Workers Seek to Shed ‘Drone Complex’ by Building Self-Worth
Three months ago, 10 secretaries huddled in a secluded room at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Relaxed, with their eyes closed, they turned their imaginations over to a training specialist whose quiet monotone guided them into a flight of fancy in which secretaries don’t fetch coffee and bosses don’t make unfair demands. They pictured the best of all possible work worlds: one where secretaries mattered and knew they did.
Three hours once a week for five weeks, they met--enough time, the trainer said, “to create a new way of seeing yourself.” They gave each other support, told secrets, set goals, staked their claims to having a real impact in the office. “We looked at our own job and realized it is important,” says Linda Hassell. An office manager in her thirties, she works at the Maryland Department of Transportation’s state aviation office. “We re-emphasized we should feel important every day.”
That’s a tall order for occupations that commonly fall short on appreciation and confidence, not to mention wages. Complicated by a decade in which fulfillment-minded workers demand more from their jobs than just a paycheck, low professional self-esteem is now seen as a problem. Gradually, employers have come to recognize that its negative effects extend beyond workers who are bummed out about being nothing more than inconsequential cogs in the corporate mechanism. Research has confirmed that the worker who is down on himself also is down in his productivity.
A Happy Work Force
But, where there’s a willing market, there’s a way. With companies acknowledging a vested interest in a mollified work force, the field of psychologists, business behaviorists and pseudo-scientific consultants exploring methods for turning around on-the-job frowns has grown steadily in the mid 1980s.
When automation eliminated the jobs of 900 of its tellers recently, a California banking firm offered those employees positions in its sales division. Some complained bitterly that one reason they became bankers was so they’d never have to work in sales. The company hired a specialist to meet with the displaced workers--not about sales techniques but what the psychologist in charge called “role acceptance.”
Two years ago, the federal government hired organizational specialists to create, via computer connection, “an interagency network” of personnel managers. The purpose: to make inroads against low morale of government employees. “We intend to set the stage for a federal work force which is turned on, in which every worker knows the mission, and where people are excited about their role in making that mission happen,” said Lisa Carlson of MetaSystems Design Group, an Arlington, Va.-based consulting firm. “We realize we are talking about a subtle attitude change . . . but every ‘light’ we can turn on makes a small difference.”
At Bell Laboratories, management’s ability to shape employee attitudes to mesh with the hardware and software of a new computerized setting was called “roleware.” Robert Howard, author of “Brave New Workplace,” describes management approaches such as Bell Lab’s as an “intricately orchestrated infusion of meaning into working life” that generally can “turn disaffected secretaries and clerical workers into committed ‘knowledge workers.’ ” He labels it the “re-enchantment” of the American workplace.
“Simply put, it is possible now, in 1988, to turn around the reality of a secretary’s self-image from that of a pre-liberation drone to that of a recognized and self-affirmed potent link in the chain of production,” says Pamela Dinkel, in a letter promoting Creative Self Imaging, her Bethesda, Md., firm which conducted the BWI workshops. “They can find their work fulfilling and learn to see themselves as a part of the team that focuses on high performance success.”
Not Quite Alchemy
Empowering a worker whose job description has more clunk than clout takes some psychological sleight of hand. But Dinkel denies that conjuring up self-respect is vocational voodoo. “It’s not magic,” she said, though she likened parts of her workshop to “turning a negative blemish into a positive pearl.”
As the firm’s name suggests, the techniques used by Dinkel and managing partner Ann Frees are designed to create and reinforce a positive self-awareness in secretaries, clerks, nurses--”people who are constantly serving and need their batteries recharged,” as Dinkel says. “They give and give and give, until they reach a point where they just need for themselves.”
To satisfy that need, Dinkel and Frees, like many employee-empowering consultants, borrow techniques such as relaxation methods and guided imagery from the human potential and holistic movements. They owe a theoretical debt to other influences--some of them trendy and unproved, some of them based on scientific research. Their methods synthesize self-actualization and intuition research, organizational behavior theory, neurolinguistic programming and “simply whatever works.”
The latter, Frees adds, has emerged from her 10 years as an organizational development specialist helping companies to establish teamwork. As the workshop progresses beyond the initial ego-flexing, the secretaries are encouraged to try in the office what they’ve been practicing in their heads. “We start focusing on the issues they are dealing with on the job,” Dinkel says.
So when the boss says, “Hey, Thelma, make it cream and sugar,” the recharged secretary, feeling her personal power, replies confidently, “OK, but only if you get it tomorrow.” And that overload of overtime? Now she understands it’s one more indication of her vital role. But she has a heart-to-heart with the boss anyway.
“They’re able to approach issues with their bosses that they’d been sitting on for a long time,” Dinkel says. “They start to stand up for themselves in new ways. . . . What we’re talking about is claiming your own power, being clear about your own strength and being able to project that.”
