Let’s acknowledge the basic reality that business doesn’t care about people. At the institutional level, company language that claims otherwise is really just an acrostic of managerial worry over not having enough shoes on the shop floor. Managers want to attract and retain talent, because at the end of the day, their mortgages depend on the profitable packaging of something they sell. It’s always been this way with commercial operations. That’s why the law has had to intervene periodically, addressing open cruelty like sweatshops, workhouses, textile plants, and so on, clear back to the dark satanic mills, where mercenary capitalism actually killed people.
This obtains on the individual level, too, down on the shop floor. Executives may fret about salary and perks, but the ordinary Joes around you worry about being exploited by those managers – and about their own competition with you within that exploitative environment.
The Franciscans have a peculiar way of looking at this. We’re considered slightly odd ducks by the rest of Christendom in this respect. Theologically, we’re perfectly conventional. Our belief system, to use the clumsy language of the unchurched, is like that of every other Christian. Where we differ is that we don’t bother much with belief, in the sense of doctrine. Our focus is on suffering. That’s where we start. We sniff it out, we try to understand it, and we parachute in to help how we can. That’s why you don’t find Franciscan theologians as easily as you can find Franciscans inoculating babies and feeding people. We care first, whatever its cause, about things like hunger, injustice, oppression, or fear.
Fear is what drives workplace oppression. It’s why there are managers who are harsh, or absent, or who lie to you. It’s also why there is guerilla war out in the cubicles. These are all human beings, who probably mean well most of the time, because that’s how humans are. But they’re frightened out of their wits. And so they compete, and they undermine, and they withhold intelligence, and they frogmarch. They don’t want to know your problems, at least away from the water cooler, because they have too many worries of their own. In a competitive environment, where survival is at stake, you may actually represent one of their problems.
The theoretical remedy for this is to detect what it is they’re afraid of, exactly. In practical terms, you try to get them talking to you. There is a cynical counterfeit of this, used by con artists, who detect people’s fears in order to exploit them. Casinos and televangelists, it’s been observed, exploit people’s loneliness, for example. Dictators and armies exploit fear of being left out of systems of prosperity. This isn’t that. Franciscan sleuthing is transparent sharing of worry, and an invitation to gush out what’s really on people’s minds. Frightened people who think you want something from them are dangerous. Frightened people whose tears you welcome are grateful, and honest, and unguarded, and in the end, surprisingly altruistic.
We do this bloodletting all the time in hospice work, where people are afraid of dying, or of losing someone to death. Do we probe? No. We’ve learned not to do that. Do we Get To The Root Causes of their fear, and then remedy it? Again, no.
We let them talk. Sometimes they need to bleed for hours, or for days, or for a whole season in their lives. The language we, and hospital chaplains, use is of opening ourselves, of being their empty receptacles. That’s all.
Which of the following would you prefer your area manager to do for you?
a. Tell you to look on the HR website for Employee Wellbeing Resources.
b. Consider a hobby
c. Come to the next Team Building Workshop
d. Take you on a drive, and eat hamburgers with you, and let you talk the way you really want to, and then do it again
Now run this in reverse.
Ready?
Which of these things, or things like them, can you do for that troublesome, frightened colleague? Perhaps that person is even an HR officer.