Partnership in the Workplace
In her introduction to the chapter titled “Your Work and Community Relations”, Riane Eisler emphasizes how the shift to partnership relationships in the workplace “will greatly improve how you and those around you feel”. Of the seven relationships that Eisler considers of great importance in her book The Power of Partnership, workplace relationships are perhaps most significant for the amount of time we spend in them. Eisler quickly points out the workplace as nexus for partnership with ourselves (intrapersonal partnership), interpersonal partnership and communal partnerships, all of which are interrelated.
If we don’t find satisfaction, tolerance and contentment, much less fulfillment, how can we be expected to afford the additional time and energy necessary for cultivating partnership behaviors? How can we imagine the desire, much less cultivate the patience and afford the experimentation necessary for initiating and responding with partnership communication?
Alternatively, if we are waking up looking forward to the challenges and social interchanges ahead, if we are traveling to work in recognition that our transportation choices are closer to sustainable for our environment, if we enter the door smiling; that feel-good mentality offers something in addition to the health and wellbeing of working in an emotionally nurturing, satisfying environment. Emotionally supportive environments tend to draw us out of fight or flight anxieties and reactivities, opening us up to more holistic, creative, motivated solutionmaking, designing, planning, task work and management.
While much has emerged about how urban environments can affect brain development and the emotional intelligence framework that underlies the partnership model, little of this information has been brought into our popular conceptions of physical community and the workplace. Poverty has been found in a growing volume of research to correlate strongly with the likelihood of inhibited brain development. Ongoing and intensive stressors such as out-of-work breadwinners, the uncertainties of food, shelter and clothing can contribute strongly to a family environment dominated by stress and the need for control, for venting. Freeway pollution has been shown in a number of studies to correlate strongly as well with impoverished neighborhoods and inhibited brain development in children. Inhibited brain development, especially the executive brain functions, mean less opportunity to cultivate emotional intelligence practices and neural pathways, and a greater tendency for fight or flight, reactive-defensive patterns to become established and strongly entrenched.
Studies of the brain too have offered much in terms of the potential—given a nurturing environment—for a stronger sense of fulfillment, happiness, satisfaction, compassion, and not least, performance. Little of this evidence has been cross-networked into our mental frameworks for workplace organization, communication and productivity. Partnership-oriented workplaces are ones that lay strong emotional foundations for the executive brain to function, the frontal part of the brain that develops late and develops last, and can be inhibited from growing at all when we are exposed to dominance-based, disciplinarian organized social surroundings, whether family, school, work or peers.
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, recognition of the potential for partnership-based workplace relationships—which begin with our relationship to ourselves and our work—has never been more important for transforming society into a more sustainable era of co-habitation, from the ground up.
There are no guarantees that we will love every job we have, especially with current and future economic uncertainties. Recession fallout, coupled with the addiction to growth that our dominant Capitalist economic system currently refuses to acknowledge as a grave threat to sustainability (much less surrender), make for greater difficulties in guaranteeing fulfillment and love for our work. All the more reason to cultivate adaptability, foster remaining in the present moment when we are working through tasks, thank ourselves for a job well done, and recognize that our internal dialogue is as important in our transformation to sustainability as our interpersonal dialogue.
