Last week I addressed a two-day in-house Customer Service Workshop for an ATE Group company in Bengaluru (India). The first day of the workshop was largely built around my book Organisational Schizophrenia, the copy of which was made available by the company to each participant only a couple of days earlier. One of the participants asked me upfront: “How would you explain ‘Schizophrenia’ as part of the title of your book?” Had he gone through the book he would have found the answer. None-the-less, it is a valid question and the answer needs to be shared widely.
Schizophrenia
According to one definition, schizophrenia is the “mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.”
Workplace Schizophrenia
People working for organisations are not immune to contracting what may be called workplace schizophrenia. If a company’s internal routines, operating processes and management’s priorities do not support the declared policy of a high degree of customer commitment, the organisational climate becomes a hotbed of contradictions. As a result, the following attitudinal changes begin to occur to the employees at various levels of hierarchy:
- perception of self-interest gets distorted,
- level of engagement gets dented,
- intensity of organisational communication is lost,
- self esteem erodes because of lack of knowledge-at-the-point-of-action,
- objectivity in dealing with issues is lost,
- willingness to put in discretionary effort takes a back seat,
- initiative becomes risky and above all,
- behaviour becomes unpredictable.
Given the above frame of mind, the behaviour of even the most customer conscious employees are likely to betray confused thinking, fake empathy, illusive logic, evasive commitments and self-deprecating unwillingness to take ownership of the problem. This behaviour denotes the behaviour of a mentally fragmented employee working for a schizophrenic organisation.
Paradoxically, a larger number of people are likely to suffer from work-place schizophrenia in companies, in which the top leadership truly wishes to deliver excellent customer service but fails to check obsessive pursuit of short-term profit maximisation. As a consequence, quality of customer service suffers a substantially negative impact.
My research confirms that this phenomenon knows no geographical boundaries and also while the expression ‘organisational schizophrenia’ is not exactly new I look at it as a new watchword in customer service lexicon. That is why I thought ‘organisational schizophrenia’ was a very apt title.
Organisational Schizophrenia—based on the findings of a targeted empirical research—deals comprehensively, with the reasons why companies get schizophrenic. It also suggests how, by exercising discipline as a matter of culture, the leadership can stop schizophrenia from creeping in.
Gopal Gureja
01/30/2016