The ultimate test of management is performance - the
achievement of actual results. Why, then, do Australian managers
concern themselves with their colleagues’ personalities and
motives? Why have they become infatuated with emotional
intelligence and, in bizarre cases, with spiritual intelligence?
Traditionally, managers who performed earned the right to argue
with their colleagues. Nowadays, individuals who argue are said to
lack ‘soft skills’ while a sad few are thought to be suffering from
a personality disorder.
The popularity of soft-skill management has created
psychomanagers: managers who have entered into a
Faustian bargain with psychologists. Some managers work
with psychologists to master themselves; others work with
psychologists to master other people. As psychomanagement
requires specialised knowledge, many Australian managers have
yielded their authority to counsellors, coaches and consultants,
many of whom believe that human behaviour is determined by
internal and external forces over which individuals have little or
no control. Accordingly, psychologists have laboured to absorb
the idea of the free and responsible individual into a pseudoscientific
framework that denies moral agency. The result is that
ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have been replaced with ‘healthy’ and
‘sick’. In their pursuit of a ‘therapeutic state’, psychologists have
medicalised morality and managers have embraced powerful
myths about minds, motive-forces, personality traits, social
conditioning, leadership, occupational stress and mental illness.
Consequently, the twin ideas of personal freedom and responsibility
have been sabotaged.
This book is about Australian managers and their long-standing
love affair with psychologists. For fifty years the author has
studied, taught and consulted with managers and waltzed with
several famous psychologists.
