Your Problem Is You: Charlie Sheen’s Lesson On Corporate Survival

Would somebody please get Charlie Sheen some help? If even half the things people are saying about him are true, the guy has got big problems: surely, one of his friends (to the extent that he has any real ones) or members of his family (to the extent that they’re capable) need to do something for him. I mean, we’d all do the same for our own loved ones, right?

Charlie Sheen (Image via Wikimedia, Credit: Angela George)

Well, maybe.

The guy did bring a lot of this on himself. No one forced him to do coke, hookers, and everything in between.  He’s had a hit film run, has a hit TV sitcom—what IS his excuse exactly?

But then there are the other pieces. We don’t know how he was raised, or how he wasn’t. When he felt like grabbing another kid’s ball on the playground, was his mother/nanny/generic,-easily-and-frequently-replaced-caregiver giving him a nod and a wink to say, “It’s okay, hon. I don’t give a crap.”

We don’t know what his mental and physiological predispositions are, whether he’s genetically prone to depression and addiction, for example. We don’t know how many good doctors turned him away, how many bad ones are in his pocket, enabling him.

We don’t really know what it’s like to be on a Hollywood set, what the expectations are, how he’s expected to behave, and what the consequences are for failure to comply.

There are just a lot of moving parts here and while it may be easy to blame him for his own mess, should we, really? Sheen has made a lot of bad choices but per my earlier post, were they all really his to make or were some of them made for him, constructed for him by where he came from and how? As entrenched in his own history, choices, and consequences as he is, can he even see the way out?

I don’t have a clue. I don’t know anything about Charlie Sheen but I do know something about me and, perhaps, people who behave like me.

What I do know is that we can all get ourselves into some pretty big messes of our own as we sacrifice our physical and mental health for satisfaction and perceived security at the office. Like an addiction, life at the office can absolutely consume us, landing us in a mess that could probably look something like Charlie’s (though without the drugs, non-prescription, anyway).

And I know we can’t even begin to see our way out of those messes until we understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and find alternatives. Only by holding ourselves accountable for our messes, can we crawl out from underneath them.

When business is good, we’re almost happy to kill ourselves for the sake of our work. We eat and caffeinate ourselves to keep ourselves humming like a tuning fork because God knows, louder than even the sound and fury of all that work is the deafening vibrato of silence.

We stop for nothing—as long as we remain seated. We get up and move around only to find something with which to steel ourselves for the big meeting or a protracted date with Excel.  Coffee and donuts work but donuts certainly aren’t hip so we find other things, less obviously unhealthy things that are still sugar-, fat-, and calorie-rich, nonetheless.

KFC's Double Down: Death by bunless fried chicken (Image via Wikimedia, Credit: Michael Saechang)

When we worry, REALLY worry about whether we will succeed in all the fine and noble things we do behind a laptop, at a meeting, or while we’re on our way to a client site, we don’t have to worry for long: Vending machines, gas station convenience stores, and of course, airport concessions are there with new and powerful intoxicants such as KFC’s Double Down and anything with the word holiday next to it at Starbucks. Thousands of fat and sugar calories later, even a piss-poor Powerpoint deck can start looking snazzy.

When business is bad, well we know the drill there. A post or so ago, I ran through a scenario in which employees increasingly become lost in multiple business reorganizations and shifting quarterly goals. Some find surer footing, some don’t, but the point is that through it all, they can very likely lose themselves. When we don’t know where we’ll be working from quarter to quarter, or whether we’ll be working at all, is it any wonder that we eat, drink, and yes, be merry to make ourselves feel better?

But there is a way out for us (still not sure about Charlie).

If we examine ourselves and our behaviors, really try to understand why we just hit the office vending machine for a Twix, or treated ourselves to a peanut butter shake at Cold Stone Creamery just before a client presentation, or thought that General Tso was a mandatory invitee on order-in Fridays—if we dissected all the things we know we shouldn’t be doing, we’d be well on our way to putting a stop to them.

