I’ve always been curious about why people behave the way they do.
One of the earliest questions I remember asking about working life came from observing two colleagues. This was long before I knew I wanted to study organisational psychology. These two colleagues of mine were facing what seemed to me to be fairly similar stressful situations, yet they responded to it in completely different ways.
I found that fascinating. Why did one person find the situation manageable while the other found it overwhelming?
That curiosity eventually took me into psychology, research and a PhD exploring personality. My career has since moved away from academia and into working life itself, but the questions never really went away. If anything, there are more of them.
If anything, there are more of them, and the questions have become bigger.
I’m still interested in why two people can experience the same working environment so differently. But I’m equally interested in what happens when we put people together in teams, give some of them leadership responsibilities, surround them with targets, structures and expectations, and call the whole thing an organisation. Things become considerably more complicated when humans interact with other humans and the systems around them.
We like to think we are rational. We look for patterns in behaviour and try to predict what people are going to do. Organisations do the same. We measure engagement, performance and wellbeing. We create processes, incentives and policies in the hope that they will produce certain behaviours.
And yet people interpret, adapt, conform, resist, mask, change their minds and surprise us.
Sometimes we surprise ourselves.
We know that working too much can be bad for us, yet many of us still do it. We say our families and health are more important than work, but our calendars don’t necessarily reflect that. We crave feedback, but when we get it, we disagree with it. Organisations say leadership matters, but do they always create the conditions for people to actually lead? We ask employees what they think, but what happens when the problems they identify are things neither they nor their managers can change?
These are the moments that make me think:
Hang on…
Why are we doing this?
Why did that happen?
Who can actually influence this?
And is the obvious explanation really the whole explanation?
So, what is this blog about?
Probably quite a few things: individual differences and organisational systems, teams and group behaviour, leadership, work ability and wellbeing, employee surveys, feedback, and undoubtedly questions I haven’t thought of yet.
But those aren’t really the red thread.
The red thread is my curiosity about why we do what we do at work.
I don’t expect every question to have a neat answer. In fact, I’m suspicious of neat answers to complicated human problems.
Instead, I want this to be a place where I can take something that makes me stop and think, look at it from different angles, bring in what psychology and research can tell us, and occasionally challenge some of the things we have come to accept as simply “how working life works.”
I write partly because writing helps me make sense of things. Hopefully, occasionally, it will help you make a little more sense of them too.
Welcome. Let’s see where the questions take us.