How messy is your desktop, your office? How does it compare with your co-workers? Full disclosure: my desktops and offices are nearly always a mess. I rarely think about physical disarray. See photo.

So I found interesting Sue Shellenbarger’s article, “Clashing over Office Clutter: “I’m Not Messy, I’m Creative,” in the March 19, 2014, print edition of The Wall Street Journal. Shellenbarger interweaved “soundbites” and research. She noted that the average space for workers has decreased and more companies are experimenting with shared office spaces. Where working space is in the open, there are greater opportunities for co-workers to make judgments about others based on the degree of messiness. Her warning: “Look for more clashes over clutter” (D1).

These perceptions can have consequences. Shellenbarger cited a 2011 survey of over 2600 managers where 28% of managers indicated they were less likely to promote someone with a disorganized workspace. According to the article, some people get stressed out by the messiness of others.

On the other hand, some argue that what appears to be clutter is actually organized. Research suggests clutter may be positively related to creativity, to moving beyond boundaries. Shellenbarger quoted Carter Weitz of the ad agency Bailey Lauerman: “Clutter generates a sense of positive energy” (D2).

My take-away:

I find much wisdom in the writings of the great French management philosopher Henri Fayol (1841-1925), in particular his Fourteen General Principles of Management. Fayol’s 14 principles were derived from his systematic observations during his nearly 60 years at all levels of management.

Principle 10 is Order. Fayol wrote, ”Appearance of order may cover over real disorder  . . . on the other hand, the appearance of disorder may actually be true order.”  Just because an office or desk appears messy does not mean that is disorder. The key is not the appearance of the desktop but whether items can be located easily by the person or persons who need to locate them.  Bottomline: Do not necessarily assume a messy office is disorganized.

Image of a messy office.  © John Ballard, 2014. All rights reserved.  

Fayol, H. (1949).  General and industrial management (C. Storrs, Trans.). London: Pitman.    

What are your biases? We tend to associate biases with favoring one position, one group, and such, over another, and usually in a way that is unfair. But in coming at life and giving our experiences meaning, we continually choose one meaning over another, consciously or unconsciously.

Most of our biases are not unfair. They are just how we come at life. I have a bias for the Irish rock group U2. I favored “Ordinary Love” over “Let It Go” for the Academy Award for best song from a motion picture. Objectively I have no idea which is the “better” song but I am biased to favor U2. 

In the final chapter of Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, Joseph Rychlak discussed the inherent nature of bias in our lives. We are always choosing to extend meanings to our experiences favoring one interpretation over others. 

10. Avoid one-sidedness but acknowledge that affirmation necessitates bias in one’s outlook.

• For all practical purposes our positions on everything in life are biased, affected by our preferences and what we affirm. 
• Being biased does not mean we are narrow-minded or rigid in our thinking. 
• Because we are all biased as we come at life, we need to understand ourselves well enough to know our biases and to be able “to acknowledge that there are other points of view.”
• If we make decisions “based on skin color, age, sex, class identity, nationality, and so on, rather than on the merits of his or her arguments concerning the issue at hand, we cultivate a narrow one-sidedness” and restrict the choices we can make.
• “We should continually examine and refine our personal biases, getting to know them and their implications rather than pretending that they do not exist.” (p. 266)
• “If we cannot state our grounding predications [biases], then we have not yet taken personal responsibility for our free-will possibilities in life.” (p. 267)
  

My take-aways:

How do you come at life? How do you interpret your actions, the actions of others? Do you know your “biases”? Henry David Thoreau said, “If I am not I, who will be?” How do we know who we are if we do not examine our beliefs and our attitudes? Rychlak argued that to be truly free, we need to understand what we affirm through our actions and understand there are other options. All of us, especially those who lead, need self-examination. The better we understand ourselves, the better we can understand others.

Rychlak through a lifetime of writing and rigorous research built on the humanistic tradition and brought greater clarity to the nature of the human being, what it means to be human. In this series of blogs based on the final chapter of  Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, I have tried to share a few of his insights and my thoughts on those insights. I was honored to have this great human being as a mentor and friend. His gifts to humankind are for the ages.

Image of several books written by J. F. Rychlak.  © John Ballard, 2014. All rights reserved.  

Rychlak, J. F. (1979). Discovering free will and personal responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.  

