Talent and Spiritual Identity

I had the opportunity recently to talk to some people about their jobs. They came from different countries, different backgrounds and represented diverse genders and ethnicities. I started by asking the following question: “Picture that you have decided to retire. You feel content that your time at work has been well spent. Tell me about what you have accomplished with your professional career.”

The responses were highly individual and unique. But all answers shared one common attribute: everyone wanted to know that their work had contributed to making the world a better place. Some people defined “the world” as their workplace, where many others focused on much broader social, economic and political contexts. Not one person answered from an economic perspective. Nobody said “Well, I’d like to be as rich as possible.” Not one.

This was not a scientific study. There is no statistical validity to the results, But the exercise reinforced for me that people hunger for meaning in their life, and since work has become an increasing part of their identity, there is an ever growing desire for individuals to be able to equate the value of their daily work with impact beyond their pocketbook.

From an HR perspective, I believe this will be the greatest challenge that medium to large-scale companies will face in the coming 20 years. How do you balance the need to squeeze every last ounce of waste and inefficiency out of your processes, every last penny of value from your resources while creating systems that summon the human spirit? Or, to put a capitalist (talentist?) spin on the question “Which for-profit organizations will define spiritual fulfillment as their competitive advantage.”

There is a real danger that companies will look for easy answers to this question, much as nations have over the last 2000 years. Why spend the time to define a treacherous path that innovates spirit-summoning systems, that finds the good and the profit in connectedness, compassion and truth when you can coopt a religious theme and let the holy men do the heavy lifting? It may seem laughable now that large corporations would shift from secular worship of mammon to managerial religious zealotry, but in a world where talent is scarce and management is confused, benchmarking successful spiritual organizations will seem like a logical business decision.

But the spiritual problem that companies face is not a belief in a higher power. People have seen 1,400 CEO’s be fired or walked out the door this year alone. The higher power of the working class is spending too much time in minimum security to be worthy of idolatry. The spiritual problem confronting today’s organization is a belief in their own creative capacity and the inherent risks that come with that ability. The hierarchical control structures of work are designed to limit the unpredictable variations of the human being. When muscles or mind are the key component of the human cog then you must homogenize the diversity of the human spirit in order to maximize the utility of the human body. And therefore it was accepted (and rarely contradicted) as the appropriate and conventional wisdom that seeking a profitable path between the needs of fickle buyers and the opportunity of the unpredictable heart was a fool’s errand. The epithets “soft” and “wishy-washy” were issued with snickers and sneers. When work was solely about the accumulation and preservation of capital, and when the acquisition of that capital was dependent on the ability to run machines or maximize the value of information, tapping into the infinite creative capacity of the human sprit was seen as sure path to disaster.

The human body, enraptured by the human mind for the purpose of rendering products from natural resources, was the unquestioned domain of the capitalist. The human spirit, unleashed for the purpose of creatively solving many of the problems of our own creation, will be the privilege of the talentist. As companies increasingly compete on their ability to summon that spirit of creativity in the form of continuous innovation it will be job of HR to mine the natural resource of the human heart. But unlike the human body and the human mind, access will be denied to those who seek to profit through control, obfuscation, manipulation or opacity. Only time will tell if corporations are willing to take the risk to becomes temples that summon the spirit more often than the bankers.

Comments

[Critic]

Well spoken - the intersection of truth and phrasing is worthy of a talentism manifesto.

Time will, indeed, tell if corporations are willing to take the risk to become temples that summon the spirit more often than the bankers. Sadly, however, corporations fight this evolution in order to preserve systems proven to be profitable. Capitalism hasn't learned how to profit by freeing the spirit. Instead, leveraging human capital continues through assembly line derivatives where employees lead quiet lives of desperation.

[Amitai Givertz]

Hmmmm... we'll have to think this through, Jeff. My mind is too foggy right now. It must be the opium. Indeed, I suspect you are off the Marx with this one but I Kant think right now. I should go and have a Hegel and coffee, wake up. Perhaps then I can reply to your thought-provoking post.

Amitai