By Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP

At the closing plenary of the 2011 BC HRMA Conference, keynote Brene Brown suggested that shame (and its negative associations) can debilitate innovation and the potential within any organization.  Only by embracing our vulnerabilities can we avoid letting our vulnerabilities take hold of us and illicit behaviours and emotions ranging from deep fear to perpetual anxiety. She said that when you let your vulnerabilities take hold you react with behaviors and emotions that include fear, shame and anxiety. Of course, these things are absolutely unhealthy and have resulted in reinforcing the toxic North American commercial culture which perpetuate these types of stressors, and has resulted in the ‘the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in… history“. But when you embrace your vulnerabilities, you reduce the effects of shame, fear and anxiety on yourself.

In a different session, Bill Jensen suggested that the flooding of workplaces with ‘hackers’ means organizations should be shifting to create systems which make performing effective and efficient from the perspective of its human capital – the organization’s users. The current models are constructed from the perspective of making it easy for those higher in the hierarchy to manage and push the laws of the workplace onto subordinates (similarly, author Nigel Marsh says organizations are fundamentally built to extract as much as they can from its capital – human or otherwise). The result is disengagement and the increasingly younger workforce reacting by finding ways around these rules.

My take-away from these two philosophies is that for a shift in organizational practices to occur – that is, for this cycle of negative stress to close and for positive engagement to rise – it is the responsibility of our commercial system to take action. Their responsibility is to reduce the negative avenues of fear, shame and anxiety by making work comfortable and fit for each individual. By using systems which make performing effective and efficient from the perspective of its users (i.e., the labour capital), rather than from the perspective of the organization, measures including engagement, productivity and profits will benefit.

Traditional top-down interests should take a backseat to bottom-up drivers in organizations. What’s been comfortable for organizations is now being uncovered as unfit for its employed stakeholders. This means organizations should no longer impose mechanical rules and stressors on its human capital; rather, there needs to be a focus on reducing the costs for users in the organizational environment. This is done by giving its users avenues to use their skills and capabilities in their own most efficient ways to help the organization reach its goals.

How is your organization giving up power to its people?

Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP, is the membership and CHRP administrator at BC HRMA. After several grueling years in school, Nilesh graduated in October 2010 from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, First Class Honors. He majored in Human Resources Management and tacked on an extended minor in Psychology. He’s a self-confessed nerd (the first step is admitting), likes to read, loves hockey and is struggling with the complexities of learning the game of golf.