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Organizational Psychiatry with Dr. Daven Morrison
92 Plays8 days ago
On today’s episode of Doorknob Comments, Fara and Grant are joined by Dr. Daven Morrison, a psychiatrist with deep expertise in organizational and occupational psychiatry. A member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and an officer of the Academy of Organizational and Occupational Psychiatry, Dr. Morrison shares insights into the psychological dimensions of workplace life. From managing mergers and downsizing to fostering self-aware leadership, he walks us through the core principles of organizational psychiatry.
We hope you enjoy!
Resources and Links
Doorknob Comments
https://www.doorknobcomments.com/
Dr. Daven Morrison
https://www.ourgap.org/committees/work-organizations
https://www.morrisonltd.com/about-us/daven-morrison-m-d
Dr. Fara White
Dr. Grant Brenner
https://www.granthbrennermd.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/grant-h-brenner-md-dfapa/
If you like our podcast, please leave a review! Thanks in advance!
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Transcript
Pressure vs. Self-Reflection
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, one person said, you're only as good as your last meeting, right? So there's this pressure to perform, to be seen as productive, to be fast, to be so a person who takes action.
00:00:12
Speaker
So it's very much counter to self-reflection.
Podcast Origins
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, I'm Dr. Farrah White. And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner. We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice in New York.
Doorknob Comments
00:00:23
Speaker
We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the doorknob comment. Doorknob comments are important things we all say from time to time, just as we're leaving the office, sometimes literally hand on the doorknob. it's Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in
Expressing Meaningful Thoughts
00:00:39
Speaker
everyday life. The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing.
00:00:47
Speaker
Maybe we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open, or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them. Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves. Sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out.
00:01:02
Speaker
Hi, thanks so much for tuning into Doorknob Comments today. I'm your host, Farrah White, here with my co-host, Grant Brenner, and a very special guest, Davin Morrison.
Davin Morrison's Work
00:01:13
Speaker
Davin and I know each other ah through the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry, which is a sort of think tank of psychiatric, I guess, ideas and practice.
00:01:26
Speaker
And so we've known each other for a couple years now, and I would love to Just hear your story. And I think a lot of people don't really know what organizational work looks like and feels like, or that it's a thing that is maybe available to
What Makes a Workplace Healthy?
00:01:43
Speaker
them. So would love to hear about that, about that development.
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, and thank you very much. I've been looking forward to conversation with you both and appreciate your concept of doorknob moments. And i regularly use that concept in my practice. And I'll tell you about that as I'm sure as we have a conversation and the tie of my work actually does tie back to gap because they both kind of have their origins in the Minninger foundation and primary prevention.
00:02:15
Speaker
One of the, ah ah originals that um groups that started GAP. And the purpose of GAP was to basically say, we want to get our thoughts and ideas about psychiatry out quicker.
00:02:27
Speaker
We want to get it out to the public. We want to get it out to residents. We want to get it out to practicing psychiatrists.
Origins of Organizational Psychiatry
00:02:32
Speaker
And we'd rather not get tied up with the the APA or any journals, but we need to have a shared collective approach opinion, not just one person's voice. And that's the challenge of the committees. And that's the fun and and then then the the basically the strain, um the the pressure inside the group is to come up with a shared perspective. So we were one of the original committees at GAP. It was called
00:03:00
Speaker
ah psychiatry and industry or something like that. And the idea was they were coming out of World War two There was a lot of sense that something needed to be done with veterans. ah they They were...
00:03:13
Speaker
having trouble reintegrating in after World War two just beginning to understand PTSD, you know, soldier's heart, shell shock, all that stuff. Right? We were on the cusp of the of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and more things were coming.
00:03:27
Speaker
And these veterans were now in the workforce. They were coming out into the workforce. So how do we put them to work? How do we think about them? Are they broken? Can they be fixed? What's their story?
00:03:38
Speaker
What is this... um ah phenomena of symptoms that we so think are tied to their battle experiences, how does that relate to them as workers? A large part of what we've been exploring is what I continue to think about today is what in the workplace makes a person healthy and what perhaps makes their symptoms worse or induces pathology.
Work and Love in Mental Health
00:04:00
Speaker
ah large part of the thinking around the world of work and and um mental health ties back to a legacy comment that Freud apparently said, but was never directly attributed to saying, which is to be mentally healthy is to be able to work and to love.
00:04:15
Speaker
And although we can't find him specifically saying that anywhere, Eric Erickson picked it up and talked about it. And then a bunch of other people have picked up and talked about the importance of work as a source for mental health. So very important to me, ah our practice, our little business here is um relatively uncommon in the world of ah primary prevention or getting out to advising or coaching, because it's mostly done by psychologists.
