AN OPEN INVESTIGATION - Understanding The Impact of Suffering at Work
Have you ever noticed something was wrong, but you just couldn’t put your finger on what it was? You just couldn’t name it.
For example, over the past five years, I have met with an increasing number of exceptional leaders – high-performing, admirable, successful people - who were simply not OK. They had hit a wall or seemed at the end of their long rope. Even before the pandemic hit and the market buckled, I would be sitting in a room full of executives and sense something troubling was simmering just below the surface of their executive poise.
This ambiguous quality was more than burnout.
And it seemed undefinable ... until I met Angela.
a moment of insight
In late 2019, Angela was in a program we were leading for high-potential leaders. Throughout the day we experienced her as an engaged, happy, and whip-smart leader who connected well with her colleagues. After the second day of the program, she opened her laptop to catch up on email. Within minutes, her shoulders were hunched forward and a deep frown had formed on her face. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she typed urgent replies to the messages she was reading. Her entire demeanor had changed.
As I walked over to grab some supplies from the middle of her table, I quietly asked, “Is everything OK?” Her eyes darted up to me and she instinctually said, “Yeah, it’s fine.” Sensing there was more, I asked again. She looked up at me, frozen. We both knew it wasn’t. Slowly, her head began to shake back and forth.
“No, it’s actually really not OK.”
She began to describe a long-standing tension with her boss, the 12-hour days she was working, and the woefully-frenzied pace this had set for her team – she described it as “simply unsustainable.” Then she shared that she didn’t want to be “a part of the system” anymore – a system that overworked people to satisfy ambitious growth goals and shareholder returns. She blamed her own personal limitations and lack of stamina for how impossible it felt. Here was a woman, exceptional and exhausted, who had finally hit her wall. And as she spoke her truth, a word began to form in my brain. The word was “suffering.”
After this conversation with Angela, I heard myself use the word “suffering” out loud for the first time with a teammate. In fact, what I heard myself say was, “This should be the mission of The People Side. We can alleviate human suffering in the workplace.”
the start of a calling
Fast forward only a few months and we all found ourselves at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Within two weeks, 70% of our company’s revenue evaporated – no one was traveling, and no one was training. And the notion of “suffering” became even more real to myself and my team. We started to see the world, and our work, through the lens of suffering. And the dots kept connecting – people were finding new ways of being at work, at home, and together during one of the most difficult and tumultuous times in modern history. For some of us, it was stifling; for others, it set us free. The bottom was falling out of the traditional workplace, revealing its many cracks. Everywhere we looked, we saw obvious and unnamed suffering. And our desire to understand it, trace its roots, and alleviate it became insatiable.
Trust me, knitting would have been an easier pandemic hobby ... but we could not ignore this idea. We started reading and listening to the people who researched suffering — from Buddhists to Brene — to better understand the impact it was having on people, and specifically, how it impacted those people at work.
Since that time, we have watched as qualified and talented people politely excused themselves from the workplace in favor of gigging, early-retirement, and even “fun-employment.” My new business partner, Kate Bouyain, was one of those people. She "jumped off the hamster wheel" in late 2020 due to downsizing in her company, and has never looked back.
But that is a story for another day.
exploring the concept
News outlets dubbed these trends as the Great Resignation, but we wondered, was it actually the Great Reassessment? To us, it looked more like sane people refusing to endure the grind and dysfunction of their workplace anymore because they were fed up. There was a better, more workable value proposition emerging, and they leapt at it. People were enduring incredible circumstances outside of the workplace – long-term isolation, fear, sickness, geopolitical unrest, and cultural reckonings just to name a few – and many companies behaved like it should not impact a human being’s ability to do the work. This was a mistake. Alarm bells were resounding all across the media, waking companies up to the new expectations of today’s workforce. But far too many organizations have been unwilling to listen and adjust.
When we ignore the suffering of ourselves, our teammates, and our world, we do not make things better. Nothing goes away, it just simmers. As a society, we need to stop wading in the mud of our own making, expecting people who are barely holding on to continue performing and delivering at work if they don’t have the capacity to do so. There is an impact we need to pay attention to, and a better way forward. We have decided to prove it. In 2021, The People Side officially declared our mission – “To Alleviate Human Suffering in the Workplace” – and began the journey of understanding how to practice it.
Let’s talk about this word. Suffering. It is a hard one to look at. It is definitely not a dinner-table conversation, and even our own team has questioned if we should call it that. It can seem overstated to suggest people are suffering at work – unhappy, maybe – but suffering? But this language is important, and calling it suffering is a conscious choice because it lines up perfectly with the way The People Side is approaching adult development. Suffering is a complex and deeply human condition. Toxic workplaces and “hustle culture” have been taking a toll on human beings for a long time, but new data trends are emerging. In Japan, there is actually a term called karoshi (過労死) that means “death from overworking.” It is a phenomenon studied and validated by the World Health Organization. Yes, it seems people can – and do – experience personal harm when they endure harsh workplace cultures long enough. But suffering is not only inflicted by the systems or cultures around us — there is also a system of suffering between people and within people that should be explored and understood if we want to improve human performance in the workplace.
We have learned that the majority of the suffering happening between us, and around us, is due to the suffering within us.
the challenge that lies ahead
This year, The People Side will be launching an open investigation into the impact of suffering on human performance in the workplace.
It has to be now, before we close the book on the last two years and label it all as an anomaly, or an outlier in the employment data. And it has to be our team because we feel uniquely called to help. Though we are not scientists, we are practitioners and people developers on a mission to untangle the systems of suffering and learn how to alleviate it for the good of society.
Here is our hypothesis:
There are systems of suffering – around us, between us, and within us – that have a significant impact on the performance of people at work. Once these systems of suffering are identified, they can be understood and alleviated.
The mission of our company rests on us proving this hypothesis. This has become Priority #1 for The People Side. At this moment, in the arc of our society, what else matters more than this? What becomes of our world if people collectively shut down and fail to meet the challenges we face?
Supported and inspired by our team of bright and driven professionals, The People Side will research the notion of suffering from every angle we can. You will hear the brilliant voices of our team as they explore this topic on every outlet available to us. Out front in this work is Jenna Willingham – a rockstar on our team who left the corporate world to pursue more freedom and purpose in her work. Her chief focus the rest of this year is to research, synthesize, and share. She will gather stories, lived experiences, and any data we can get our hands on. She will also host conversations that get to the heart of human performance on our podcast The Leadership Living Room, this time with a special focus on decoding human suffering at work.
From Jenna, Candyce, Kate, and the entire TPS Team: this is your personal invitation to join us on this journey. Together, we will confirm or reject our hypothesis based upon what we learn and hopefully, become more aware throughout the discovery process. We wonder how this article finds you where you stand. Maybe somewhere along the way you have suffered at work? Maybe the personal hardships you face are starting to show up in your professional life? Maybe you need to help the leaders or teams in your organization who are suffering and you are unsure what do. All the same, we invite you to be a part of it.
Here are four easy ways to join in:
Subscribe to our newsletter “Leading the People Side.” Receive monthly insights summarized & delivered right to your inbox.
Grab a seat and listen to our podcast The Leadership Living Room. The theme of Season 2 will be: Investigating Suffering @ Work.
Recommend a thought-leader on this topic. If you think Season 2 of Leadership Living Room is the perfect platform for you or someone in your network, we would love to connect.
Tune into The People Side, on LinkedIn: join our live discussions, read relevant articles, and learn alongside of us!