCORE__

[2] Does he have a grandiose sense of self-worth?
Does he brag? Is he arrogant? Superior? Domineering? Does he feel he’s above the rules that apply to “little people”? Does he act as though everything revolves around him? Does he downplay his legal, financial, or personal problems, say they’re just temporary, or blame them on others?
SCORE__

[3] Is he a pathological liar?
Has he reinvented his own past in a more positive light — for example, claiming that he rose from a tough, poor background even though he really grew up middle class? Does he lie habitually even though he can easily be found out? When he’s exposed, does he still act unconcerned because he thinks he can weasel out of it? Does he enjoy lying? Is he proud of his knack for deceit? Is it hard to tell whether he knows he’s a liar or whether he deceives himself and believes his own bull?
SCORE__

[4] Is he a con artist or master manipulator?
Does he use his skill at lying to cheat or manipulate other people in his quest for money, power, status, and sex? Does he “use” people brilliantly? Does he engage in dishonest schemes such as cooking the books?
SCORE__

[5] When he harms other people, does he feel a lack of remorse or guilt?
Is he concerned about himself rather than the wreckage he inflicts on others or society at large? Does he say he feels bad but act as though he really doesn’t? Even if he has been convicted of a white-collar crime, such as securities fraud, does he not accept blame for what he did, even after getting out of prison? Does he blame others for the trouble he causes?
SCORE__

[6] Does he have a shallow affect?
Is he cold and detached, even when someone near him dies, suffers, or falls seriously ill — for example, does he visit the hospital or attend the funeral? Does he make brief, dramatic displays of emotion that are nothing more than putting on a theatrical mask and playacting for effect? Does he claim to be your friend but rarely or never ask about the details of your life or your emotional state? Is he one of those tough-guy executives who brag about how emotions are for whiners and losers?
SCORE__

[7] Is he callous and lacking in empathy?
Does he not give a damn about the feelings or well-being of other people? Is he profoundly selfish? Does he cruelly mock others? Is he emotionally or verbally abusive toward employees, “friends,” and family members? Can he fire employees without concern for how they’ll get by without the job? Can he profit from embezzlement or stock fraud without concern for the harm he’s doing to shareholders or pensioners who need their savings to pay for their retirements?
SCORE__

[8] Does he fail to accept responsibility for his own actions?
Does he always cook up some excuse? Does he blame others for what he’s done? If he’s under investigation or on trial for a corporate crime, like deceitful accounting or stock fraud, does he refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing even when the hard evidence is stacked against him?
SCORE__

Total____

If your boss scores:
1-4 Be frustrated
5-7 Be cautious
8-12 Be afraid
13-16 Be very afraid

source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss-quiz.html

Recently many companies try to improve employee motivation and attitudes by sending them attending seminars & training. Company thinks that all of this initiates are enough, or if things still go wrong company can say that the problem rest in the hand of employees.

All of these efforts are not enough. Back from the seminar, employees face management decision and attitudes that are contradicting and de-motivate them. In seminar they are told to be positive and never give up while management install excessive control and enforce increasing target, indicating their distrust to employees. Management promotes merit pay, while at the same time giving excuse to top managers, indicating caste in organization. Management coach employees and act like a coach, but at the end of year they judge employees performance by attributes not performance.

Believe me, there is no employees genuinely not motivated. Notice that employees, who in working hour look very unmotivated, can be very committed to extra office activities such as sport or arranging events. Motivation exist, but because of negativity the motivation is not directed to do the job extraordinaly.

This might indicates jobs, or people surrounds the office (including the Boss) possibly destroy their sense of responsibility and achievement. So while stepping further to any motivational intervention, first of all, look whether management stop de-motivate employees?

Ancient wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in organizations we often try many other strategies, including the following:

1. Changing riders
2. Buying a stronger whip
3. Falling back on: “This is the way we’ve always ridden”
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse
5. Arranging a visit to other sites to see how they ride dead horses
6. Increasing the standards for riding dead horses
7. Appointing a group to revive the dead horse
8. Creating a training session to improve riding skills
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment
10. Changing the requirements so that the horse no longer meets the standard of dead
11. Hiring an external consultant to show how a dead horse can be ridden
12. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed
13. Increasing funding to improve the horse’s performance
14. Declaring that no horse is too dead to beat
15. Doing a study to see if outsourcing will reduce the cost of riding a dead horse
16. Buying a computer program to enhance dead horse performance
17. Declaring a dead horse less costly than a live one
18. Forming a workgroup to find uses for dead horses
19. Changing performance requirements for the horse

And … if all else fails …
Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position. Or, in a large corporation, make it a Vice President.

Baru-baru ini seorang teman menceritakan bagaimana juniornya di perusahaan lama telah mengikuti jejaknya pindah ke perusahaan tempatnya sekarang bekerja. Karena perusahaan sangat membutuhkan karyawan baru, junior teman saya tadi disepakati (melalui negosiasi gaji tentunya) memperoleh gaji yang lebih tinggi dibanding senor teman saya tadi. Lagi-lagi perusahaan demi alasan kebutuhan dan survival menafikan keadilan.

Adil adalah masalah pelik negeri ini, keadilan banyak dipahami sebagai memperoleh sama rata dan sama rasa padahal keadilan adalah 1) internal equality: memperoleh sesuai apa yang dikorbankan, 2) external equality: memperoleh setara dengan orang lain dengan pengorbanan yang sama.

