The Identified Employee

In a healthy family, everyone owns their own contributions to the problems.  In a dysfunctional family, however, the family looks for one member to be the scapegoat, the one on whom they can project all the family's problems.  This person is known as the "identified patient."  This is the person the family agrees "needs help" and the one they all agree should go to counseling.  A good counselor versed in family systems sees right through this dysfunctional family strategy.  He or she knows that one individual is rarely the problem.

Family systems theory has given us some very valuable family insights that can be extrapolated to the workplace.  Like a family, workplace teams and organizations that are dysfunctional tend to look for someone within the organization on whom to place the blame. "Jane is the real problem here. She's become very withdrawn and critical of the rest of the team." With these identified problems in Jane, the executive coach is called in to solve the problem by "fixing" Jane.  

W. Edwards Deming said that "85 percent of all recurring problems were systemic." In his view the problem was rarely about the people but rather about the processes.

Jane's not perfect. She's got her issues and areas needing improvement. She's grown more critical and withdrawn as the system has marginalized her and identified her as the problem. If we allow the work team system to make Jane the problem, not only will we misunderstand the true systemic problems but we'll end up stigmatizing Jane in the process. We won't solve the real issues and Jane's morale and performance will continue to wane. In workplace teams, as in families, it is rarely the case that one person is the problem.  

The problem is the system. Each member of the system contributes to the problem and needs to be part of moving toward a new paradigm. If you're tempted to think that the Jane in your office is the problem, most likely, you need to think again. Look systemically at the interplay of the various people and dynamics and see the true nature of your struggle. Once you all begin to understand that you (pl.) are the problem, there is hope for change.