Issue 159
When things get difficult and the atmosphere is charged and intense, you can find yourself considering the environmental factors to be rather overwhelming. You find that the workload is too heavy or demanding, the deadlines are too short and the targets unachievable. Maybe the work style is distasteful to you or the attitude so competitive that it stifles creativity.
Should you express your concerns, you may find yourself being told “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”.
The assumption here is that these factors which you find so unpleasant are what stress researchers call ‘factors intrinsic to the job’. They just go with the territory. They are like heat in the kitchen: essential for the achievement of the task in hand.
Now heat may be essential in the kitchen (even though quite a lot of it should be confined to the ovens) but that does not mean that the distasteful element in your work environment is also essential. Sometimes it is worth questioning whether that which many or all assume goes with the job, actually does. A level of swearing, crudity or abuse may be associated with certain groups but it is not needed to do the job. Certain sharp practices may be endemic in some lines of work but they are not written into anyone’s contract. It is possible over the years that groups of people have built up a set of behaviours which characterise their work and they have become so dependent on them that it is now imagined that these things are central.
Stress levels have been factored into some jobs on the assumption that pay will compensate. Some forms of mass production or farming methods have grown up on the assumption that this is what people want. Challenge this and you will be invited to leave.
But there are times when rather than leave the kitchen, you need to change the kitchen. The heat that you are being asked to stand is unnecessary heat and it is the heat, not you, that should leave.
There was a general assumption in the Temple courts that the money changers were involved in normal practice – Jesus disagreed. There was an assumption that women should be stoned for adultery – Jesus disagreed. It was assumed that leaders were the ones who were to be served – Jesus, however, washed his disciples’ feet.
There may be a very small but significant assumption in your school, office, team or chosen line of work which needs to be challenged. It may not be spectacular, and challenging and it may not cost you everything but it might be that if you challenge it now, you will stop a process which if left unchecked will result in another source of unnecessary hassle in a few years’ time. Maybe now is the time to take the heat out of some situations.
(Note:this piece was written in April. Guardian readers may remember that a piece on this saying was in the paper last week. ‘Great minds…’ or coincidence – you decide!)
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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