Educational articles

Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė / Stop-frame

Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė
Business psychologist, founder of HAI Institute
Excerpt from the HR Hint Online conference "A new era is coming, are you joining?", 2023

In my original radio show "The Future Gene" I had 8 conversations about living organisations. What did I take away from these conversations?

There were 5 aspects that dominated the speech of all my interviewees:

- the goal is not money, but change in society, in the larger system or, simply, value for the customer;
- people's autonomy and empowerment. So far, it has been assumed that about 15% of people in organisations are like this, the rest are doers. Today, the need for autonomous people is much greater;
- regeneration through innovation;
- Diversity, differences;
- people development, strengthening their liveliness.

Most of the energy was when we talked about people. So it occurred to me that maybe the real purpose of organisations is to mature people: they come to organisations with their own psychological problems, with their own patterns of behaviour, they mature and they go out to create their own organisations, their own projects. (...)
What are the principles of people's psychological adulthood? I refer to the Italian philosopher A. Meneghetti, who identified 3 main principles:

- existential autonomy: I know what I want; I know what I can do; I can speak out. I don't have to hide behind money, behind recognition, behind justice or other things. I just know who I am, what my identity is;

- emotional autonomy. Interestingly, we are no longer talking about the emotional intelligence (how to know oneself and others) that we have been talking about for the last 20 years. Today we are talking about how to understand what behaviours from my childhood are preventing me from achieving the desired result. And the new direction in management development is psychodynamics, which is already entering the field of top management. It analyzes what is happening here and now in the relationships between people. It is a higher level of emotional intelligence;

- economic autonomy: whether I choose to pursue an economic goal and a concrete result, or whether I sabotage myself, i.e. choose a non-functional goal - to prove something to others, to get public attention and a bit of applause.