Repeating Positive Thoughts
Donald Moine, an organizational psychologist with the Assn. for Human Achievement in Rolling Hills Estates, sometimes has clients repeat “an affirmation or internal dialogue” a thousand times. With “I deserve this raise, I am a hard worker, I deserve this raise . . . “ Moine illustrates what he calls “a visualization to totally program your mind.”
“We have them write down their affirmations on note paper and tape them to the dashboard of the car,” says Moine, who specializes in boosting the self-respect of sales people. “Instead of seeing negative, they see positive. That’s empowerment.”
Salesmen consistently are rated near the bottom of national opinion polls on respected occupations. This causes a negative impact on their professional and personal lives, Moine said. “I’ve done seminars and asked how many planned to become sales people? Only one or two raise their hands. The majority fall into sales accidentally. . . . We’ve seen cases where people are making $100,000 a year selling insurance but their spouse was so embarrassed” that they took lower-paying jobs to get out of sales.
But Moine believes it is a mistake to focus only on occupations traditionally seen as “drone jobs.” The professional egos of lawyers, accountants, even executives are often esteem-starved. “Lawyers have tremendous self-esteem problems, because many of them had no idea what law was going to be like until they got into it. And some of them suddenly realize that to do the best possible job for a client means ruining another person’s life.”
Moine described one saleswoman who had a breakthrough when she decided her job was no different than her marriage. “Her affirmation was that she has chosen to be there in that job,” he says, explaining that role dissatisfaction commonly arises from the false perception that the worker lacks a choice. “The affirmation gave her strength. In three months she was promoted.”
Obviously there is a payoff for the company. What corporate executive would shell out $225 a head to Frees and Dinkel, for instance, to train secretaries in office rebellion? “A savvy boss will see the improvements in terms of greater commitment, less absenteeism and higher productivity,” Dinkel says.
Some experts maintain that such outposts of self-respect on today’s job front have been made all the more essential by a continuing dehumanization of American work life. Others, however, equate corporations applying such mind-tinkering techniques with handing out doses of soma, “the happiness drug” in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” that made drones content to carry out their menial labor.
A Different Reason
“Training programs are the little pill,” argues Mark Pasten, a professor of management at Arizona State University’s College of Business whose specialty is business ethics. He believes the growth of self-image programs has been spurred by the fine fix American business is in with employees. Real income per individual has decreased over recent years, he says, upward mobility is disappearing, and there’s little chance for improvement.
“What companies hope to gain from the training is people who are satisfied with non-economic rewards, and who are satisfied to develop within a particular position,” Pasten says. In the context of corporate manipulation “a whole lot of upbeat-sounding training is actually very nasty business,” he says.
Although many of the programs are well-intentioned, Pasten says, innocent training themes are sometimes bent to accommodate this corporate intent. So-called “win-win” thinking is twisted to defuse employee opposition, self-help strategies are turned to substitute happiness and personal development for diminishing raises and lost security.
“The bottom line is to try to engender a level of employee commitment, or at least compliance, that is higher than you could achieve through a carrot and a stick,” Pasten says. “All of them are ways of Band-Aiding a lack of money and lack of mobility--a compensation nightmare for large organizations right now.”
In addition, some of the programs have run into trouble. Critics charge that, in their most brazen form, the training constitutes brainwashing. Some workers have complained of prying into their personal lives and attempts to alter values and program the subconscious.
When Pacific Bell, California’s largest utility company, enrolled some 67,000 workers last year in a series of seminars constructed from the teachings of the early 20th-Century Armenian mystic philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff, objections over “mind control” led to legal actions by employees and a utilities commission investigation that criticized the program.
Claimed Rights Violated
About the same time, an inspector at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash., charged in a formal complaint that his First Amendment rights had been violated when he was ordered to participate in training sessions that taught meditation, guided visualization and techniques that can alter a individual’s “view of reality and religious beliefs.”
“Some of it borders on invasion of privacy,” Pasten says. “A lot of these programs are Get-Your-Mind-Right stuff and some employees are resisting them.”
Moine concedes that some of the criticism has been justified. “Especially when you have non-psychologists teaching psychological processes and techniques to lay people,” he says, “because they are subject to manipulation and fraud.”
Frees says cases such as Pacific Bell have had “a negative impact on the field,” but that her firm hasn’t run into any bad situations. “You have to be sensitive to other people when you are doing something that so deeply affects their lives,” she says.
Pasten also says there are exceptions. Southwestern Bell, for instance, offers motivational workshops to its employees but doesn’t make them mandatory. “By comparison,” he says, “they’ve been more respectful of the individual.” He says trainers, for the most part, are “nice people who want to help so they latch onto a perceived need at face value: Wouldn’t it be nice if secretaries were happy? Yes. And if they thought of themselves as important people? Yes, of course.
“But, by and large, secretaries are not compensated as important people,” Pasten says. “Secretaries can look at their paycheck and see they don’t make as much money as the guy who disposes of toxic waste. And that limits the effectiveness of this kind of training. At some point, the reality comes home.”
