It Isn’t Easy Being Green: On Being an Occupational Psychologist in the Corporate World

Gene Johnson considers the challenges of being an occupational psychologist in a fast-moving corporate environment, where scientific training can seem at odds with facilitating major organisational change programmes. Gene is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, EMEA Learning & Development Manager at Dell and Chair Elect of the Division of Occupational Psychology.

I’m not usually prone to seeing myself as a lone green frog on a log. Usually my analogies are somewhat more literary, such as the careful observer of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroeger, looking in at the ‘blonde, blue-eyed dancers’ from outside, never joining in, always watching and evaluating. I see things that the casual, untrained eye never knows even exist. The need to observe and conclude is a natural part of me. Am I a psychologist because of my watchful, critical nature, or have I been trained to be that way because I am a psychologist? I think more the former. This ability to set one’s self apart from the action and objectively identify behaviours, signs and symbols is needed in a fast-paced business that never stops to reflect upon its own culture - especially when it is trying to change that culture.

My firm appears to be constantly changing. Much of the change is surface-level, but two major change initiatives are vital to our success. The first is a re-focus on the customer, called Dell 2.0. We started nearly 23 years ago with a close relationship to the customer; indeed, we re-defined the market with the Dell Direct model, where we sold customer-configured PCs straight to the end-user via the internet. Somewhere in time we lost our focus and may not have always seen the customer as individuals with unique needs. The second initiative derives from this realisation: a major re-organisation from geographical organisations to customer segments, such as SMB (small & medium-sized business) and CA (corporate accounts). Moving forward, we will be able to more tactically and flexibly meet the needs of our customers, as we better understand the different segments.

These are not merely surface-level changes. Envision this: country sales, marketing, customer care, and other teams currently operate from a geographic site and deliver to the same market. Moving forward, those teams, still in the same location and working next to each other, will now be divided by customer segment. They may report to remote managers, and their end users may be in the same country or across EMEA. Change doesn’t occur in a vacuum, so it isn’t only structural change that’s involved; there are also required changes in process (different sales and care techniques for different clients), culture (how we view customers, co-operation across functions), and people (skills in solutions selling, relational customer management, and remote management).

I can play an active part in this change, primarily as a change agent. I sometimes think that the average manager believes that change occurs just by saying that it will. ‘Here’s our new structure; get to it.’ It’s my role to give them a reality check - something not usually ascribed to us psychologists - about resistance to change, and a process to manage the change. I have a model that logically plots out the elements of change - although change isn’t usually structured, it can at least be managed. These elements include different roles (sponsor, change agent, targets), a reason to change and/or a vision for the future, acknowledgement of our ‘baseline’ (organisational culture, prior change, and resistance), and supporting systems (learning, rewards, and communication). And there’s also my ability to point out what I see on a day-to-day basis as ‘evidence’ of culture - both old and new.

The challenge for me is, how do I get buy-in from the business for my involvement in these changes? Do they even see them as worthy of attention? In my experience, it’s quite rare for firms to formally address the less concrete aspects of change, possibly because they think they just fall into place after the new structure/process, because they see them as too ephemeral to address, or they’re just not seen as important. While actions do speak louder than words in their symbolism, I’m not sure if a micro-analytical analysis of behaviour and surface-level artifacts would be viewed as more than a bit of nonsense by an executive focused on the bottom-line. Furthermore, I’m not sure the decision makers in my firm even know what an Occupational Psychologist is. Thus, it’s vital that I don’t appear to be spouting enigmatic statements about behaviour reflecting organisational culture (‘the casual dress code indicates a lack of respect for customers’), lest I’m mistaken for the neighbourhood mystic.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t play the Occupational Psychologist role in the work place - we certainly should. We may be good at playing the outside observer looking in, as well as acting from our rigorous scientific base. However, rather than convincing our stakeholders of our arguments, we may stun them with science if we lay it on too heavy. As practitioners, we need to provide our input in the local parlance of business, so there’s no question of its understandability and practicality. This includes appealing to the bottom-line and, in my case, presenting a logical approach to change. Over time, this apparent acknowledgement of business realities will gain us credibility. With credibility, we may occasionally be allowed to be the green frog on the log. In the meantime, I’ll keep my mystical observations to myself.