So, Corporate Survival Tip #34:

Look at everything you put in your body and everything you do to your body, and ask why. If you know it’s a bad thing to do, ask yourself why you need to do it. If the answer is that you can’t imagine life without these things, that’s fine for now. If the answer is that you just haven’t had time to think about these things, that’s fine for now, too. As long as the answer you come up with sounds right to you, as long as you’re truthful with yourself about it, then it’s a start. Over time as you continue to think about these choices, you’ll either end up validating them as good ones or rejecting them as bad ones. When you’re ready, and ONLY when you’re ready, make any changes you think follow from your self-examination.

Accountability is the key.  Once we understand what we’re doing to ourselves and why, we can find the motivation and strength to make changes.

Ironically Charlie Sheen himself underscores this very point in his classic cameo in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Your problem is you,” he said to Jennifer Grey’s character.

(Take a look at the minute mark in this video)

Your problem is you. Our problem is us. It isn’t the easiest thing to accept; in fact, Jennifer Grey ended up threatening to cut off one of Charlie’s balls.

But if we can get past the guilt, ire, and self-incrimination, we might just get the help we need.

–          Mike Raven

 

I’m Engaged! Roll Out the Champagne!

Over the last few days, I have never felt more useful at work.  My boss, his boss, a couple of SVPs, and the CEO himself all wanted something only my team and I could provide. Put that together with the fact that we had just 48 hours to get it done, a mandate to sweep across the organization and pull whatever talent we needed, and a material, meaningful, and well-understood PURPOSE driving everything we were doing, and what do we get? An OPPORTUNITY! A real, honest-to-goodness, authentic opportunity to make a difference. And, you know, that’s all I—and tell me if I’m wrong–most of us really want.

(“One man CAN make a difference, Michael”)

When I am working hard for something I can believe in, for people with the power to make use of what I do, then I am needed. And when I am needed, I am in control. All of the fear, angst, and anxiety I talked about in previous posts, melts away, leaving me with a renewed clarity of vision and purpose.  When I have all these things, I am in modern org buzzspeak, ‘engaged.’

If you’re working for a big company, then you’ve probably had to take an engagement survey at some point, maybe at lots of points.  Now more than ever, large companies want to move the needle on productivity: they have to show their shareholders they can eke out greater revenue per employee quarterly. The thinking is that if you cut your labor force by 20%, then you’ve upped your productivity by 25% automatically, right?  Hey, even better, why not halve the workforce?  The moment you do it, you end up with a 100% productivity boost, right?

(Here, Donald Trump shows us HIS attempt to drive productivity)

Well, not exactly.  The math is right but in the longer term (maybe by next quarter), when a workforce is decimated, people scramble for the hills. They don’t work, partly because they don’t know whom or even what to work for, anymore.  Think sailboat here: You can throw some things overboard to gain speed but if the weight you happen to toss consists of your sail and rudder, you’re as good as lost.

Hold on to that sail! (Image: Steve Evans, Bangalore, India)

So, companies drop some weight and find they’re not seeing the gains their consultants promised them.  They figure something must be wrong with their employees. The wrinkle is that large companies are so out of touch with their employees, so disconnected from what it takes to excite and drive them, that they have to hire more consultants to tell them they have a problem with… drumroll please… EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT.

The consultants administer surveys, they pinpoint managers with ‘engagement gaps,’ and the managers in turn do what anyone would do in their situation: coach their employees to answer the questions in such a way that the managers don’t get hammered on the next ‘engagement pulse survey.’ Duh.

Managers, listen up. If you want to enhance engagement, it’s pretty simple: Give employees a chance to work on something meaningful, for meaningful people, and for a meaningful, transparent purpose, and they will be engaged. Oh, and one other thing, you might want to stop firing them so much.

In the next post, I’ll look at what we can do to STAY engaged (and not merely by the companies we work for).

