Facing up to an identity crisis

Imagine the scene: you are in a workshop called by your manager to introduce you to the new world of your merged/downsized/shattered company. Your company has a distinctive culture, and a different approach to how things are done. It has proved successful.

Times have changed. Your owners have decided to trade your success with the success of another company equally strong in its culture and approach.

You are merging, being taken over, whatever they like to call it. Or you are facing a 'relocation'. Or a 'change of career'.

Now you have to choose, as tens of thousands of fellow employees have to choose, how you see yourselves. Are you an ice hockey team, or a ski racing team? Do you scramble after the puck or shoot at speed down the mountain? And how do they see you?

Even more, once you choose, can you meld your views into one? How do you adapt yourself to what is demanded?

Equally, what if, as is happening now, you are an employee of a major IT company in its manufacturing heartland? And this company has finally decided to abandon the area. Sorry, that needs rephrasing: relocate and exit the area turning over the location to local investors.

'I am not a team member, I am an individual'

Here's another one. You work in a company which was seen as a key part of the dotcom boom. Now your shares, which used to be a financial supplement for some of the lowest salaries in the market, have tanked. You are urged by a group, which claims to be solely financed by fellow employees, to be excited about coming to work every day. So what team are you a member of now?

Do you want the names of the companies? Start at Alcatel, go through Cable & Wireless and Cisco, Compaq, to Fujitsu (ICL), Hewlett Packard, IBM and beyond to WorldCom.

With so many, we find that the bosses were in a team of one as they had their hand in the till. The more trouble there is, the more desperate attempts there are within IT to keep the culture intact, to appeal to the collective aspirations of employees, despite the clearly self-centred actions of senior executives.

The executives who put together these ra-ra sessions in hard times within the IT sector have it fundamentally wrong. If the prospect of working for Fujitsu cannot provide the stability promised when Fujitsu took over and gutted ICL, then it has failed in its purpose. If the HP way leads to such mass redundancies, then Bill and Dave's original ethos also has to go.

Employees stopped being mere numbers in the early 1980s when participation and the dignity of the individual became the main thrust of IT human resources management.

Employees were welded back into a corporate ethos by being encouraged to see themselves as members of a team. And the great analogy was always sports teams. Hence the ski-racing and ice-hockey analogies still lingering in the ra-ra workshops running across the world today.

Let's now appeal to the individual. What do you need today? How can you survive or even prosper? Let's appeal to people's selfishness and let them decide what they belong to and where their interest lies.

Where's the team for the IT professional over 50 years old and still churning out copies of his CV after months of fruitless job searching?

Where is the team for the mother teeming with talent now seeking a re-entry to employment after her first or second child?

We should watch The Prisoner and adapt its hero's well-known phrase for these times: "I am not a team member, I am an individual."