It’s that time of year when goals are set and performance contracts renewed. The official corporate clipboard awaits this year’s scorecard. Santa is not the only one who keeps a list.
Consider your most important relationships: family, life-long friends, partner or spouse. It would be bizarre to judge the relationship based on a scorecard that tracks what you get compared to what you give. In fact, when you stop being grateful for having someone in your life and start comparing what you give to what you get from that person, it’s a sign that the relationship is deteriorating.
If you manage others or work in a function responsible for improving relations between employee and employer, it’s likely that you want people to feel a stronger emotional connection to their work. What happens to the relationship when success gets defined in terms of an exchange of value?
In 1923, the scholar, philosopher and political activist, Martin Buber published his most famous work, I and Thou. The essay contrasts two ways of relating to the world: The I-It relationship and the I-Thou relationship. An I-It relationship presumes a distinction between subject and object. In an I-It world, we move around like billiard balls bumping into one another and experiencing temporary exchanges. We are tempted to perceive the world and talk about the world in an I-It way because that’s how things seem to us. We experience ourselves as self-contained and impervious to the stuff we encounter.
Despite how it seems, Buber suggests that reality is not about subjects (us) being separate or apart from what we experience as objects (not us). Rather, as we encounter others and things we enter into a dialogue, a transformation. An I-Thou way of relating reveals what we share rather than what differentiates. Describing the I-Thou relationship is a challenge for our language and our Western ways of thinking. Suffice to say that in those moments when we feel transcendent connections, when we lose ourselves in an experience we’ve had a close encounter of the I-Thou kind.
When we define a work relationship in terms of what gets exchanged between employee and employer, we highlight our boundaries rather than our mutuality. We reject our interdependence. Our I-It work relationship is not much different than the one between a thirsty person with money and a vending machine with beverages.
If it’s true that younger workers crave purpose and meaning, we may need to reevaluate how we evaluate. Rather than asking your boss: What incentives and compensation will I get for meeting and exceeding my objectives this year? Try this question instead: How will we share responsibility for each other’s success this year?