Culture Change

Last week we touched on the impact of narcissistic behaviours in the workplace. Narcissism is a psychological descriptor for a selfish person who craves admiration but lacks empathy with others. It manifests itself in four forms ● Grandiose Narcissists - charming master manipulators. ● Social Narcissists - craving peer group attention. ● Vulnerable Narcissists - hypersensitive, negative and adept at blaming others. out destroying the prospects of others.

We all know a Prima Donna. Not in the true sense of the word, as few of us number among our friends the leading female singer in an opera company. But the term has come to mean a temperamental person with an inflated sense of their own worth. It is often connected with another term - Narcissism - which is a psychological descriptor for a selfish person who craves admiration but lacks empathy with others.

At work, we are slaves to the acronym. If we can find a way to abbreviate a company name, a process or a condition we will use it. Even though, forever after, someone will always be explaining the acronym to someone else who hasn't heard it. When it comes to employee performance, many of us are slaves to the KPI and the KRA. There is certainly a role for these in planning and measuring employee productivity.

In life, people generally try to help one another. This may be rooted in behaviours adopted by early man, who realised that there was safety in numbers. Several millennia of subsequent human development have since overlaid social, moral and spiritual stimuli. But we all know that our willingness to help others is affected by the situations we find ourselves in. I saw this myself the other night while boarding a crowded flight.

I recently touched upon the fact that everyone suffers from Monday blues and suggested that the average employee might find Monday’s bluer than her leaders do. I felt that leaders and managers might want to consider this as they try to crank up the working week. One or two people wrote to ask me what the solution might be. It struck me that, if leaders practised empathy, they could come up with their own solutions.

One rewarding aspect of involvement in The Amalgam Leadership Programme www.amalgamleadership.com is the quality of the conversations on our Alumni chat. Few of our Alumni were any different from their peers when they joined the programme, now entering its 7th year. Their career success was rooted firmly in the domain of IQ. Since childhood they had studied with diligence and later applied themselves wholeheartedly to their professional development.