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The Manipulators That Make Businesses Unsustainable

Peter Matthies - Conscious Business Institute | Sunday 9th August 2009

How to break away from the existing model of Dominance & Subservience

In the last blog post, I described that as long as we build businesses based on the Model of Dominance & Subservience, it will be impossible to create sustainable organizations. I stated that it is a paradigm shift that both the Dominator and the Subservient are fully accountable and responsible for their contribution to this model, and that if we want to break away from this model, we need to understand its governing principles.

We find that the Model of Dominance & Subservience is governed by the following 3 principles:

1. I must dominate the resources or I will be dominated.
2. If I cannot dominate the resources, I must be subservient to the dominator.
3. I need to sacrifice my authenticity so that the dominator will take care of me if I cannot take care of my own needs.

Think about these principles for a moment.

Pause

We can easily see how these principles operate in our private and work lives. We strive for years to make it to the top, only to end up in a position where we are calling the shots or become "financially independent", so we do not need to become subservient to a dominator.

However, only about 1% in our society ends up in that role, while the remaining 99% of our population are forced to step into a subservient role - at least in some aspects of their lives. And we can also see how the third principle kicks into gear when we are confronted with losing our jobs.
This third principle plays the most essential part, because as we sacrifice our authenticity, we start behaving with the purpose to manipulate a future outcome or what other people think about us. In short: we act from fear. And where there's fear, there cannot be flow.

In essence, this model makes it impossible to experience flow, ease, peace of mind, or sustainability in our lives or businesses.

The Common Manipulators
As mentioned earlier, it is a paradigm shift that both parties in this model are equally responsible. There's no victim or perpetrator. Responsibility is equally shared. Both parties use specific behaviors to keep this model intact. We call these behaviors Common Manipulators, and they include for example such behaviors as Shame, Blame or Outrage. We can easily see when the Dominator (e.g. the executive) uses these Manipulators when he blames his employees, or when he's outraged that his people don't work harder. But the Subservient (e.g. the employee) equally uses the Common Manipulators when he is outraged about the boss, because he bags all the money.

As stated in previous post, this is good news, because the boss is not the "bad guy", anymore. This model provides an opportunity to level the responsibility in an organization as individuals become aware and accountable for their behaviors. As they do, Leadership Mentality can be established on every level in a business - in my personal view an essential component for organizational effectiveness and sustainability.

(Please feel free to contact us or check out the Conscious Business Institute website for more information about how this can be accomplished).

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