Organizational Psychiatry Practices
00:04:45
Speaker
I don't know the ratio, but it's probably something like for every one organizational psychiatrist, there's 100 organizational psychologists. And they're being they're graduating and moving out into industry and into consulting or internally into organizations like Johnson & Johnson or Google or any of the big organizations that have ah departments on the inside.
00:05:06
Speaker
But the idea came out again from primary prevention, what is mental health? What is mental illness? And one of the original organizations that did this was also Miniger's.
00:05:17
Speaker
And Minninger's created this Center for Applied Behavioral Sciences. And so they were active in GAP.
Mininger Foundation's Role
00:05:24
Speaker
And that's what brought us together as a team, Farah, to some extent. I'll stop there and just say say a little bit more about what exactly I do
Spreading Psychiatric Ideas
00:05:32
Speaker
shortly. But is that all making sense?
00:05:34
Speaker
So organizational psychiatry developed in response to unmet needs, partially having to find ways to help large groups of returning veterans.
00:05:47
Speaker
My understanding, is that about right? Yes, yeah. And my understanding is that Wilford Bion, who's a British analyst, developed ah group psychotherapy essentially because there weren't enough individual therapists after World War two So he put the veterans together into a process group and he observed like what happened, which was really interesting.
00:06:12
Speaker
And he wrote a book about that, which is short but dense called Experiences in Groups. And maybe we'll talk about some of what he observed and how that applies to current organizational thinking.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think if I'm tracking with you, Grant, and I don't know that history, I know the name Beyond, but I think we still talk about the group defenses and what is a working group and what is a group that's defended against work.
00:06:40
Speaker
And there's three levels of it that runs from fight flight to to pairing to um there's one more dependent group. And I think they evolve in that direction. and is that part of what BN was describing?
00:06:52
Speaker
That was what Beyond observed and described is the difference between the basic assumption group, which you're describing, and then when the group is actually doing what it's supposed to be doing on its primary task yeah is what he called a working group.
00:07:07
Speaker
yeah So there's a rich history there, which is probably too confusing for listeners. there's There's a tradition in the UK called Tavistock. In the US, there's A.K.
Group Dynamics and Work
00:07:17
Speaker
Rice. There's group relations conferences. yeah um It's own thing.
00:07:21
Speaker
you know it's its own thing Yeah, no, that's very much um integrates, dovetails with what was happening at Minigars. um Essentially, this was kind of an experiment.
00:07:33
Speaker
to sort of say, hey, we know about what makes people um recover from severe symptoms. We know about what supports health. Is anybody else interested?
00:07:43
Speaker
And private industry was interested, and another group that we still work with, municipal leaders, for a variety of reasons, were interested. so And particularly professional service firms, because if you think about it,
00:07:55
Speaker
um bankers and accountants and um others that have to work, get their work done with clients through people need to understand what supports mental health. So there was quite a lot of what would become cottage industries that they were working on back then. There was a case of um sexual harassment, we'd call it today, that caused a problem in a client that brought them to minigres. There was alcoholism, there was divorce, um infidelity, all the kind of stuff that there are cottage industries out now focusing on those things, ah racism.
00:08:30
Speaker
And um so, yeah, so we still talk to those dynamics in work groups because leaders can be perplexed, right? We're coming together.
00:08:41
Speaker
We're supposed to get this task done and yet we waste our time. Or somebody has this fantastic idea and we all sit around and admire this brilliant person in our group and listen to his analysis of economics.
00:08:53
Speaker
And we don't, collectively ah do the work that's required as a team. Not and everyone's contributing, people are spacing out, or two people come in and they pick a fight with each other.
Mental Health Assessments
00:09:04
Speaker
All classic things that Beyond described a long time ago still happens in these work groups. So that's part of what um we're currently continue to describe and and talk about.
00:09:16
Speaker
In addition, ah There was a ah kind of core bit of work that we do today that was a dream of the Minninger brothers. They wanted to be like the Mayo Clinic, but for psychiatry.
00:09:30
Speaker
And so one of the models that we picked up and ran with was just an idea at Minninger Foundation. And then ah my father left and started his own practice that came to Chicago, ultimately, was around how could we do something equivalent for mental health that the Mayo Clinic does for physical health? In other words,
Executive Stress Solutions
00:09:52
Speaker
can we do an in-depth, comprehensive review of all the pressures on the individual, ah the financial pressures, the career pressures, the marital pressures, the legal pressures, all the things that are coming down on an executive so that they could then feel like they are understood and if possible, develop a plan for them
00:10:13
Speaker
And then go forward in kind of a trusted business advisor on getting their needs met related to their career. And often, as ah is the case, their ability to lead a team or work better with their boss.
00:10:27
Speaker
So those concepts that were just ah kind of back of a napkin ideas are now important. something we've been doing for 50 years. We have roughly 3,000 executives who've come through this, and we've added specific assessments onto this and processes related to interviewing around their life at work and their life outside of work.
