One of the most profound, and interesting, concepts I became aware of through my Masters in Occupational Psychology a few years ago were the concepts of ‘loss and lack’. These two short words have a significant effect on how we deal with organisational change as individuals. How we process what is going on and therefore how we deal with the future within our organisations. And I have observed over recent times how these play out in the success or failure of organisational change.
Whether you look at change through the Kubler-Ross curve, the William Bridges Transition Model, or your change model of choice, we know there is something that happens to us as individuals that can cause different levels of “loss”. Examples of these situations can be leaving a task or job that we feel settled in and/or like, moving on from a team we enjoy working in, or just that you personally like it when your tomorrow looks like your yesterday. We grieve the loss. As organisational leaders, our role therefore is to tell the narrative and stories that take people on the journey towards “the new world” where there are benefits and opportunities to replace these losses. By doing this, we create a level of acceptance in our people, and these benefits supplant the feelings of loss to allow us to move on.
Job done.
But what about ‘lack’? How does lack fit into this?
Lack is a bit trickier for organisations. We can rewind back to the 1960’s for rather obscure definitions of ‘lack’ by Jacques Lacan, but to me, it is the perception that something is missing to make us feel complete. For organisations, this is important because it involves us dealing with the fantasies inside our heads that give us our perception on such things as self-worth and how we fit into the complex world around us. More importantly, it is very good for us, as individuals, to wallpaper over any cracks of ‘lack’ that might exist in our lives, allowing us to find ways to ignore them.
Why is this important for organisations?
One example is the work we do in organisations to create a positive psychological contract. We overtly promote the concept of “if you work hard and deliver quality for us, we will look after you and reward and recognise you appropriately”. It promotes engagement. This promotes discretionary effort, more output, and all is good.
However, when we initiate a change or transformation programme with restructuring, redeployment and maybe redundancy, a person’s internal fantasy may suddenly be reevaluated as false. We were not actually seen any more as good employees. The organisation does not care for me as much as I thought. A ‘lack’ appears in the person’s internal monologue. It disrupts the internal story of the self, the work and the organisation. The effect is more fundamental to the person than the sense of loss. It goes deep to the identity the person has created about themselves which included how they fitted into their work and the organisation, and as part of their interaction with society.
The importance here is this can run deep in the psyche of an individual. The more of the internal story we have about ourselves that is connected to our work and organisations, then the more traumatic this can be. And think about it, so many of us have our work, role and profession as part of our identity. When you socialise and meet someone new, how do you introduce yourself? I bet your profession or job is up there in the top two or three things.
If we undergo change and transformation within our organisations with a plan to deal with the sense of ‘loss’ only in our people, we are not dealing with the deeper, more underlying and fundamental mental process of ‘lack’. It is lack that connects closer to our values. It is the idea that there is a lack of worth in me from the organisation that can severely disconnect people from re-engaging back into their work after organisational change. Often there is little or no reconnection unless quality thought, planning and intervention happens from organisations through this change and transformation.
The issue is there has been a lot of change and transformation recently in most organisations. Each one “peels back a bit of wallpaper” of the internal narrative and drops a hint to the individual that maybe there is a ‘lack’ in their relationship between self, work and the organisation. Maybe each time they are aware of the crack they can alter their internal narrative and stick the wallpaper back up. However, the more you see the crack you might start reassessing your inner story and one day realise that the relationship between you, your work and your organisation was not what you thought it was. This day of disengagement often comes with no warning for organisations. You probably thought everything was good, and so did the employee. It probably was while the wallpaper was in place in the individual, covering the growing cracks.
So, what and now what? What can we do as organisations about the concept of lack as well as loss?
There is no easy fix. We need to ensure all tools are available to us through change and transformation. Most ‘lack’ experiences come from the perception that the organisation change effects tell us that we are not worth as much as individuals to the organisation as we thought. As organisations, we can ensure our comms are well thought through. However, this still largely comes from the “lack producing” faceless part of the organisation.
The most powerful resource we have at our disposal are our line managers. Those who reinforce the ‘worth’ of a gelled and high-performing team on a regular basis. Regularly skilling our line managers to be the best at emotionally connecting the work to the self-worth of the individual, storytelling the change into the broader narrative of needs, desires and motivators, and knowing the person and being able to talk “their language” are key to reducing the cracks under the wallpaper.
Ensuring that people’s internal fantasy, story or monologue is appreciated and nurtured is the key to taking our people through change and transformation most successfully. If you want to minimise the sense of loss and lack, you need to turn to your line managers and skill them for a modern workforce who entwine their self-worth with their work and organisation.