Can we control our emotions? In Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, Joseph Rychlak argued that sometimes we cannot but often we can. His ninth point of the final chapter:

9. Emotional reactions occur spontaneously, but we can influence the course of our emotions through conscious effort by following our affections.

Rychlak differentiates between emotions and affections.

• Emotions are physiological, “part of the body’s organic machinery.”
  
• Emotions signal moods and cause us to make adjustments to our circumstances.”
  
• “We cannot always make sense of our emotions.”
  
• We try to put labels on our emotions: “I’m happy”; “I’m sad”; “I’m bored.” 
  
• We also try to figure out the cause of our emotions; we may think we know what caused an emotion but we could be wrong. 

In Rychlakean terms, emotions are responses, that is they are reactive, but affections are telosponses, they are proactive, the way the mind comes at the world.

• Through affections, we tend to evaluate our experiences as “like” or “dislike.”
  
• Affections are characteristics of the individual; we may have the same circumstances and yet have opposite affections, I like, you dislike.
  
• Through our affections, we can influence how we feel; we can arrange circumstances to be in line with our affection (for example, listening to music we enjoy to change our mood from negative to positive).
  
• “There will be times when the machinery of our emotions gets out of hand, but over the long run we have every right to expect that we can exert some affective control over it” (p. 265).

My take-aways:

Rychlak makes very important insights into our emotions and how they are related to how we come at life and how we can influence them. Understanding emotions should be part of leadership development and leader knowledge. I see four major points here for leaders:

1. We can’t always make sense of our emotions, what we are feeling. Sometimes we just don’t know why we feel the way we do. 
   
2. And just because we think we know what is causing us to feel a certain way does not mean we are right. We may think we know but in actuality may not. 
3. As leaders we can create or rearrange circumstances, such as policies or procedures, that those who follow may like or dislike, thus potentially by design we can affect to some degree how those we lead feel. 
4. Sometimes leaders or followers may let “emotions get out of hand” but most people should be able to bring their emotions under control if they so choose.  
   

Joe Rychlak  loved the West. Image courtesy of L. Rychlak and used with her permission. 

Rychlak, J. F. (1979). Discovering free will and personal responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.      

Do you know what motivates you? My guess is you are aware of your conscious motivations, such as the desire to achieve, to have self-esteem, or to find or maintain meaningful relationships, to love and be loved. Perhaps less clear are motivations or issues that might be considered unconscious. We may go through life coming at life in ways that are only hinted at in our dreams.

In his eighth point in the last chapter of Discovering Free Will and Personal Responsibility, the great psychologist Joseph Rychlak addressed the role of the unconscious in understanding behaviors.

8. Do not ignore, but do not overestimate the importance of unconscious factors in behavior. Try to analyze and deal with the right causes of a problem, because this is where unconscious factors usually enter.

According to Rychlak:

• The conscious and unconscious mind use the same ways of reasoning. But they can differ in how they interpret and give meaning to our lives. There may be a psychodynamic event from our youth that lies below the surface but unknowingly affects our behaviors in significant ways.
  
• The more we understand the meaning we give to life events consciously, the more easily we can find what our unconscious is saying. A key is our finding the right question to answer.
  
• By our very nature, we may give contradictory meanings to events, consciously and unconsciously. As Rychlak stated: “Human beings overlook, deny, and ‘repress’ their intentions. We do not want to admit certain things about ourselves” (p. 259).
  
• Fears, doubts, threatening situations enter our unconscious. If we can be aware of them, we can be less concerned with how they affect us.
  
• Professionals in mental health can help one reveal unconscious premises. For some people, careful examination on their own may also be fruitful. 
• “There is just one mind with many points of view…”

My take-aways:

Leaders should understand that not all behavior is consciously motivated. This is true for those we lead and for ourselves. Sometimes unconscious motivations can be dysfunctional. There may be times when the leader or follower may benefit by some “talk therapy”, the services of a professional such as a psychologist. Many years ago when I was a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy, I was required, as were other cadets, to meet with a psychologist. Why? To help us value and understand the importance of mental health professionals. And perhaps partially to understand ourselves better based on psychological testing. I found it valuable. Leaders need to know themselves. As Rychlak noted, we can find or gain insight into our unconscious premises without professional help but it can be more difficult. 

Image of Joseph Rychlak courtesy of L. Rychlak and used with her permission. 

Rychlak, J. F. (1979). Discovering free will and personal responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.