00:10:49
Speaker
So that's been really rewarding um and what clients appreciate. There's more to that story I can share shortly, but the idea of Hey, just like you have a family history of coronary artery disease and alcoholism, come to the Mayo Clinic. We'll get the specialists, check you out. We'll tell you your relative risk factors. We'll come up with a plan so you can have some peace of mind and go back and focus for IBM or Kraft or k craft or ah Motorola, whatever your organization is. We want to do the same thing for mental health.
00:11:20
Speaker
And who is we? So ah the practice was originally ah spun out of the Center for Applied
Addressing Workplace Issues
00:11:28
Speaker
Behavioral Sciences, or CABS, which was this group in Minningers, by my father. It started in the basement of our house in Topeka.
00:11:35
Speaker
so Cool. I didn't know that. his first ah His first employee ah beyond a an executive assistant was helping him with, um ah believe it or not, overheads with gel and some large poster board things that he would carry around to make his presentations long before PowerPoint was actually my mom, who was an MBA.
00:11:59
Speaker
So they were ah came to Chicago on behalf of um Continental Bank. Continental Bank had done some work with Meninger's And they had sort of engaged him in a couple of um concerns.
00:12:13
Speaker
In fact, they don't exist anymore. But in fact, part of one of the things that they were working on is they came out of, um you know, the 1960s, 1970s, and were mainly wealthy white people who were banking and bankers.
00:12:29
Speaker
And they had some problems with racism at the time. So that was one of the early projects is how do you How do you basically open your mind to seeing people beyond their their race? And as you both probably know, there's some ahs significant history of racism here in Chicago, which is where Continental Bank was based.
00:12:49
Speaker
That was ah an early, like I was saying, these are now cottage industries. That was an early kind of DEI program
Judgment in Executive Performance
00:12:55
Speaker
or... harassment program to build designed to open people's eyes, to let them be a little bit more self-aware about how they see and talk about others.
00:13:07
Speaker
But stress was another important one. um The banking hours at that time was actually very reasonable. You come in at nine, you leave at three. You take long weekends whenever you want. You can have five or six martinis for lunch. you know It was a different era. People smoked cigars wood-paneled offices back in the day.
00:13:26
Speaker
So before email and and smartphones, there there were other stresses and um pressures on them that obviously... progress through today.
00:13:38
Speaker
So the next part of the story is it related to the individual assessments beyond the organizational um consulting and advising was the this ah concept of judgment.
Clarity in Organizational Goals
00:13:51
Speaker
One of our clients was a really interesting organization called CF Industries. They're the world's largest um fertilizer manufacturing company. And it was fascinating because their board of directors was also their customers.
00:14:05
Speaker
Their board of directors was a cooperative of farmers from around the US s and then North America and now the world. um And ah basically, ah the executives were coming through and the CEO came first.
00:14:20
Speaker
And after a point, he's like, you know these are expensive. And I'd like to get a little bit more for what I'm paying. So he said, tell me about their judgment and their ability to handle stress.
00:14:31
Speaker
So it was at that point in the late 80s, I think, mid to late 80s, we started to organize our consulting around um judgment. And that came um to your point that you were talking about earlier, Farah, that sort of highlighted the idea that the individual executives are not our clients, the organization is our client.
360-Degree Feedback
00:14:50
Speaker
and And so that can be important for clarity. For example, when they come through at the beginning of the day, we make it very clear we're not making a psychiatric diagnosis. We're not here to diagnose you. We want to understand you as a leader.
00:15:04
Speaker
If something comes up, we're experienced, you know, we're trained as physicians and psychiatrists, we will find a resource for you. And we'll be very private. um I like to tease them that we were HIPAA as psychiatrists before anyone else was HIPAA. So most people know HIPAA.
00:15:19
Speaker
So, yeah, so that's um bringing us up kind of to the modern day. and so in addition to reviewing the pressures and doing some assessments about their
Downsizing Effects
00:15:30
Speaker
intellect and their personality, we also add a 360 that integrates the perspective of others in the workplace.
00:15:37
Speaker
and And was just talking about that today in terms of how do we define success? What role, if any, do these factors play? And as I'm sure you both know as experienced clinicians, the results of the actual tests, the performance on the tests don't matter as much as the person's awareness of how they perform and where and when do those matter.
00:15:59
Speaker
So there are some tests that measure the relative capacity to function in ambiguity. There's other tests that measure the capacity to read emotions. And those are important in certain contexts, but it's also important that there's other colleagues that can kind of fill in your blind spots, so to speak.
00:16:18
Speaker
And you build the team around who you are versus who you think you are. What are the most common organizational problems that we see? Is there some sort of um list of organizational diagnoses or something?
00:16:32
Speaker
I can tell you, Grant, some of the top ah concerns right now. And then i also have a, I'll tell you about the individuals, ah sort of turn the question around a little bit and talk about concerns for the individual executives that are sent to see us.
