Cold Shower 3 - Six Silent Killers Exposed

Cold Shower Six Silent Killers Exposed Vol. I, Article III

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North and South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, you claim six silent killers are more insidiously destructive to American industrial and commercial enterprise than anything else. If this is so, how can we identify the killers before they take hold, and then too, what can we do to prevent them in the first place?

Dr. Fisher replies:

What makes this problem so difficult to deal with is because the problem itself is endemic to everyone’s existence. Two things drive us throughout our lives, one is desire and the other is fear. While we are matriculating at school, and developing our personalities – from television to radio, from newspapers and magazines to live concerts and sporting events, from religious indoctrination to ethnic cultural rites, from peers to family connections – we are formulating responses to the challenges of desire and fear.

The predominant characteristic of these responses is to please others, invariably at the expense of pleasing ourselves. Many of us find ourselves in a “catch 22” – our greatest desire is to please while our greatest fear is to displease. Consequently, in an effort to please everyone, many of us end up pleasing no one, especially ourselves. Without knowing it, and before we can express it, we find ourselves a victim of circumstances, existing but not living, exercising someone else’s agenda, and not our own.

We go to school because we have to; we go to church for the same reason; and we take any job that comes along because we have to make money to live. In a word we take this begrudging mindset wherever we go and with whatever we do. The cumulative effect is that we expect to be disappointed and taken for granted and we are. Disappointment follows us at every turn.

Nowhere is there room to factor in pleasing oneself. That would be selfish, and being selfish is a cultural curse. The war between desire and fear nonetheless rages on silently in the menacing shadows of our minds. Our minds will not be still. So we seek solace in ways beyond the control of social norms, beyond the hand of authority, beyond policies and procedures, which would regulate us. Without planning to, we fall prey to the six silent killers.
People lie, but behavior never lies. There are discernible signs that people are in the grip of these social termites. The most obvious indicator is that the personality of the individual changes from the relentless internal struggle being waged between desire and fear, pleasing others and pleasing self. Sometimes the indicators are subtle, other times quite obvious. The individual:

1) Dresses differently, more provocatively, or appears careless about his (her) appearance.
2) Avoids friends, no longer socializes at lunch with coworkers, finds excuses to be left alone.
3) Commences to swear, to flower comments with earthy expletives, tell dirty jokes, which is totally out of character.
4) Takes up smoking, or starts smoking again, same with drinking, doing drugs.
5) Puts people down absent from the group, bad mouths company, management, looks for the exception in anything positive.
6) Attempts to recruit others to deviant behavior, to violate social norms.
7) Becomes promiscuous in contrast to normal prudish inclination.
8) Gains or loses weight dramatically.
9) Loses interests in pet projects.
10) Becomes careless with money in contrast to being miserly before.
11) Spontaneously erupts into rage over nothing.
12) Becomes especially talkative or quiet.
13) Loses friends.
14) Starts hanging out with “losers.”
15) Stops going to church.
16) Bad mouths wife (husband), family, friends.
17) Shows cruelty to people and animals alike, when otherwise not so inclined.
18) Lets quality of work slip, then break down, and then become nonexistent.
19) Looks to pick arguments.
20) Calls in sick to collect on sick days accumulated.
21) Starts missing work altogether.
22) Becomes accident prone in and outside of work.
23) Becomes supervisor’s pet project to “save” worker from him (her) self, which delays the inevitable.

If you can see yourself in some of these behaviors, don’t be surprised. Please note this is not an exclusive listing, but representative of behaviors. We often look for recognition, appreciation, satisfaction and fulfillment, not from what we do, but from how others perceive and respond to what we do. The desire-fear syndrome is at work here. This is further complicated by the fact that most workplaces sustain a culture of comfort or complacency, not contribution, where whining and complaining and seeing oneself as the victim is the normal fare. Such workplace cultures not only condone these six silent killers, they sponsor them. Prevention, as you shall see in the next column, is a monumental task.

Copyright (1996) See Dr. James R. Fisher’s Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (St. Lucie Press 1998), or check its listing on www.amazon.com or www.bares&noble.com