Kasus teman saya tadi jelas adalah kasus external equality. Bagaimana bisa dengan skill dan knowledge yang lebih tinggi, plus pengalaman lebih lama memperoleh gaji yang lebih rendah dari new entrants? Jujur saja kasus ini lazim di Indonesia. Fresh graduate di perusahaan besar Nasional yang direkrut th 2006 memperoleh gaji minimal Rp. 3 juta, sedangkan yang direkrut dengan spec yang sama di th 1996 Rp. 1,5 juta. Jadi secara kasar hanya untuk mempertahankan equality, rekrutan th 1996 harus tumbuh gajinya Rp. 150.000 atau 10% per tahun (3 juta – 1,5 juta dibagi 10 th). Masalahnya kenaikan tahunan belum tentu 10% net.
So bagaimana perusahaan harus bertindak? Jelas perusahaan harus memberikan kenaikan penyesuaian netto yang sesuai, misalnya 10% dalam contoh. Secara fundamental perusahaan harus bertumbuh sesuai dengan pertumbuhan job market, dan inilah yang susah! Tanpa kesetaraan pertumbuhan ini HR akan kesulitan memperoleh calon karyawan dengan spec yang minimal sama, makin sulit menempatkan karyawan tanpa memperpanjang rata-rata employmet time dalam setiap jabatan, dan makin sulit mempertanggungjawabkan membesarnya staff atau munculnya departemen/seksi/jabatan yang non-fundamental.

Lebih gawat lagi masalah internal equality di negeri ini. Saya ingat tahun 1996 dengan gaji yang menurut saya biasa saja, setiap hari saya bisa sarapan lengkap di Dunkin Donat namun tahun 1999 setelah krisis saya sungguh tidak rela sarapan di sana setiap hari meskipun posisi dan gaji saya sudah naik jauh. Yah… dengan pengorbanan yang sama ternyata gaji kita telah dikoreksi demikian jauh sebab situasi makro ekonomi sungguh buruk. Bagaimana dengan kasus mikro atau sehari-hari? Kita cenderung melihat segala sesuatunya hanya dari hasilnya, sehingga hanya mengagumi yang paling cemerlang tanpa ingat bagaimana pengorbananya. Kita lupa bahwa yang patut dikagumi adalah mahasiswa yang lulus dengan beasiswa dengan GPA 3,0 dibandingkan seorang mahasiswa yang lahir deri keluarga kaya degan GPA 3,5 yang tidak pernah naik bis kota, tidak pernah belajar dibawah lampu bolam 5 watt, dan tidak pernah makan Kentucky Fried Chicken. Karyawan juga demikian. Penilaian karya berdasarkan output semata, tidak membandingkannya dengan potensinya. Meski jelas bagian rekrutmen mengukur potensi setiap karyawan…..

Selain masalah pertumbuhan, fenomena teman saya tadi jelas masalah keberanian dan etika, masalah benar-salah. Manajemen yang pengecut dan lebih suka memberangus hati nurani akan membiarkan ini terjadi tanpa sedikitpun komunikasi. Tindakan yang tepat harus diterapkan, seperti evaluasi gaji, dan penyesuaian.

Mestakung, penjabaran konsep fisika Critical Phenomenon dari Prof. Yohanes Surya PhD, dewasa ini (Desember 2006) adalah konsep yang mulai banyak dibicarakan orang. Mestakung adalah proses pengaturan dari alam yang bekerja melepaskan sistem dari kondisi kritis. Mestakung selanjutnya dapat dipancing dengan KriLangKun (kritis, langkah dan tekun).

Kritis berarti menempatkan diri dalam kondisi kritis. Kondisi kritis akan menyebabkan semesta bereaksi mengatur diri mewujudkan keinginan kita. Langkah adalah aksi yang dilakukan untuk bergerak menuju sasaran. Tekun berarti melupakan hambatan di belakang dan menetapkan fokus mencapai tujuan.

Konsep ini dalam ilmu social mirip dengan prinsip motivasi conditioning, yaitu menempatkan obyek dalam situasi tertentu sehingga bertindak / mencapai hasil yang dikehendaki. Konsep ini dan juga konsep motivasi dalam ilmu sosial berakar pada asumsi bahwa manusia dan alam memiliki fleksibilitas dan kapasitas tidak terbatas sehingga dapat menyesuaikan diri.

Problemnya asumsi ini kadang “keterusan”, misalkan kita tempatkan seseorang dengan kemampuan biasa-biasa dalam posisi kritis untuk mencapai prestasi extraordinary. Bisa jadi obyek akan meraih prestasi istimewa, namun dengan mengorbankan prinsip etika, menjadi sosok yang over competitive, dan sebagainya. Artinya suatu sistem bias dipacu namun tanpa pemahaman potensi alias kapasitasnya maka Mestakung hanya akan menghasilkan sistem yang tidak menyeluruh/ sempurna (wholeness). Fenomena ini terjadi umum di masyarakat Tionghoa jaman ORBA yang karena berbagai batas pemerintah, dan posisi legal-politikalnya yang kritis mencapai kinerja ekonomi luar biasa namun mengorbankan aspek kemasyarakatan lainnya. Menjadi asosial, kurang pergaulan, terlalu perhitungan, dll.

Jadi ingat semua diciptakan memiliki batasan, (kebalikan asumsi modern motivator-motivator management yang terpengaruh new age), memiliki porsi, memiliki tujuan penciptaannya sendiri…. Di luar itu Mestakung hanyalah seperti rejim tangan besi yang memaksa sistem bekerja menghasilkan output yang sangat baik, namun dengan mengorbankan pelaku-pelakunya yang menderita dalam prosesnya. Oh ya ingat juga Jepang…. sistem memaksa lulusan SMA belajar ekstra keras, sehingga banyak yang bunuh diri….