Express Exchange Engage
Serene Teffaha’s stunning post raises many fundamental issues central to the workings of organisations and government and to the quality of their employees’ personal and professional lives. These issues are not just important to Serene and to all the other frightened, withdrawn, sometimes brutalised colleagues at the ATO, but are important to citizens and the national interest because how employees experience an organisation's culture and operations is how citizens will experience the organisation in their transactions with it. (The ATO acknowledged and embraced the logic of this mirroring effect earlier, so one would anticipate it would be concerned to work on and fix its culture that has had such a devastating effect as is described below.)
Serene’s story describes, better than anything I’ve ever read, the devastating impacts on her (and her colleagues) - personally and professionally - of leaders’ behaviours and of the culture that shapes their behaviour.
She makes me ask: – (i) Why do people in a government organisation like the ATO behave like this? (ii) What is to be done to ensure they don’t behave and act similarly in future?
(i) I believe the many people who dealt with Serene in ways that caused her so much pain and suffering over a period are not bad people. Many probably lack the emotional and social intelligence, maturity, awareness, courage, skills and experience to apply them at work and the people-management/ leadership training and experience required to manage a diverse group of people effectively.
An equally important cause and shaper of their behaviours and actions is the ATO’s culture.
Dr Peter Rennie’s work (at Leadership Australia) suggests that the ATO culture is substantially shaped, as is the culture of all bureaucracies where power, organisational and interpersonal relationships are predominantly hierarchical, by the hierarchical nature of those relationships.
Rennie’s insight is that leaders in such a hierarchical culture think and behave in ways that would inevitably give rise to the dysfunctionalities and devastating experiences described by Serene.
On top of that, I believe there are a number of dynamics at work that make the management/leadership behaviours, actions and culture of a revenue-gathering organisation, such as the ATO, significantly more dysfunctional and devastating for people with whom it (the organisation) is uncomfortable, than of other (non-revenue-gathering) bureaucracies. (These insights and dynamics are elaborated on in various articles, books and papers, which are available on request.)
The logic of these insights and dynamics predicts that the ATO will treat people like Serene was treated, as long as it remains an organisation that is operating hierarchically. So, largely due to Rennie’s work and psycho-dynamic insights about the shapers of a revenue-gatherer's culture, we can now understand the root causes of why the ATO behaves as it does, and as extremely as it does; and why it performs – or rather fails to perform - as it traditionally does.
(ii) The solution to all the dysfunctionalities and problems associated with hierarchical organisational relationships is also provided by Dr Peter Rennie. He suggests that if the hierarchical relationships are replaced by collaborative, team-based thinking and practice, the dysfunctionalities and problems will be fixed. From my years in creating and leading high performing teams, on the one hand, and experiencing the endemic closed-mindedness and dysfunctionalities of the ATO, on the other, I know he is right.
Which prompts one more question: What will each of us do now to help fix the problem (the confronting challenge) that hierarchical organisations will inevitably behave like the ATO behaved towards Serene?