00:16:47
Speaker
One of the things that happen in organizations, as I'm sure you know, is downsizing, right-sizing, mergers and acquisitions kind of change the culture, the expectation, the power dynamics in the organization.
Self-Awareness in Leadership
00:17:00
Speaker
One group that I was working with was here in Motorola was their legacy automotive division. And um it's kind of fun, but the word Motorola comes from the combination of motor and Victrola.
00:17:12
Speaker
The idea being that Bob Galvin wanted to hear the radio in his car, and there was too much electronic interference from the firing of the pistons. So the first engineering thing that he wanted to do that was not for the US Army or something like that was for the public. It was the Motorola car radio.
00:17:29
Speaker
That was a legacy business, very proud of it Lots of different um solutions, electronic solutions they were bringing to the cars. Well, that group got acquired by a German company and their headquarters are here. And I was working with one of their leaders and he's like, i don't want to go to Germany again. I've been there before.
00:17:46
Speaker
I want to be a coach like you. So he and I worked together, and he's now successful advising leadership advising coach. He says the number one thing for leaders is actually self-awareness.
00:17:59
Speaker
So this inability to perceive how you come across and the harm. If you're doing well, right it's not a
Current Hot Topics in Work
00:18:07
Speaker
problem. They don't need to come see somebody like me.
00:18:10
Speaker
or him, but it's when they screw up and they're insensitive or they're tone deaf or they're pushy or whatever. So it's kind of a large, huge bucket of um different ways, but the common denominator is a lack of being aware of how they're coming across that but self-awareness. so And then as it relates to organizations, it's right now the there are two, maybe three big ones.
00:18:37
Speaker
Obviously,
Long-Standing Organizational Issues
00:18:38
Speaker
artificial intelligence is a really big one right now in terms of how is that going to impact ah white collar jobs in particular, but also just the relative production of materials.
00:18:50
Speaker
right It can take a split second to draft a memo, an internal memo, or a new policy. which might have occupied somebody's afternoon back in the day. They would have taken half a day to work on these things.
00:19:02
Speaker
And then the relative concern about accuracy and and hallucinations and all of that kind of stuff. The other big one is, are we working in the building? Are we working at home?
00:19:13
Speaker
And who gets to work at home and when? So that's that's a hot one right now. And then the administration, honestly, is an important one because of a couple of my clients are getting whipsawed by these tariffs.
00:19:26
Speaker
They don't know what's coming next. How to anticipate ah where to put their um people, where to put their plants, where to put their money.
00:19:37
Speaker
it's It's all... um There's a lot of uncertainty. ah yeah predictability ye Yeah. it's it's It's anxiety provoking. So those are the hot ones right now. But there are also kind of consistent theme through time, which is new technology, um economic forces that come unexpected, the drive for growth.
00:19:58
Speaker
ah We've got to be bigger, faster, ah more successful than our competitors. So those are verennial problems. And do you
Executives' Perspectives and Goals
00:20:08
Speaker
find, let's long-time clients of yours, um are those types of decisions things that they want your input on or not so much?
00:20:20
Speaker
There's a couple of different things. buckets they fall into. One is would be, i really know what I want to have happen. And why won't these damn people do what the F I want them to do, right? There's those guys and gals.
00:20:33
Speaker
And um then there's the um people that are kind of like, you know, I just need to hang on for another five years so I can get my ex. i'm sure you're familiar with them, Farah. You probably you too, Grant, that I need to get to 55. I need to get to 60. I need to somehow you know endure. And then there's a couple of people currently that are on the other side of that 10 or 15 years back from that.
00:20:59
Speaker
They're kind of in the the making hay part of their career that don't necessarily know what their passion is. They've been promoted. They're good at what they do. But they need
Lack of Self-Reflection in Leaders
00:21:11
Speaker
they need to discover. So it's in the dialogue with their story.
00:21:15
Speaker
sort of They're using me to kind of, I see my role as kind of be a sounding board back to them. So how come they're not more self-reflective? What happened to them?
00:21:25
Speaker
That's a great question, Grant. I'll tell you. no offense. Yeah, no, they're not. They're generally not. I'll tell you a common story, and it may be very biased by the kind of people that come to work with me.
00:21:40
Speaker
So there may be a whole set of people that aren't like this, but... A lot of the successful professional service firm people that come to us did not have much money. And they've been very successful because they GSD.
00:21:52
Speaker
They get shit done, right? Sorry, I don't know if I can swear on this. but Yeah.
00:21:58
Speaker
They get stuff done and and they come out of a hunger. you know Maybe it wasn't when they first started. Maybe it was ah you know two blue-collar parents or single parents. But at some point, there was a hunger, right? Are we going to be able are we gonna have to move again?
