The Idea of a Self-Actualization Company

I have talked about self-actualization as a process for individuals, but what about groups?

• Can a group self-actualize?
• Can a business become a Self-Actualization Company?
• If so, what would that be like?
• How would a business operate if it were committed to the self-actualization of all of its people?
• What would self-actualizing managing and leading be like?

Maslow began exploring this these very questions the 1960s. Taking a break from his teaching at the University, he went to California and became a Visiting Fellow at the Non-Linear Systems, Inc. plant in Del Mar, CA. He did this at the invitation of Andrew Kay, President of Non-Linear Systems (NLS). In preparation he read Peter Drucker and Douglas McGregor who originated the idea of Theory X and Theory Y regarding two paradigms of business and management. Kay and Maslow later said that NLS was demonstrating that organizational and worker interests could converge through enlightened management (On Eupsychican Management, p. 270).

Maslow described enlightened management as what a self-actualization manager would engage in. Of course, he then muddled things up by giving it an esoteric name—eupsychian! He invented the term eu-psychician, meaning new-psyche or new-self, as meaning “moving toward psychological health.” No wonder Eupsychican Management did not become a best seller! (As an aside, in 1999 when the book was reprinted, the title was changed to Maslow on Management.) In that work, Maslow explored the question of extending self-actualization to work, management, leadership, groups, politics, and society. To that end he asked such questions as:

“What conditions of work, what kinds of work, what kinds of management, and what kinds of reward or pay will help human nature to grow healthily, to its fuller and fullest stature? How treated? What conditions will they work best? (p. 227)

He also challenged the current economic theory in the following way:

“Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self- actualization and the love for the higher values.”

When we think about self-actualizing people working together and creating a Self-Actualization Company, we are faced with fundamental questions about human psychology and the basic issues of motivation, responsibility, relationships, etc. We are faced with multiple beliefs about many facets of organizational life.

• How good a society does human nature permit?
• How good a human nature does society permit?
• How good a society does the nature of society permit?
• Do you believe that people are trustworthy?
• Do you believe that people seek responsibility and accountability?
• Do you believe that people seek meaning in their work?
• Do you believe that people naturally want to learn?
• Do you believe that people don’t resist change but resist being changed?
• Do you believe that people prefer work to being idle?

Maslow’s ideas about enlightened management elaborated the concept of synergy originated by Ruth Benedict. How can we create synergy in a business, company, cooperation, and society? How can enlightened management create a synergy between building an organization and attending to the well-being of the individuals working within it? And what did he conclude?

“The old-style management is steadily becoming obsolete . . . The higher people get, the more psychologically healthy, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition, and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy . . . that is why I am so optimistic about Eupsychian management . . . why I consider it to be the wave of the future.” (286)

For a company or culture to become synergistic, we set up a mutually beneficial relationships between individuals and the company so that which is beneficial for the individual is beneficial for everyone and for the organization. Why? Because as Benedict showed, in a high synergy cultures people feel secure, benevolent, and high in morale. There is an emphasis on generosity, abundance, cooperation, and personal responsibility. In low synergy cultures people are insecure, in conflict, and low in morale.

If self-actualization is fulfilling our gifts, talents, and passions, if it is being our best selves even at work, then we can begin to design work to fulfill not only our lower needs, but also our highest needs.

“Perhaps we shall soon be able to use as our guide and model the fully growing and self-fulfilling human being. The one whom all potentialities are coming to full development, the one whose inner nature expresses itself freely.” (1965, p. 17)

Maslow believed that this enlightened management would be “the wave of the future” and so it is even now becoming. In the leadership and management of organizational life and corporate governance, we are even now in the midst of this rising wave which is what continues to make Maslow so relevant.

Back in 1965 Maslow even started a Journal, Eupsychian Management: A Journal. He used the journal to assert the importance of higher needs in all employees, whatever their level in a company. He insisted that authoritarian top-down management strategies robbed companies of their worker’s intelligence and creativity and robbed the individual worker of an opportunity to experience the fulfillment of true productive work.

Fast forward some 40 years and today we are in the midst of the ever-changing nature of how to integrate and synergize the intellectual, personal, and creative capital of people within a business or corporation. No wonder business consult and coaching has become so important today. More than ever before leaders and managers are asking these self-actualization questions:

• How does one become a self-actualizing leader or manager?
• What does it mean to have a self-actualizing job?
• How can we change things so that work is not only about making a living, but expressing one’s meanings and purposes?
• How can we lead and manage people to express their highest and best within the context of the products and services that we create?

As we think about creating Self-Actualization Companies and societies today, we look to the structures, systems, and conditions that we currently have and begin to explore what alterations will be needed. What will this mean in terms of economics? Today we know that money can only motivate workers to a certain limit and afterwards, loses its power. Why? Because we want more than just money as part of our pay, we want recognition, acknowledgment, being part of a team, having good and fun relationships, getting a chance to experiment, create, lead, etc. Maslow called this meta-pay.

“To think of ‘pay’ in terms of money alone is clearly obsolete in such a framework. It is true that the lower need-gratifications can be bought with money— but when these are already fulfilled, then people are motivated only by higher kinds of ‘pay,’ e.g., belongingness, affection, dignity, respect, appreciation, honor, as well as the opportunity for self-actualization and the fostering of the highest values – truth, beauty, efficiency, excellence, justice, perfection, order, lawfulness, etc.” (228)

It is when we are able to synthesize our talents and passions into a “job” that what we do becomes highly meaningful in its significance and as an expression of who we are. Then our actions and performances as expressions of what we do for a living enables us to self-actualize via our jobs and careers. Then our “jobs” becomes so much more. Maslow said that it is at the point where “the self-actualization job is assimilated into the identify or into the self by introjection,” that our work not only becomes therapeutic, but self-actualizing.

Business that operates only from the lower human needs will inevitably incorporate deficiency, scarcity, and win/lose competition and that will become the quality and feel of the business. When we do business and create businesses, however, that includes the higher self-actualization needs, a new paradigm is given birth. Now we think about the creation of products and services, economic exchange, the creation of companies that recognize the full development of people, etc. in new and different terms. Now we begin considering the possibility of a Self-Actualization Company—the subject of the next reflection.