Thanks for reading, and I would love to get your reactions to this…

-Mike Raven

 

Fear and Loathing in the Workplace

I’m not sure Lie to Me is headed in the right direction. In that Fox TV series, the lead character, Dr. Cal Lightman, interprets facial and vocal “microexpressions”—facial actions or voice modulations discernible only to the trained or naturally astute observer—to get a good sense of what people are feeling whether they’re lying.

In one scene, for example, Lightman shows a video of a woman talking cheerfully about how she’s ready to see her family, how she’s no longer depressed and is ready to exit institutional care. When he slowed down the video, however, and focused on her face, we can plainly see the smile flanked by momentary facial constrictions, narrowings or strictures that show she is trying to disguise her real feelings literally by turning a frown upside-down, an effect turned right-side-up by slow-mo.

Based on the real-life work of psychologist Paul Ekman, it’s a terrific premise but do Lightman and his team have to descend deep into the criminal underground to uncover dark secrets and lots of people to save?  Fight clubs, masochistic beauty queens, organized crime, kidnapping rings – who needs ‘em when the Lightman Group could be working feverishly (and at a high price-point, I might add) to save a perfectly delightful population of intrapsychically-conflicted, hyper-anxious, and chronically self-obfuscating employees at major corporations?

Try this – Experiment 1:

At your next meeting, look around the room and scan the faces—I mean, REALLY scan the faces.  You may see some smiles but are those really smiles?  Those of you with kids know what a real smile looks like; is that what you’re seeing as you pan across the conference room? Take a look at the ridges above and below the eyes and mouth – what are you seeing?

According to Ekman, expressions of fear are universal. (Image: Maria Yakunchikova "Fear" 1893-95)

If something in those faces doesn’t look quite right but yet seems somehow familiar, try one more thing: try to make those features appear on your own face.  As you begin to recall the last time you’d made that face, you might start to feel something. Even if you don’t, what would you have to be feeling to make a face like that?

Hint: It’s fear.

Well, depending on where you are in your own corporate lifecycle, perhaps it’s fear mixed with contempt. Depending on how you were brought up, maybe it’s fear suppressed with self-loathing. The point is, it’s fear.

Three more experiments:

1. Listen to the laughter at a meeting. Is that real laughter? Or, does it sound forced? Do you think this is how these people laugh with their friends and family?
2. Tune into watercooler or drive-by conversations. As I walked from my fourth-floor office to a fifth-floor conference room, I heard two conversations whisper-punctuated with the words, “I’m afraid that…”
3. What are your colleagues doing as they talk? How are they moving their bodies? During a job interview with a major insurer, a Group VP of Analytics commented, “Oh, when I started here no one called on my group. They didn’t get us. Now, whenever they need to get it right, whenever the CEO needs something, we’re the ONLY ONES they call!” And with that, he threw his right shoulder very slightly forward in two staccato motions. It happened so fast and so subtly that it could have gone unnoticed but like a poker ‘tell,’ it helped me understand something important about the level of fear (and the necessary level of defiance required) in that organization.

So, what are we all so afraid of? Failing. Not living up to the image we have of ourselves. Being canned.  Almost being canned. I could go on and on and probably never come close to the specific things you or I are afraid of every day when we enter the office.

And we could dump a ton of money into psychotherapy and self-examination to figure out why, or get a prescription to manage the tons of symptoms that live off that fear like bacteria on an open wound. Or, we could start living. If we recognize the fear, recognize that that is ALL it is, JUST FEAR, then we can start living.

We lie to ourselves every day when we sit down at a meeting. We laugh when we don’t want to, smile when we feel we have to, and contort outselves into creatures we scarcely recognize.

But we don’t have to. Once I started telling the truth, once I started acting like the person I wanted to be in spite of everything I felt I had to be inside that conference room or manager’s office, I started living.

So, step 1 to surviving corporate America without psychotherapy or drugs:  Recognize that fear dominates much of what we do at work. But, that’s all it is: fear.  Start living.

All the best,

Mike Raven