Resistance

RESISTANCE

Who could resist the benefits of personal mastery? Many people and organizations do. Taking a stand for the full development of your people is a radical departure from the traditional contract between employee and institution. In some ways, it is the most radical departure from traditional business practices in the learning organization.

There are obvious reasons why companies resist encouraging personal mastery. It is “soft,” based in part on unquantifiable concepts such as intuition and personal vision. No one will ever be able to measure to three decimal places how much personal mastery contributes to productivity and the bottom line. In a materialistic culture such as ours, it is difficult even to discuss some of the premises of personal mastery. “Why do people need to talk about this stuff?” someone may ask. “Isn’t it obvious? Don’t we already know it?”

A more daunting form of resistance is cynicism. In combating cynicism, it helps to know its source. Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist—someone who made the mistake of converting ideals into expectations. For example, many of those cynical about personal mastery once held high ideals about people. Then they found themselves disappointed, hurt, and eventually embittered because people fell short of their ideals. O’Brien used to point out that burnout does not just come from working too hard. “There are teachers, social workers, and clergy,” says O’Brien, “who work incredibly hard until they are 80 years old and never suffer ‘burnout’—because they have an accurate view of human nature, of our potential and limitations. They don’t over-romanticize people, so they don’t feel the great psychological stress when people let them down.”

Finally, some fear that personal mastery will threaten the established order of a well-managed company. This is a valid fear. To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. If people do not share a common vision, and do not share common mental models about the business reality within which they operate, empowering people will only increase organizational stress and the burden of management to maintain coherence and direction. This is why the discipline of personal mastery must always be seen as one among the set of disciplines of a learning organization. An organizational commitment to personal mastery would be naive and foolish if leaders in the organization lacked the capabilities of building shared vision and shared mental models to guide local decision makers.