Career dilemmas from individual expression and belonging

A friend two weeks ago had to make an important decision. He has worked and made a good career to be a senior manager in his company, which he joined eight years ago. He was now feeling as if he no longer belongs to this company, but at same time was not sure if he really wanted to go, given the potential for growth. In our discussion, it became clear to me that the biggest issues he was dealing with had to do with new norms that seem to have formed with a change of senior leadership in this company and also his own growth and development. He was feeling that he is not able to “express” himself as much as he would want to, and do things in the way that he wanted noting how much he had grown. My conclusion in our discussion was that he was not necessarily ready to leave but was dealing with something that in one of my favourite books is referred to as the paradox of identity (Paradoxes of Group  Life: Understanding Conflict, Paralysis, and Movement in Group Dynamics, by Kenwyn K. Smith and David N. Berg).

Today I will quote some of what Smith and Berg say, as a lot of what they write about affects many of us who work in companies but always feel some internal conflict between “conforming” and “being self”. For Smith and Berg, the paradox of identity “is expressed by the struggle of individuals and the group to establish a unique and meaningful identity where each is an integral part of the other”.

Expanding further on this concept, they write as follows: “When individuals approach a group, they invariably struggle with what they are going to have to give up in order to belong. Likewise, a group as a whole often expresses concern over whether its stipulated purposes can be achieved given the individuals of which it is constituted. These twin dilemmas can lead members to look around for ‘good’ groups, by which they mean that individuality will be minimally compromised, and groups to look around for ‘good’ members – that is, people willing to put the group ahead of themselves”. It is amazing how much conflict occurs both within companies and in society because of our inability to manage this seeming contradiction, where a group may want the individual to behave according to particular “norms”, and the individual wanting to change the group into something that he or she would wish to be a part of.

Smith and Berg offer a paradoxical approach that they say “conceptualizes the processes through which both the individual and group identity are formed as being one and the same. In this frame, individuals are seen as both creating and being created by the groups to which they belong… The struggle so often observed between the individual and the group is predominantly a struggle occurring simultaneously within the individual and within the group over how to live with the tension created by the mutual processes of adjustment of the individuals to the group and the group to its individual members”.

Would I, on the basis of what is said above, be advising my friend that he must not leave his company?  The answer is a definite no. However, I would be saying he must think carefully of making an abrupt decision when his active involvement as an individual may influence an environment to be one that he considers more palatable. It also requires of him to not only invest his energy on a past that he likes, but in defining a future that may be. And he cannot do that without an active process of communication within his company. And my advice to him was that he should explore, find someone to communicate with in the company, and see how he can make the current process work better for him. I also advised him that if he finds that the differences are so fundamental, he still can exercise the choice of leaving the company. My only contribution was to get him to review the lens through which he views all that is happening around him, and the processes he uses to engage in order to come to a final decision.

Each one of us has to make these difficult decisions at some point in our careers. Let us explore them through different frames.