Tales of Artful Work
Dick Richards
First published in At Work and reprinted in American Chamber of Commerce in Japan Journal. The stories told here are drawn from my first book, Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning, and Commitment in the Workplace
.
Ted was teaching art at a small college that found itself in a money crunch, decided to pare its art department, and eliminated Ted’s job. With one-year-old twins at home, and prospects for another teaching position dim, he went to work as an illustrator for a manufacturing company. Thus began Ted’s climb up the corporate ladder. It led him to a General Manager’s position.
In his early years as a manager, Ted did what he saw other managers doing. He behaved as if he knew everything his subordinates and bosses expected him to know, and he struggled to maintain control. He believed that success as a manager required him to relinquish the playfulness that made for success as an artist in favor of a more pragmatic and serious approach to his job. But he missed being creative in his work.
After ten years of what he now calls, “masquerading as a manager,” he realized that he knew at least as much as his peers. Since he also knew that he did not know all the answers, this meant that his peers also did not know all the answers. Everyone was masquerading!
Ted determined to find a better way to manage, a way that acknowledged his playful creative bent, and allowed him to end his masquerade. He drew on his experience as an artist to re-invent himself as a manager. One major aspect of that experience was to respect his own ignorance.
Ted said, “Ignorance was a normal and real part of my art experience. From ignorance came experimentation and playfulness. It was fun to be ignorant! However, the business world does not look kindly on GM’s who openly admit to ignorance.”
His first challenges included convincing his own staff, and the corporate officers, to accept that a senior manager ought to be able to admit to ignorance. Eventually those around Ted saw that admitting ignorance allowed others to experiment, share their own knowledge, take more ownership of their work, make mistakes and learn from them, participate in problem solving, and communicate more of their own beliefs and values. In other words, admitting to ignorance was empowering. Ted not only opened his work to his own artfulness, his approach allowed others to open to theirs.
All work is art. However, the ability to do any particular work artfully rests on the attempt to bring the whole self to the work. The whole self includes dimensions that are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Art is SELF-expression, the expression of all four dimensions. If the self is not present in the work, there can be no art. When we bring new aspects of ourselves to our work, aspects that we have kept in hiding, we move closer to artfulness, as Ted did.
Moving closer to our own artfulness also moves us closer to engaging the passion and commitment our organizations so sorely need to succeed at complex change efforts, to commit to visions and values, and to maintain high levels of quality and service.
Bill, while not trained as an artist, also re-invented himself as a manager by bringing more of himself to his work.
“I got where I am by kicking butt,” he told me. Bill was a fifty-five year old senior executive of a Fortune 50 computer and office products company. Bill is not the kind of manager who typically asks a consultant to help him with his management team, so during this meeting, our second, I was curious to find out what was on his mind. I knew his reputation; the marketing manager on Bill’s executive team had described Bill as “abusive.”
“I’m the guy the company puts in situations that are failing,” Bill continued. “I’ve been successful at turning those situations around. Mostly by just plain old butt-kicking.”
“What is different this time?” I asked, meaning, “What do you want from me?”
He replied, “My boss told me that, if I want to move to the next level, I have to find another way to be. Butt-kicking alone isn’t enough. But I don’t have a clue what else to do.”
As Bill talked more about his style, he referred to it as a “tough love” approach, and I got a hunch.
“How were you with your kids?” I asked.
He chuckled sardonically. “Pretty much the same way I am with my management team. Tough love.”
“How about your grand-children?”
Bill brightened. “A totally different story,” he said. “With my grandchildren, I don’t take complete responsibility. That leaves me free to enjoy them and help them learn.”
Hunches often produce wonderful dividends.
“Do you suppose you could take that approach with your management team,” I suggested, “Don’t take complete responsibility. Allow them to share responsibility with you. Enjoy them as people. Help them learn.”
Bill was able to do that, pleasantly surprising those around him. He was promoted a year later.
The roles we are assigned or assign ourselves, and are rewarded for, often become prisons, hemming us in, preventing us from employing the fullness of who we are, and who we are capable of being. This seems especially true of work roles, because we are so very attuned to the external rewards attached to our work. We try to conform to the role so that we will achieve the reward. In the process we sacrifice large parts of ourselves, and too often work artlessly, without passion and commitment.
Bill later confessed that he was uncomfortable with his harsh style. It left him feeling isolated from those around him. He had given up expecting to develop lasting relationships in his work, given up expecting the work itself to be joyful. His work was a chore. He enjoyed only the results.
Bill had succumbed to believing there was a certain way for him to be, and he forfeited the flexibility inherent in bringing his entire self to his work. He brought only the “tough love” father to his work, and not the playful, nurturing grandfather. He did not allow himself to be an artful manager.
A third tale of artful work is about Ellen, who had an idea for a new revenue source that the company she worked for might pursue - a new profit center. She was the Accounting and Information Systems Manager for a large sports and entertainment complex. Her efforts to convince others of the merit of her idea seemed futile; no one seemed interested.
Six months earlier, Ellen and the other senior executives of the complex had held an off-site meeting during which they created a vision for the organization. Ellen felt committed to the vision, but noticed that none of the other managers spoke of it after the meeting. She had taken her cue from the others and not spoken of their vision.
Ellen decided to go public with her commitment. During a meeting when she presented her idea, she spoke of the vision, her commitment to it, and talked about how her idea moved the organization towards realizing the vision. Ellen’s idea became a thriving new profit center.
We are all assigned roles by our families, our educational institutions, and our workplaces. We also assign roles to ourselves. These roles often restrict us, limiting our creativity, our artfulness, our personal potency. Ellen, like Ted and Bill, decided to bring more of herself to her work. None of the three of them underwent any major personality change. They merely decided to shed restrictive roles or challenge restrictive organizational norms, and to bring more of themselves to their work. They decided to be more self-expressive, more artful in their work.
The best thing we can do for ourselves, if we want to be more artful and effective at our work, is ask ourselves these two questions:
1. What aspect of myself do I value and enjoy that I do not currently bring to my work?
2. How might I bring that aspect of myself to my work?
And, the best thing we can do for one another is to see who the people around us ARE and quit assigning roles to one another. If we could do that, it would make it easier for all of us to bring ourselves to our work, to truly transform our work into art, and to celebrate ourselves as the self-expressive, creative beings that we are.
