I love Senate estimates, Lionel Murphy’s great gift to Australian democracy. Long hours of tedium relieved by the occasional exposure of bureaucratic management folly, of which there is much. So I experienced feelings of joy, delight and unbridled enthusiasm when I saw the vision of some senior bureaucrats explaining why they had spent a million of your hard earned bucks on happiness training. This is a plot line straight out of the Simpsons.
When I was a “senior executive” in Canberra in the early nineties the go was leadership, team-building and myers-briggs test. I once had a week on this stuff in a motel in the southern highlands. Nice work if you can get it. I found it to be completely useless because there was no attempt to implement the ideas systematically in the Department. Just a caution on the phrase “senior executive” even though my designation was senior executive service band 1 there was still many layers of management above me.
Anyway, Martin Seligman, this American self-help book author and founder of the positive psychology movement that Gillard’s department imported to cheer them all up, is also the originator of the idea of ‘learned helplessness’:
Seligman developed the theory further, finding learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation – usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation – even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation
This all seems to be particularly relevant to the public service I knew. Many of the public servants I worked with knew, or perceived, that their role in life was to get blamed for anything that went wrong. They were into risk adverse behaviour and when things went wrong they just sort of accepted the blame and moved on. Naturally, this did not make for a cheerful work environment. And it was widely acknowledged. I can remember SES conferences in places like Mollymook where there was always a kind of gallows humour about the public service blame culture.
The point is that it wasn’t the individuals that had the problem. It was the system and it was management. Money was spent on leadership, team building and being creative all of which was constantly undermined by senior managers shifting the blame around so they didn’t get left holding the parcel labeled ‘responsible’ when the music stopped.
Bringing out americans to teach you to be optimistic won’t matter a jot if your work situation is crap and if you can’t change it and you’re stuck there for life. That’s enough to depress anyone and no amount of fancy psychologising is going to change that.
Since that time whenever I hear about managers training staff on leadership (or god forbid happiness) or anything else I know that there’s a problem and it’s at the top of the organisation not the middle or bottom.
