At Work & Co there are two distinct and opposite experiences. You have little control over which one you’ll get. Either you are put in the safe bucket or in the blame bucket.
If you are in the safe bucket, you are part of an unspoken ring of trust nurtured by the partners. They trust, empower, and protect you. You’ll feel a sense of reasonable psychological safety and of belonging. You will have plenty of opportunities to grow due to the tight relationship with the partner(s) who invited you into the ring.
If you are in the blame bucket, you are the target of anything that goes wrong - anywhere. Partners masterfully push blame away from themselves and their protégées onto those outside of their ring of trust. They do it forcefully, unreasonably, and systematically until people either mentally break and up in the hospital or just leave.
Being in the safe bucket may feel great for some but it is not a recipe for success either. There are no guarantees you’ll be in the safe bucket for too long. In reality, if you raise personal concerns, bring up disruptive ideas, or have your own opinions of what could be improved, you may quickly feel the painful woes of being transferred into the blame bucket.
This dynamic exists because partners are mostly unable to feel or project genuine humility. Humility requires vulnerability and the partners’ definition of success hinges around the unrealistic idea they of never being vulnerable - of never being wrong. Any sign of vulnerability is seen as weakness. Partners are bullheaded strongmen who want to project an image of infallibility as a way to measure success.
In order to achieve such infallibility, partners use target employees to transfer their failures onto. It is easy to be infallible when you employ people who can take the blame in your stead. Under the guise of their sociopathy, people are disposable resources that can be easily replaced.
People who get dragged into the blame game will have an abysmally miserable time at Work & Co. People who stay in the shadows, repeat what the partners say without questioning, or are simply lucky enough to be drinking buddies with - or related to - key stakeholders will have a much better time.
If you have your own opinions, if you want to feel included, if you to be part of a diverse, welcoming and psychologically safe environment, stay as far away from Work & Co as possible. If you want to be respected for what you do and the value you bring to an organization, stay as far away from Work & Co as possible. If you don’t want to risk being an emotional punchbag for psychopaths and narcissists, stay as far away from Work & Co as possible.
On the other hand, there will always be two kinds of people who stick around and seem happy. There are those trapped in an emotional and financial prison and those who sit comfortably under the shadows of people who they’ve come to believe are examples of success. You might feel like one or both of them and then you should work at Work & Co.