00:22:13
Speaker
Did mom or dad lose their job again? um and And that entails a fair amount of emotional numbing or compartmentalization as well.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. there's There's an issue of um also, aren't you guys seeing this? Why can't you figure this out, parents? And I don't ever want to be worried again about not paying the rent.
00:22:35
Speaker
So that's not an uncommon senior executive story that then gets to what frame of mind are they in when they get to college or as they go through high school, right?
00:22:46
Speaker
I'm not taking any BS class on philosophy or the um rise and fall of the Roman Empire or the great sonnets of Shakespeare because that's not going to get me a J-O-B.
00:22:57
Speaker
you know I'm not going to get a job with this bullshit. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of time. So you don't have those seminar kind of experiences where you sit and wonder you know about ah just a line in a poem or a scene in a book. that.
00:23:14
Speaker
they miss that you know I'm overstating the story, but that's one dynamic. And then they get to the workplace and it's you know one person said, you're only as good as your last meeting.
00:23:25
Speaker
right So there's this pressure to perform, to be seen as productive, to be fast, to be so a person who takes action.
Work Identity and Personal Impact
00:23:34
Speaker
So it's very much counter to self-reflection. Now there are those who do it well and that pays off over time.
00:23:42
Speaker
But you know it gets ridiculed. imagine you've heard this navel-gazing or kumbaya. It's quickly they want to be family stuff yeah they want to categorize this and dismiss it, make fun of it.
00:23:54
Speaker
Do ever do what is sometimes called parts work? Like I've noticed that with a lot of high performers, there's like a part of them that's dismissive like this.
00:24:05
Speaker
And over time, sometimes there can be the development of a more meta sort of meta awareness, like broad based understanding of oneself. where people will start to see like like, that part of me, it doesn't give a hoot about anything.
00:24:20
Speaker
Doesn't care if I didn't sleep, doesn't care if I didn't eat, doesn't, you know, just whatever it takes to get the job done. um And is often very, very critical and of almost abusive internal kind of voice.
00:24:33
Speaker
And the motivation is often based in this abusive type of relationship pattern that may have been internalized early in life.
Developing Self-Awareness
00:24:42
Speaker
um and often plays out in their personal relationships. i think I think you would agree that a lot of times the the hypertrophy, the overdevelopment of the work identities deeply interferes with intimacy, particularly as right intimacy involves a certain level of emotional self-awareness and so on.
00:25:03
Speaker
So I'm wondering how many how many of your clients come in and also... yeah, look at what's happening in their personal lives or whether there's overuse of alcohol, which can be common in certain industries. And, you know, how how much traction do you find? I've i've found that this the development of this type of awareness may be very quick on an intellectual level, but the emotional development can lag far behind the intellect, which can be frustrating for someone who's trying to perform.
Literature and Self-Reflection
00:25:34
Speaker
i agree with all of that, right? I mean, ah one of the One of the interesting insights came out of a weekend on Judgment at Kellogg. It was kind of fun because it made me feel good about being a Spanish major.
00:25:51
Speaker
But I went to Northwestern as an undergrad and one of the most popular courses, it was strange, I couldn't figure it out until kind of looking back on it 20 years later, was Russian literature. And it's still popular today.
00:26:03
Speaker
And so I did my spiel on um executive judgment and measuring it in the story that you guys have heard. um But right before me was the current professor. It's now like been taught for 40 years, maybe 50 years, and back to the Cold War maybe, who still teaches Russian literature.
00:26:22
Speaker
And part of what he talks about in that class, and this ties back to my tactics, is when you read a good piece of literature, you're almost forced to think about what would I do in that situation? Or what was it like to be them? What was it like to be Anna Karenina?
Empathy and Leadership
00:26:39
Speaker
What was it like to be somebody in War and Peace or Dostoevsky's Brothers? I often wonder what it's like what it would have been like to be Raskolnikov. ah Who is that?
00:26:51
Speaker
isn Isn't he one of the, oh, no, I mean, do I mean Rasputin? I might mean Rasputin. That could be. That could be. I'm not a master Russian literature. I took the course a long time ago, i don't remember. That's the only thing I know about Russian literature.
00:27:03
Speaker
Rasputin, the guy that whispers in the ear of of somebody? i think Raskolnikov was in Crime and Punishment. Ah, okay. He's one of these bad guys, um or I guess he was a good guy.
00:27:18
Speaker
Anyways, I'm sorry to digress. Well, no, that's- How does rationalize or relate to organizational psychology? And that ties to your question because how do we break this cycle of achievement?
00:27:29
Speaker
And a lot of times it's this fricking guy is blocking me or why don't they give me the resources I want? And so part of what they do that they know, particularly because many of them have had to have some sales responsibility, but what's in it for them, right?
00:27:45
Speaker
With them, what's in it for me? So part of what I offer that begins to bring
Improving Work Conditions
00:27:51
Speaker
some self-awareness is what's it like to be that person? What's it like to be that person when you take this tactic?
