The Career Encouragement Blog: Do you bring your whole self to work?

Thanks to Ann Bares for calling my attention to this great article about being a whole person at work in Fast Company Magazine.

Margaret Heffernan comments on the differences between how men and women approach work and the resulting structural implications for our corporations:

"And as men built the business world for themselves, by themselves, it became a very partial, simple, skewed, unilateralist kind of place. Business forms became very rigid: the office with its special, tough furniture. The cubicles. The jargon. The sharp suits. Values became rigid too. Business became a place that celebrated aggression, dominance, and crushing the competition. A place that became very lopsided in its values and its concerns. A place that, as it became more rigid, welcomed less and less of the human beings it employed.

When women entered the workplace, their pain was like the dead canary in the mine: a clear warning that something was wrong. At first, it looked like this was just a structural problem, one easily solved with a few flex-time and job share programs. When those didn't work, it was easy enough to blame women: they lacked ambition, weren't tough enough, lacked the genetic make up for 80-hour weeks."

Heffernan then goes on to talk about how women are leaving these artificial environments in droves, starting their own companies that allow them to express their core values, and becoming wildly successful in the process.

Personally I cringe a little at the sweeping gender generalizations, but I get where she is coming from. There is some element of truth to those generalizations, or it wouldn't be so acceptable for Heffernan and others who write on these topics, to state them so boldly. But I would be remiss in my role as an encourager of workplace success for all if I didn't acknowledge that I have been privileged to work with many men who are thoughtful, collaborative, and very progressive in viewing work as an integral part of community and family life, not as a separate battle ground. And I have also worked with women who possess the negative traits she attributes to males.

I do think, however, that Heffernan is dead-on in her characterization of how separatist thinking creates a corporate environment that can easily be "lopsided in its values and its concerns" and the results will not be good for any of us in the long-run.

Fortunately for those of us in the corporate workplace, this dialog is going on around us. More and more companies are expressing a desire to be a workplace that allows/inspires employees to do meaningful work that benefits their company, their community and themselves. In a previous post I highlighted how Kim Sharan at Ameriprise Financial cares about her employees. You can also look here to learn about the cool things other great companies are doing.