Companies can’t heal anyone’s hurts or make them whole. Work isn’t group therapy, and good leaders aren’t counselors or preachers. That inner strength, that sense of self and worth, should be something each employee can pack up and take with them when they leave for another opportunity. Rather, they strive to give each person the opportunities, tools and support to find that within themselves. Identity, purpose and belonging are still part of the conversation in a healthy workplace culture, but they are not satisfactions that the company or its leaders provide from outside the self, creating an unhealthy dependency and dynamic of control. Is this really who we are and want to be? Why do we do things this way? Where are we not living our values? How can we do better? It’s the questions we all ask and the challenges we make from a place of constructive skepticism. It’s transparency and telling truth to power. If you commit a cardinal sin such as sexual harassment at my company, I’m going to fire you, no discussion, no accommodation for differences of opinion on what our culture’s stance on this should be.īut within the essential boundaries marking where we cannot go, culture is what we create together in the dynamic tension between trust and accountability. Key constitutional principles may be upheld by a central authority. It’s a provisional reality we create and grow together-a reality with modest scope and porous borders, one that honors the sovereignty of our lives outside of work. It’s rooted in red pill realism and reciprocal respect. Healthy workplace culture emerges organically from all the people it encompasses. Healthy Culture Grows From A Thousand Red Pill Roots Then everyone is left holding an empty pill cup, going through withdrawal from something that’s no longer theirs, that never was. What happens when the company patriarch or matriarch kicks you out of the family? What happens when the sacred purpose fails and the company folds? These things happen all the time in business, in careers. We’re all frail in our own ways, and that’s OK.īut blue pills only numb the pain, dimming our perception of our problems while making everything worse. We all have empty places within us that yearn for something more. Your job can and should give you satisfaction, but it’s a dangerous pit of sand on which to build your whole life’s happiness and worth. To anyone considering working for such a company, tossing their head back to swallow the blue pill down: I advise a healthy skepticism. ![]() But even when the blue pills are dispensed with care and kindness, the impact is just the same: codependence, exploitation and, almost inevitably, betrayal, with all that the loss of one’s sole source of purpose, identity and belonging may bring. There’s a glimmer of ill-conceived compassion at the heart of treating your employees “like family.” There’s a misguided stirring in the soul that glorifies your work with spiritual transformation. Not every business leader who leads this way does so with conscious intention. ![]() ![]() It’s power driven by fear, the fear that people may leave your company, may prioritize their balanced lives over your company’s hustle and grind or might ask you for the full value of what their work is worth. It’s a terrible way to lead, exploiting people’s insecurities, promising them something you can’t actually give, the illusion of which you may one day decide to take away. It’s a perilous game, immoral and, in the end, always unleashes self-destructive chaos that even the cult’s creators can’t control. It’s how nationalist autocrats and strongmen rise and hold onto power. You see this repeatedly in world history, even in current events.
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