00:27:57
Speaker
So that ah drive that you described that can be moralistic and be very harsh is what we call a harsh superego, or there's ways we measure and talk about that and our in our testing and in our processes. And then we look for data for it in the 360.
00:28:12
Speaker
It's very common. It's roughly four-fifths of the executives that come through. We tend to see it come out in one of two ways. It comes out like, it's hard to work for this boss. He's never happy. you know He's an asshole.
00:28:23
Speaker
Or they take work back. They never let me do anything because the only one that can do it perfect is them. So yeah, it's quite quite common. So what happens, right? You start talking about that. You start coming up with plans. What are you going to do different when you go back to the office on Monday? What are you going to do different when you go on your email tonight?
00:28:41
Speaker
Get very concrete with them. Stop being a sociopath. yeah stop stop being um well stop Yeah. Stop being it driven by this sense of perfection because it doesn't have to be perfect everywhere. we we we agree to that, right? I mean, we've walked through that already.
00:28:57
Speaker
I find self-compassion is often a critical idea. Yeah. Because a lot of the way they treat other people is what they expect from themselves. And that can be used to rationalize these transgressions.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And ah that's also the sense of the not quite narcissism, but just the sense that my department or my child or my wife is a reflection or my husband is a reflection of me.
00:29:25
Speaker
And they need to be perfect and they need to do everything right. So yeah, that one other example of it spilling from work back to all parts of their life was kind of interesting. It's coming to an end. It's about a 10 year story.
00:29:39
Speaker
And ah the person is rotating off and the successor is coming on. It's been a really neat consultation. But I found that most important thing that I thought he ought to work on was giving more structure to the people that he worked with because he did really well in ambiguity and things were clear to him.
00:29:55
Speaker
but he needed to be more clear, needed to slow down and be specific. But you know I always let them work on whatever they find motivating and we watch and
Professional Life vs. Personal Life
00:30:05
Speaker
see. So he came back.
00:30:07
Speaker
um Within a month or two, and and this was on a phone call. So he's in Chicago and then we're doing these phone calls um to check in and see if he's making progress. He was stressed. His boss son was overly stressed and he was just tight as a snare drum.
00:30:21
Speaker
So the point was to help him get more support from work or basically not be so tense and overwhelmed. So he um he came back and he said, he's a Tar Heels fan.
00:30:34
Speaker
So he came back after the March Madness and he said, hey, David, I just noticed something. I think I should be working on hyper competitiveness. because I was watching my team go through the um ah March Madness.
00:30:49
Speaker
And as they started to lose, I got more and more agitated to where I was yelling at the phone on television. And i and i realized as I got louder and louder, the family scattered to corners of the house to get away from me.
00:31:01
Speaker
And he said, as I thought about it, right, the that the, the, the, the inklings, the beginnings of self-awareness, I calmed down and I asked them about it.
00:31:12
Speaker
And they're like, dad, yeah, you should knock it off. It's not pleasant to be around you. Or honey, you know it' I'd like to watch the game with you, but it's miserable. So yeah, those are those are times where we were looking right specifically at changing things at work to decrease the stress.
00:31:28
Speaker
But he wasn't getting the nurturance at home either because it is something I wasn't even planning on. But he took it, ran
Business Pressures and PTSD
00:31:34
Speaker
with it. and And that was actually the beginning of a really strong, what would become a really strong working alliance with him.
00:31:41
Speaker
so I think a lot of folks with these sorts of problems inadvertently are intimidating to people in their personal lives. And it seems for the people in their personal lives that their everyday concerns are just not that important.
00:31:53
Speaker
And i think you can draw a parallel back to combat veterans who, if they have PTSD, which you can sort of have from a very neglected, deprived, abusive childhood, that everyday things just don't seem to matter very much compared it to like needing to you know,
00:32:10
Speaker
make your numbers by the fourth quarter or whatever. um Because in a sense, business starts to feel like war and nothing else matters.
Social Media's Influence
00:32:20
Speaker
I think we see that.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah. i think we see that a lot in all areas um where things, the the intensity on things, and that means academics or parenting, home relationships, work seems to have been turned up. And I don't know if we feel like social media or LinkedIn, if if there is too much sort of proximity and competition where it feels like these relationships, maybe there's, there's an overload, right. Of what other people are doing or thinking about how we measure up.
00:33:00
Speaker
I don't know that we're meant to have front row seats to everyone else's like, you know, parenting struggles or work, you know, successes.
00:33:11
Speaker
ah Do you have any thoughts about that?
Loss of Privacy with Technology
00:33:15
Speaker
Oh, Farrah, that's so, so important. I've been thinking about something like that since I had to give up my flip phone for a smartphone personally. Yeah.
