BY BHEKILIZWE BERNARD NDLOVU Goodbyes are never easy. If there is a place in life that has people exposed to a lot of meeting new people and separating, it is the workplace. Families meet, live together and sometimes die having lived together even if at times they move away from each other geographically. Yes, divorces do separate spouses forever sometimes but where there are kids there is an indelible connection.
The workplace poses a different dynamic altogether where one joins an organisation most of the time with total strangers and as a stranger themselves. They have to be inducted to get to meet new people and understand new processes to be ready to work and participate productively. In a family the induction is slow and natural.
One is born, gets attached unconsciously and attachment becomes something they then take to different other institutions and most of the time unconsciously. We don’t see, unless we become interested in knowing, that we are beings that get attached and the attachment happens right in the womb, maybe even in the loins, who knows. Attachment theorists will help us understand where exactly this attachment phenomenon begins. I can argue without needing a research process that it can and does start even outside the womb. How so?
Because when kids are swapped or adopted, they get attached to their foster parents. Just that interaction outside the womb is thorough enough for a child and a mother to fall head over heels in love even if there was no womb interaction.
This lays the foundation for the issue this column explores today, which is about joining and leaving an organisation. Think about the number of organisations you have worked for and look back and see how you have experienced and handled separation. Maybe you never thought about it, and it has always happened to you unconsciously leaving you with scars you never processed, and you have by now certain fears you don’t understand when you think of joining a new company or organisation. I recall leaving an organisation that did behavioural change work and had a lot of ‘woke’ people.
I was clumsy about it until my boss who was a drama therapists and very knowledgeable in the area of relationships, attachments, and detachments made me aware of something. I held the position of operations manager for projects that had such spaces as prisons and other places that needed our behavioural change work. He said to me that I needed to do the leaving consciously and also understand that the people I led were experiencing separation and some of them unconsciously. They were bound, unconsciously, to be angry at me for leaving because I had led them as their manager. Some might have been happy but feeling guilty about it depending on how we had related.
Indeed, when I became present and observed my own feelings and other people’s attitudes and actions towards me, I understood what my boss was talking about. There was turmoil in all of us. I was anxious about where I was going and how things would go well there, and if I would create the relationships I had created there. I was worried about whether I had made the right decision I would not live to regret. I was even moving to a new province in South Africa called the Free State where language was predominantly Sotho and Afrikaans. I spoke neither of the two and so there was that fear of what if I fail to connect with the new community?
Some of my colleagues, on the other hand were angry that I was exposing them to new beginnings and new relationships that had to be built. They were not sure how the new leader would treat them. They might not have verbalised it and even been aware of it but there was that turmoil rumbling inside their poor souls. They wondered if it was time for them to leave too. Some were happy but feeling guilty that we had not had a happy ending. Human beings by nature seek and desire happy endings in all areas of life. There are theories, for example, that postulate that women who continuously expose themselves to abusive relationships do so because they are unconsciously searching for a happy ending. They fail in one relationship with a total narcissist and throw themselves at another one, unconsciously most of the time to the extent that some ‘spiritual’ churches have labelled this demoniac.
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That someone has a demon that keeps pushing them to narcissists. Well, I am not sure about that. So, the colleagues with whom I might not have connected well with, would have felt a deep emotional ambivalence, especially if the majority was unhappy, I was leaving. They would be wondering why they failed to connect and trying hard to shift the blame to me for being a bad manager. The other voice in their own heads would be arguing to say there is no way this person could have been a bad person when almost everyone seems to have connected well with them.
No one enjoys such internal turmoil and ambivalence. We, as human beings would like to believe that we are rational, and we don’t have such creepy things as voices in our heads that say the different things. What a difficult thing then to go through such turmoil and not know that we are going through it, let alone know what to do about them.
Of course, after a few weeks or months we are back to normal, working, and if our organisation has a good induction programme, we quickly adapt and begin to function. It is of paramount importance for the human resource to process feelings and grow instead of moving from one place to another with new wounds and scars. It’s a great thing to leave an organisation feeling like a victor and not a victim, having processed one’s feelings and going forward to learn more.
What is disheartening is that the workplace has not shown enough appetite for participating in the growth, wellness and whole person thriving of their human resource. If you are leaving there are no processes to help you come to terms with, say five years of attachment, success, and failure. Specialists in areas such as psychology, dramatherapy, behavioural change and others do have processes one can be taken through or do on their own to swim through the murky waters of attachments and separations and it is important to talk about these critical things that touch on the welfare and health of the human resource. A friend of mine I went to for some counselling one day about a relationship that was not working with a colleague said to me that, ‘Bheks, in the workplace, we are here to get sh*t done…’ That’s the attitude in most organisations and that’s sad. We meet to connect, and we get attached, and while we are busy getting attached, something happens and we have to leave, or someone leaves. This is real.
- Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a South African organisation as a learning and development specialist, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on [email protected]
