So, alienation. Mercedes isn’t really convinced that it’s a big deal.
“Tons of people go to work every day to jobs they don’t love,” she argues. “I never really expected my job to be a way of expressing myself, why do you?”
My initial reaction was that she is kind of skeptical of alienation as a concept because it ideas like that lead people to do stupid stuff like quit perfectly good jobs in order to do something more fulfilling.
Of course, quitting your high paying job to do something with a purpose is kind of like a rite of passage in today’s elite. For example, I recently read an article about presidential candidate Peter Buttigieg which included this description:
But ultimately, Buttigieg only left McKinsey because it “could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.”
So yeah, Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar goes to work at McKinsey and then quits to go do something meaningful. Typical.
Anyway, after thinking about it a bit I started to ask myself whether there might be a different reason why Mercedes is skeptical about alienation. Maybe it isn’t just a way for her to manipulate me. What if her skepticism is actually rooted in, like, her real legitimate feelings.
This could be the case if either 1) she has never really felt alienated at work, or 2) she felt alienated, but she didn’t call it that.
The second possibility intrigued me. What if she was feeling skeptical because of the language I was using to describe it. I tend to describe alienation in terms that relate to purpose and meaning, like I need to be working toward something I care about at work. But my language is generally skewed toward a growth oriented personality (because I am a pretty growth oriented person). So I need to expand the idea to include more than the way growth oriented people feel about work.
As a reminder, a very general definition of a growth orientation is someone who feels rewarded by working toward a goal. By contrast, a threat sensitive person is driven by a desire to avoid threats. So alienation for a growth orientated person feels like a lack of a proper objective, or purpose. For a threat sensitive person, being alienated at work feels like being constantly subjected to threats. That is, work isn’t a safe place, emotionally speaking.
I am not sure if everyone would agree with this dual-sided definition of alienation, but i don’t really care. I’m making it up as I go along. What I do care about is the idea that our work environment should provide for our psychological needs. For some people, this is largely about having a meaningful objective, for others, it is about feeling security. For most people, it is some combination of both.
A typical firm only provides people with meaning and security to the extent that it seems immediately profitable to do so. But in my ideal of a tribal firm, the happiness of the members is the primary objective. And this is accomplished by engaging people in meaningful work, and by making them feel emotionally secure in their work.
Although I won’t go into too much detail here, I believe there is another dimension of work alienation that has to do with the people vs pattern orientation. That is, alienation is not just about the balance of risks and rewards (which I associate with the growth vs. threat dimension of personality), it also has to do with whether your work engages you in a way that feels stimulating. Idea people tend to feel exhausted by too much personal interaction, and people people tend to feel bored or annoyed when everything is too abstract.
In any case, alienation is largely about being engaged in work that does not match your personality. How this feels, and what kinds of work are appropriate depends on your personality type. Since I was using language centered around growth mindset to describe alienation, it didn’t really make that much sense to Mercedes, who is coming at the world from a different direction.