00:33:25
Speaker
when was i I did not want the email entering my life. And then I have a close friend. He's been very successful. he had a similar experience with Wi-Fi on airplanes. You know, there there's there were sort of certain pockets of our world where work could not get us.
00:33:41
Speaker
That was actually the the source of our logo, work, family, and self, because the original ah burned out people were city managers who felt like they were living in a fishbowl.
00:33:52
Speaker
Most municipalities require resident living. You have to live in the city that you work in. So this is now like almost 50 years old, but the idea was they couldn't get away ah because people would corner them at the grocery store,
00:34:07
Speaker
or the football game and say, um i need a stop sign on my street, or, you know, crime is going up, or there's a pothole, or the water bill is too much, what whatever it might be, they couldn't escape when they should be allowed to kind of walk amongst us anonymously, right?
Parental Challenges with Gen Z
00:34:25
Speaker
So yeah, I think that front row seat, boy, that's a great metaphor. um I just wrote about this actually today, I'll send you a link, medium with Karen, you know, Karen?
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah. she She was driving this more than me, Farah, but she talked about the loneliness of the Gen Z and the sadness of Gen z and the way that we as parents feel it too.
00:34:48
Speaker
And so one of the readers said, let's flip this and talk about what it's like to be a parent of Gen z Maybe you saw this as well, but David Brooks just wrote an article a week or so ago about the most rejected or generation.
00:35:02
Speaker
very painful article to read about the amount of places the the Gen Z generation apply to and get rejected from. So the odds of getting into Harvard, right? The odds of getting into University of Illinois um used to be all you had to do was apply and and get into your state school.
00:35:22
Speaker
And then of course the um competition for academics, but also sports and music and other things, and then getting into the job world. So yeah, I i don't know what to do about it.
00:35:37
Speaker
Imagine you both as clinicians are seeing it. Part of what we wanted to emphasize is the idea of a healthy bond.
Emotional Support in Parenting
00:35:44
Speaker
you know, a safe place to come back to ah not being a, um, an, a, a project manager as a parent, but just a parent parent that you just love them, you know, what whatever they do. And, and that could include telling them to get their act together and do their homework, but it it's, it's, it's about them as a person unto themselves, not as an extension of me.
00:36:07
Speaker
And, and, and not as, and the other thing I think is, I think you both know is the contagion of emotion. and And if you've ever been out at, because I felt it, my sons are...
Emotional Contagion in Competition
00:36:18
Speaker
you know, good. They weren't fantastic, but they were good at soccer. So they got into some kind of elite clubs and there's a contagion of competition that you just walk up to the sideline and start talking, um you know, who's getting playing time, who's getting moved up, um what is it required to, for this team to advance to the next level, who's coming to watch, ah to scope them out from the Olympic team or the Chicago fire team. You know, that crap is, is like a emotional contagion to the whole group.
Cultural Impact on Work Ethic
00:36:50
Speaker
So um I think that's just- It's sort of basic dominance stuff, like one, upsmanship and status dynamics. and And Western culture and US culture in particular is you know known for having this relationship with work.
00:37:06
Speaker
yeah You know, you can make fun of like Europeans and some other cultures are very, very performance oriented. Some Eastern cultures where that's almost like a moral imperative to succeed materially.
00:37:19
Speaker
and Our culture is also, as as you keep suggesting, dominated by the sports mentality, which is which is very much how people are conditioned. yeah um i think a lot of people who are successful in the corporate world started off in elite athletics.
00:37:34
Speaker
And it's very much like the team works together. There's an eye on the ball. The ball is a KPI or a metric. And like that's kind of all that matters until something happens. right Later on in life, you see that.
00:37:46
Speaker
The generational issue, I think, is fascinating with Gen Z and Gen AI. more, I think more and more, there are leaders who are Gen Xers. I'm a Gen Xer, i was born in 1970.
00:37:57
Speaker
And you know we we youre yeah and we we always brag that no one took care of us. right right like um you know They let us out and then we came back when the street lamps came on and it was dangerous. Or if you didn't have a parent at home, we were called latchkey kids. yeah I was a latchkey kid and okay I never lose my keys to this day.
00:38:17
Speaker
And so I think that can cut against the parenting where you're kind of like, you guys are whiny, yeah by the same token, the kids today are like smartphone kids.
00:38:29
Speaker
If we were latchkey kids. And that's, I think part of, you know, what you're describing, like, ensuring that there's that basic human bond.
Technological Attachment Shift
00:38:38
Speaker
And of course you see more and more parents on their phones, they call it fubbing when someone is ignoring someone else, you know snubbing them with their phones.
00:38:46
Speaker
And you see all these parents and nannies who are just like on their phones and the kid is on their phone. To your point about AI, right? The attachment becomes primarily to technology rather than to other
Managing Tech Distractions
00:38:59
Speaker
humans.
