And the Dundie for best organizational awareness goes to …

One of TV's most beloved casts has left behind a trove of lessons on how to understand and influence spoken and unspoken workplace dynamics.

Image from NBC Universal

“The Office” premiered 21 years ago this past March. I get it, you’re thinking, “Why, Adam? Why did you just do that? Why did you decide to make me feel so old?  What did I ever do to you?” Fair. These are all fair questions. Believe me, I will spend the day feeling as ancient as an Egyptian sarcophagus upon learning this news. I’m making us all aware of the ravages of time for a reason, though.

In this day and age, there are very few collective experiences in our lives. Most of us going through our days within ever-delineating subcultures, be they our individual places of employment, our unique places of worship or lack thereof, our tailor-made playlists, that new Korean drama that we're suddenly obsessed with (“Bon Appétit, Your Majesty” — check it out, you will not be disappointed). “The Office,” however, is one of the last shared cultural references, with roughly 100 million people watching the show over its life on broadcast television, syndication and streaming. As a port in the seas of monoculture we once all navigated within, Dunder Mifflin Paper Company Inc. is one of the largest at which we all docked our ships.

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On paper, and in reality, the main character Michael Scott is a horrible boss. He is sexist, racist, ignorant. He is selfish, avoids painful decisions (and annoying paperwork) and has zero sense of appropriateness when it comes to office romances. Organizational awareness, an aspect of social awareness that is a component of social/emotional intelligence, is a power skill that Michael consistently fails to grasp. It also is one of his biggest strengths as a leader. Let’s explore how this seeming contradiction can exist within one fictional character. I promise it will be a win-win(-win) situation.  

What is organizational awareness?

In the book Organizational Awareness: A Primer, co-authored by the godfather of social/emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman defines organizational awareness as “the ability to understand and navigate the unspoken norms, decision-making processes, and power dynamics within an organization.” When we onboard at a new organization or join a new group, it can be easy to learn about that group through its written materials. Company history, organizational charts, standard operating procedures (SOPs) all provide value in your effort to understand the group and its goals. But those materials tell one part of the story. They will teach you how things are supposed to be done but not always how they are actually done.

Every organization has that person with more informational power than legitimate power. Think about the administrative assistant who knows about the pending merger before the rest of the organization because they’ve been tasked with preparing for the meetings between parties. Every organization has an informal dress code. It's not cool to show up in sweatpants if everyone is wearing tailored suits. In some organizations, more decisions are made at the golf course or after-work happy hours than in the boardroom. Improving your organizational awareness requires you to learn about the organization in ways that are not included in the welcome packet. Most organizations do not have a breakdown of the team gossips or rules about putting ketchup on your hot dog at the company picnic written down (except in Chicago where the ketchup rule is mandated by City Hall). 

In his 2018 article, “The Trick to Being ‘Organizationally Aware’,” Goleman provides a helpful checklist for gaining organizational awareness within an organization, be it a workplace, family, volunteer group or congregation.

He suggests observing group dynamics and asking yourself the following questions:

• How do the parts of this organization fit together?
• Does the organization have a mission statement? If so, is it reflected in day-to-day realities?
• What are the norms, both spoken and unspoken?
• What is the emotional climate and why?
• Are people engaged and passionate about their work?
• How does the organization relate to business partners and competitors?
• Where is there tension in the organization, and what is causing it?
• What are the social networks within the organization? Who talks to whom? Who holds informal power? Who does key information pass through? To whom do people listen?

Goleman tells us to take your own observations related to these questions and test them against other group member’s responses. Do you both agree about the causes of tension within the organization? Do you see the social networks laid out in the same way? Just in the same way we all see colors slightly differently, the observations people make about informal power networks often differ enough to be more valuable when considered together.

How is Michael Scott bad at organizational awareness?

We are lucky that this is a web article, because I would definitely exceed a print column word count if I needed to list all the ways that the character of Michael Scott demonstrates an absolute lack of organizational awareness. If you wanted someone to teach a class in how to screw up organizational awareness to the detriment of those around you, Michael Scott would be your best teacher (ready to chuck full-size candy bars at you).

In the very first episode of “The Office,” Michael decides to keep really important information about the potential for downsizing a secret out of some misguided sense of paternalism, falsely equating his role as regional manager with being the “dad” of the office, akin to an actual father keeping the health news about grandma a secret to not upset the grandkids.  Except that he is not the dad of the Scranton, Pa., branch of Dunder Mifflin — he is its regional manager. One of his informal roles is to effectively communicate with the staff of the office about how decisions being made at the corporate level are going to impact their daily operations. He fails in this informal role to hilarious consequences.

In Season Five, when Charles Miner arrives from corporate headquarters to oversee the Scranton branch, Michael immediately bristles from a different type of scrutiny that he received from his previous supervisor, Jan Levinson. He angrily reaches out to Dunder Mifflin Chief Financial Officer David Wallace to argue for less accountability. He explicitly tells David that he “thrives under a lack of accountability.” Michael is completely misreading the differences between authority and accountability and their relationship within the corporate culture that is Dunder Mifflin. I mean, a regional manager is reaching out directly to the C-suite to solve his problem. This miscue is so severe, as well as the ensuing response from headquarters, that it eventually drives Michael out of the organization, one that he had devoted a decade-and-a-half to at the time. In all those years, Michael still did not know how things worked around there. He failed to operate successfully with this change because of blatantly ignoring organizational awareness.

