Insecurity drains the life out of employees

Not long ago a majority of workers worked for the same company for 20, 30 or more years. It was a normal occurrence. At the time many of my friends were asking me how can I shift so much and so easily from one employer to another? That was easy enough, since nothing was “pushing me” out of a company except my curiosity and new, different challenges. Same as today? No, not the same here. Those were different times and different society back then.

In 2014 Hewlett-Packard only eliminated 34,000 jobs, while JP Morgan Chase has cut 20,000 from its workforce and JC Penney and Sprint announced cuts … In '70s and '80s, not so long ago, a modification of labor market began and we were able to observe anti-worker policies forming up. Nowadays a new business model (not so new any more) is disentangling the ties between employers and employees, fueling the perception that it is good to have employment flexibility.

In today’s business spheres where results of globalization, outsourcing, contracting, downsizing, recession and even natural disasters are all together killing ‘a job security’, how does one deal with such uncertainties?

It is well known that people can deal with short bursts of pressure pretty good, but that chronic uncertainty throws them in a vicious cycle of stress and fear. According to the research done by Stuart Whitaker at the University of Cumbria, having an insecure job has a more damaging impact on people's health than actually losing a job.

When we do not know whether we’ll have a job next year or, even worse, next week, how do we plan the life? Could we consider a loan to buy a house, start family or save for college or save for retirement? In the face of job insecurity, thoughts like these bring only panic and more pressure. Can we still spend with easiness if we are so insecure for the jobs we have?

When people fear that the world around them will fall apart, when our future becomes foggy, when feelings of powerlessness paralyze us, we tend to start to flip out. We pile on more work than we can handle, we are afraid to take sick leaves. Some people start to function on drugs, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol and other substances.  We drop everything that is good for us – we stop to care for our physical well-being, we stop practicing, we do not have fun with friends or have and enjoy vacations and so on.

Why ownership matters?

I was reading the article The Seven Deadly Sins of Economic Liberalism a friend of mine Lucas Juan Manuel kindly sent to me. The article describes private ownership that generates wealth as:

Economic liberalism triggers a socio-economic system based mainly on financial speculation jointly with inappropriate economic measures and structural/social reforms.  Let’s take Euro area as an example.  The EU implemented painful austerity measures in order to reduce the high level of government debt in many country members.  But it was, and still is, a wrongly-conceived austerity

There are many ‘enterprises and entrepreneurs’ arising from political clientelism (crony-ism and patronage), and those kind of enterprises and entrepreneurs do not generate wealth and prosperity in our societies because they are not competitive.  This kind of capitalism is deeply disappointing for the real entrepreneurial spirit (genuine enterprises).

 In this way, wealth, well-being and prosperity are being concentrated in the hands of a few and the income gap between a country's richest and poorest people enlarges dramatically. “Obviously, this way of capitalism is inherent to political corruption and prevents equal opportunities in the economic and social spheres.”

Although somehow hidden, ownership nevertheless matters in all the above described topics. There are different approaches to ownership of a property. The question is whether all of them are sustainable for the advancement of a society as a whole?

Let’s define different ownerships and their (potential) effects.

‘Personal ownership’ is where assets and property is belonging to an individual, also known as individual ownership. Contrary, the ‘collective ownership’ assets and property belongs to a collective body of people who control their use and collect the proceeds of their operation. Very similar is ‘common ownership’ (or non-ownership) where assets and property are held in common by all members of society. Any country owns property (‘state ownership’) where assets are state owned or owned by certain state agency consequently having jurisdiction over in terms of use. And finally, assets owned by a government or a state and available for public use to all their constituents are called ‘public property’.

Biggest Relaxation Mistakes and how to avoid them

Long ago sports evolved from martial arts (like: Greek Olympic games) and were transformed into competitive play with rules and winning points. Sports carry in itself some cultural impact on competitors. Martial arts of today, especially Chinese, are mostly later inventions. They have typically risen at the end of 19th century. It was the time when China and other Far East countries understood cultural impact of sports and had nothing else to offer regarding sports. So they began to export martial arts and other techniques.

The core of all – not only Chinese martial arts – is so called ‘natural movement’. It is a way of movement that has originated in Nature and is connected to energy consumption (see: Least of effort in leadership).

Long ago, when physical strength was necessary to fight, ‘natural movement’ was commonplace. All styles of martial arts, breathing techniques (see:  Best Ways to Relax Successfully), meditation, yoga etc. are supposedly methods to regain natural movements. Those are very straight forward and very simple once we know how to do it, but quite a bit hard to (mostly) re-learn (recall) from our childhood years. And when we do, we realize how powerful natural movements are. In the Nature all species depend on them to survive. That is why masterful martial artists when old move so simply, so powerful and are able to subdue much younger competitors.

There are different techniques to learn natural movements! Some of them are very popular today:

• “Meditation allows your body to settle into a state of profound rest and relaxation and your mind to achieve a state of inner peace, without needing to use concentration or effort.”
• “Yoga is a healing system of theory and practice. The purpose of yoga is to create strength, awareness and harmony in both the mind and body.”

But are the above techniques fairly represented and taught?

Reasons your Focus is or isn’t going to Work

“If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him” by Seneca.

Yes, we have to focus!

The so-called Y (or better interrupt) generation has big difficulties to handle it what I see daily in my classroom.

Focus is the thinking skill that allows people to begin a task without procrastination and then maintain their attention and efforts until the task is complete. Attention is a mental muscle and like any other muscle, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise.

During my university years I spent many hours practicing ballroom dancing on the competition level. Vienna waltz was our warm up procedure but not just one round, but ten or more in a raw. I have learned that the secret to not get disoriented is to focus on a point far in the distance and visually always following the spot (or your partner’s face) extracts the entire surrounding environment. The same goes if you lead a company: you must find a beacon and drive your organization passionately in that direction.

Organizations and countries need people with strong focus on (important) goals. They all need a talent to continually learn how to do things better or best. Without such high-innovative performers there is no innovation, productivity and change.

Therefore, focus is the state or quality of having or producing a clear visual definition – a center of interest or activity we do. So, being focused means thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. It is an important tool that can and will shape your life. In a longitudinal study tracking the fates of all 1,037 children born during a single year in the 1970’s in the New Zealand city of Dunedin particularly compelling results came out (Source: The Focused Leader, by Daniel Goleman, 2013):

For several years during childhood the children were given a battery of tests of willpower, including the psychologist Walter Mischel’s legendary “marshmallow test”—a choice between eating one marshmallow right away and getting two by waiting 15 minutes. In Mischel’s experiments, roughly a third of children grab the marshmallow on the spot, another third hold out for a while longer, and a third manage to make it through the entire quarter hour.

Steps to Turn Control into Delegation

In my blog ‘Can Obedience nurture Trust?’ my thoughts were about shifting from blind obedience to trust. Control and delegation are a part of the same story. Let’s challenge them here now.

Control is the act or power of controlling or regulating people's behavior … or to exercise restraint or direction over; to dominate. All responsibility is with a control-holder.

History has repeatedly shown how problematic is to effectively restrain power from someone once it has been granted to if a strong system of control, checks and balances is in place. People tend to – when given control or power – exercise them far beyond the legal, actually given, authority. Such anomalies are not excluded in business.

What is Delegation?

To delegate means to give to another person a task or duty or activity meanwhile retaining responsibility for the outcome. The latter is the key since while delegating, you are still responsible for the outcome!

So, where lays the difference between the two if responsibility still remains in the same hands?

Well, control, as we have seen, can be misused when delegate hardly.