00:38:59
Speaker
Right. Yeah, no. In fact, I'll make another. you've You've heard about two of the worlds of kind of organizational consultation, individual consultation. We do another thing, just focus for city managers because they're here locally. They can drive over to our office. Right.
00:39:14
Speaker
And there's a lot of municipalities around Chicago. So we have four or five groups, standing groups, and we open it with what's hot. And that's where we go from there. Free-flowing, they they contribute their best practices.
00:39:29
Speaker
But me and our other group leaders are all about the interpersonal. So we've been pretty harsh about putting your phone away. Not like you know ruthless Nazis. One guy is um diabetic, so he needs to kind of keep his eye on it. But it's seductive, right? Is he really looking at his diabetes or what else is on his phone that he's checking out, right?
00:39:51
Speaker
But it's nice because it's a... It's now becoming one of them is... um Well, one of them is very old. It goes back to the mid-70s, the North Shore city managers.
00:40:03
Speaker
ah the the one The newer one is only about 20, 25 years old. And they're now self-enforcing the fact that you you don't have your phone out. um But it was hard to start.
00:40:15
Speaker
The freaking things are so addictive. And we wanted them to to not feel judged. and And of course, they don't feel competent going for two hours without fiddling on their
Crisis Management
00:40:25
Speaker
phones. so i ah I tend to leave my phone in my office as i as much as I can, so I'm not doing it.
00:40:33
Speaker
um my One of my co-leaders is hard of hearing, so he he has it as his hearing aid. Anyway, those are the hard things about focused attention. There are certain problems you cannot solve with distracted or fractured attention.
00:40:52
Speaker
Strategy is one. Performance appraisals, performance conversations are another intense group work when you're dealing with a crisis is another. So those are the kind of things that, in fact, we've had police shootings in our municipalities and they come back to the capacity to focus and to use good judgment that they learn from these groups.
More on Organizational Psychiatry
00:41:12
Speaker
So it's cool stuff. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I think we got, we touched on a lot of, ah you know, the hallmarks of organizational psychiatry. And I know that we could talk forever, but if people want to learn more about you and what you're doing, where can they find you?
00:41:30
Speaker
Well, obviously through our writings in GAP with my colleague, Farrah White. But yeah, no, Morrison Associates Limited.com is our website. And then um ah we also do work if if these are psychiatrists listening.
00:41:47
Speaker
um The Academy of Organizational Occupational Psychiatry is a targeted group where we talk once a month on Saturdays about cases. Mm-hmm. People are being pulled into a lot of times the psychoanalytic institutes or the Department of Psychiatry get consulted about workplace issues.
00:42:04
Speaker
I'd like for psychiatrists to be more representative because we know a lot more about some parts of the workplace that psychologists don't. ah the neurology, the substance abuse, um the other health concerns that can impact somebody's work performance. Psychologists don't have an MD.
00:42:24
Speaker
And I think that gives us a competitive way we approach problems. The SOAP method,
Engagement in Organizational Work
00:42:29
Speaker
the the follow-up, the ongoing care. Well, the the psychologists, the clinical psychologists have that. But yeah, I would love to see, if you're listening, contact me. There's a couple of different ways that we can...
00:42:41
Speaker
get more people doing organizational psychiatry if you're a psychiatrist. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask that. maybe Maybe that's a brief follow-up. How could a psychiatrist who's interested in organizational work actually get involved?
00:42:54
Speaker
Any quick notes on that? Yeah, I think one of the early toe-in-the-water kind of steps is a thoughtful um getting involved interested and involved in ah returning to the workplace or workplace disability process I think a lot of times psychiatrists assume they know what's going on in the workplace, but getting up off your butt and walking into the building,
00:43:16
Speaker
getting on an airplane and going to see headquarters, um that that comes later. But if you can begin to not think as the person's and think as a person's therapist or or doctor, but I want to now advocate on behalf of the organization to get this person to work as effectively and happily as
Episode Closing
00:43:34
Speaker
possible.
00:43:34
Speaker
That's a different stance. that's the beginning of it. And then when you can do that, obviously, i think where we started to grant with the Beyond models, thinking about teams and systems rather than individuals.
00:43:47
Speaker
We're not looking for Kaiser-Fleiger rings. where We're looking for group dynamics. So that thank that can be quick and and you're welcome in and invited to do more often.
00:43:59
Speaker
And you can figure those things out. And that what's in it for for the for them? you know, what's in it for me? um getting them to be more self-aware and and recognizing. I listen to you as a psychiatrist, it helps my me in my career.
00:44:12
Speaker
it pet that's That's a big shot in the main vein, so to speak. Thanks so much. You're very welcome. It's been an honor to be with you.
00:44:23
Speaker
Remember, the Doorknob Comments podcast is not medical advice. If you may be in need of professional assistance, please seek consultation without delay.
00:44:36
Speaker
to see