I caught this in the Farnam Street newsletter, and went about looking for the source. An HBR article from 2014 titled Making Business Personal, which also writes at length what and how certain organisations overcome this.
I think there are two sides to this – the organisation and the individual. The article does a great job of showing examples of organisations that have developed techniques to help individuals voice their inadequacies and vulnerabilities, and address them as well. But my thinking was more on the individual, and that got me skeptical. 😐
Doesn’t this approach assume that people will give up the “second job” under the right circumstances? There are all kinds of people, with different levels of motivation and varied kinds of intent. What makes employees take up the second job in the first place – insecurity, deviousness, laziness? Is that something that can be solved by the organisation? Can hiring policy and culture be expected to filter out certain people? How does this play with the changing attitudes of different generations towards work? Can this be sustained in increasingly competitive business environments where QoQ results are given more importance over everything else?
P.S. An even more dated, but excellent read – The Failure Tolerant Leader.