Don’t Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success
Sylvia Lafair
Josey-Bass (2009)
Lafair explains how to break certain family patterns that limit career success by “claiming and taming the world of interpersonal relationships.” All people have problems at work and in their personal lives. They become upset, confused, and impatient. “Such frustrations are understandable. But what most of us…never really ‘get’ is why people believe the way they do, and what can be done about it. The problem isn’t always other people’s behavior, either. How many times have you regretted something you said or did at work and thought, ‘Why do I always do that?’ Ever want to help your employees find out what’s holding them back? Or holding you back?” Lafair poses other questions of comparable importance. Her purpose in this book is NOT to answer them. Rather, to help her reader answer them…and perhaps help others to answer questions they may have.
What I realized almost immediately as I began to read the first chapter is that Lafair is demonstrating the importance of context and frame-of-reference by establishing them for the PatternAware™Leadership Model, an approach based on her more than 30 years of experience with both healthy and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. Her observations and recommendations are thus supported by an abundance of empirical, real-world evidence. With rigor and eloquence, she explains how behavior patterns from a person’s history are intimately connected with every aspect of that person’s adult life, not least of all her or his work life. Much of her book is devoted to helping her reader to understand that, “although you can never fully leave your family behind, you don’t have to bring it to work.” That is frequently true but I have also observed, in my own behavior and others’, that it is possible to haul so-called “baggage” anywhere, into any relationship, without being aware of it. I’ve worked with people who have more hang-ups than a telemarketer.
Over the years, Lafair has identified “The 13 Most Common Patterns™ We Bring to Work” and they serve as a thematic infrastructure for her narrative. They are identified and discussed in Chapter Four. For example, the Persecutor humiliates work associates with finger-pointing, demanding, judging, and blaming. The persecutor behaves like a bully and takes no prisoners. No resolutions occur because everyone is afraid to take him or her on. Lafair rigorously examines a total of thirteen of these disruptive characters: Persecutor, Avoider, and Denier as well as Super-Achiever, Rebel, Procrastinator, Clown, Victim, Rescuer, Drama Queen or King, Martyr, Pleaser, and Splitter. She discusses the probable causes and impact of those who have these dominant personalities. Her revelations are best revealed within the narrative, in context.
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