Bruce Muzik talks about his experience of challenging perceptions and prejudices he absorbed from birth in Apartheid South Africa. Here's how he took off those distorting lenses and experienced his native country in a new way.
It started by sharing his terrible secret:
He gives a good insight into how generalisations about other cultures and communities arise and are perpetuated.
His main purpose is in motivating others to take steps to remove numbness and increase aliveness.
In management studies we consider various ways in which people interact and cooperate. There are psychometric instruments to help us distinguish personality and style differences. Emotional intelligence guides us in ways to manage ourselves and our interactions with others. Team roles enable us to consider various functions that have to be fulfilled in completing a project and the distribution across members of the group engaged in the work.
Bruce Muzik encourages us to come back to ourselves and work on the inner kinks that block energy and a full sense of aliveness. I don't think he's encouraging people to be naive and blunder into the boss's office with the words 'I hate you and all you stand for'. He does suggest ways that might improve working relationships and trust.
One of his coaching examples might shed some light on the mysterious suicide of Welsh football manager, Gary Speed, who did not seem depressed and had no major conflicts with family and friends in the days before he died. Perhaps he nursed a secret that became unbearable?
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