The dialogs between the blog writer and the reader begin in the blog post’s generalization and develop according to increasingly particular themes. These are initially signaled by the reader/respondent who brings them to the essayist’s attention. They are then elaborated through successive pairings of letter and response between correspondents.

Thinking about this process along the lines of an organization’s structure, a very clear parallel emerges. A task or work focus is constructed through the give and take of communications, the subjects of which are agreed upon. These become further elaborated and deepened with time, and shape the future course both of the discussion and of the work.

However, what is left behind? This curious question was on my mind as I thought about the essays and responses I’d both composed and received in the context of a self-help group newsletter, with its broad membership intent on the job of finding work.

My essays were responded too with the urgent particularities of their readers. And here, I began to detect a slippage, away from the organizational focus of the group, and toward the assertion of personal resilience, over and above the task of finding work. The psychologist William James might have termed this a meta-purpose: that is, the meta goes “along with” the ostensible job.

The British social scientist, AK Rice, noted that the nature of job description operated as a sort of cookie cutter: that is, in defining the skills and capabilities required on the job, much else (the surrounding dough in this example) was left out. The practical question for the hiring organization then, becomes whether that human excess capacity is a) benign; b) additive of value; or c) a barrier to effective job performance.

The individual seeking work from outside the organization, consistently re-imagines herself according to the fit prescribed by the groups she wishes to join. Time and again, especially in an economic period when onramps are few or lacking, the disappointments of rejection, coupled both with the increased economic pressures of familial, daily life, and the worries of continuing under-employment (and even the boredom and sense of lessened worth that are many individuals’ experiences) create a tremendously hampering barrier to future effectiveness.

Organizational coaching proceeds, then, even in the absence of the individual’s formal membership in a work organization. It is organized around individual motivation to affiliate, again with a work organization. It provides, through establishment of a “temporary organization” focused on the work of developing work, an opportunity to assess and to redefine personal and career strengths, as well as to strategize the kind of organizational linkage best fits the client (newly experienced through the rigors of unemployment) at her current life stage, and the opportunities current in the working world.

Like the essayist and correspondent, it emerges through development of a unique direction, folding in the learnings, resiliencies, and aspirations accumulated through adverse experience, and redirected productively through conscious attention to what an employer might see as excess capacity, and what each of us knows- beyond the demands of any job- to be the skills and capabilities that make life worthwhile, both during and after this significant transition.

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