One of Michael’s most egregious and ongoing mistakes when it comes to organizational awareness is his complicated relationship with the Scranton branch’s human resources (HR) representative, Toby Flenderson. At various points throughout the series, Michael describes Toby as “the worst human being ever,” an “evil snail” and “Satan.” Michael starts Toby’s exit interview telling him that “of all the idiots in all the idiot villages in all the idiot worlds, you stand alone, my friend.” During all this time, Toby has worked to act as Michael’s HR representative during unorthodox negotiations — whether for a raise, during a lawsuit against Dunder Mifflin, of which Michael is key witness, or in consistently trying to expose Michael to immense liability for his completely unprofessional behavior in the office.

While we can all agree that, as a person, Toby Flenderson “is the worst,” Michael does not recognize that HR has a role, mandate and protective function, which Toby delivers. He does not understand the part that HR plays within Dunder Mifflin until Toby is in a Costa Rica hospital, healing from a problematic interaction with a zip line.  

All these examples indicate that Michael does not understand the organization to which he has dedicated most of his adult life, from his mullet days to his hair plugs. He broke both spoken and unspoken norms. He constantly ignored the lack of emotional engagement HIS ENTIRE STAFF (minus Dwight) had with the work they were doing. He overlooked the egregiously misguided decisions multiple owners of Dunder Mifflin made, demonstrating how they didn’t consider the Scranton branch, or any of the other ones, a “family.” The bottom line is that Michael  is horrible at organizational awareness.

How is Michael Scott good at organizational awareness?

Now, I will do one of my favorite things and a consistent bane to my wife’s mental well-being. I will argue out of both sides of my mouth, taking the exact opposite side without hesitation. Michael Scott is a superstar when it comes to organizational awareness.

When corporate decides that the Stamford, Conn., branch is going to absorb the Scranton branch, Michael takes immediate action outside of the proscribed SOPs to try to convince David Wallace that they are making the wrong decision, showing up with Dwight to David’s home. And while in reality his actions have no impact on the corporate’s decision to reverse course and have the Scranton branch absorb the Stamford branch, Michael keenly understood the direness of the situation for his employees’ job prospects and activated his knowledge of on-the-ground vs. formal power within Dunder Mifflin.

For most of the experience responding to Stanely’s heart attack in Season Five, Michael is unable to see his own role in increasing the stress Stanely and others in the office are feeling. I mean, he put Dwight in charge of fire safety training for goodness' sake. He had to know the impending disaster that would come from that decision, for both the people in the office and the office itself (not to mention the person who owned the car underneath the window through which Michael threw out an overhead projector). Through this experience, however, Michael showed incredible leadership in prioritizing psychological safety and recovery for Dwight and in advocating for taking this as a learning experience instead of a punitive one, as well as for Stanely and the rest of the office, with Stanely’s biofeedback monitor determining that Michael’s own actions were the driver of his stress. This awareness and acknowledgement of the emotional climate within the Scranton branch helped Michael take action — stepping back despite his pathological need for affirmation from his team — to bring everyone’s stress levels down. This was an organizational awareness two-fer for Mr. Scott.

Even in his departure from Dunder Mifflin,  Michael demonstrates his keen understanding of organizational awareness. The Scranton branch shared many life experiences over the seven seasons while Michael was part of the team:  births deaths, rabies, car accidents. Michael’s departure was an emotional experience for lots of people. Despite his personal need for validation, Michael chose what was best for the office culture: to quietly exit a day before his last day. He knew that what was good for the office was more important than what was good for him.

Why should you improve your organizational awareness?

Health care in America is in a phase of significant transformation. The aging of the population. The impact of growing populations managing a myriad of common chronic conditions. Business models accelerating or diminishing due to shifting payment models. Workforce shortages across operational and clinical departments. Your reading of this article likely means that you’ve decided to build your career, or at least sustain employment, in this field. Because of this, you need to be able to successfully navigate at an organization within the shifting reality of the United States health care system. Your ability to know who to get your ideas in front of, how to effectively manage up and how to build institutional allies are all key activities you must do to support your career advancement. The reality is that technical expertise will only get you so far. Knowing how to leverage that technical expertise and your interpersonal expertise in combination are the ingredients that are required for a consistently successful career.

If that carrot doesn’t convince you, maybe the stick will. Those who are better than you at understanding organizational awareness are more likely to get the promotion that you want, have their potential solutions to organizational problems listened to or gain those finite investment dollars for their department. You can choose to ignore organizational awareness, but that doesn’t mean it will cease to exist. It just means that you will be the victim to its realities, rather than a shaper of them.

Michael Scott, like the rest of us, has his good and his bad, his strengths and his challenges, his expectations and realities. There are lots of things you should not learn to do by following Michael’s lead, such as planning a workplace training presentation, buying real estate or learning how to use PowerPoint. But one thing you can learn from Michael is how to incorporate (well or badly) organizational awareness into your career skill set. Unlike the bailer, organizational awareness is a workplace tool Michael is allowed to use.   

Adam Bazer, MPD, senior director of thought product development, ASHE.