Abstract
Managers are expected to actively build their role, shaping and adjusting it day after day on their own company needs and on market upheaval. In our society development became one of the keywords: development at all costs, continuous growth, economic growth, professional development, purchasing power growth. Inside this logic a self-empowerment or coaching project are frequntly required, and really often the consultant acts inside the same logic of development at all cost. When the adviser agrees to this request without opening a space to analyze the question, but simply working on the given target in order to supply the comforting answer, he acts inside the same weird and directive logic leading to the prevalence of the role on the person.
Working through an effective empowerment perspective means working together with the person in the role: improving his self-awareness, promoting a reflection on targets and values, ensuring an elaboration space for emotions and experiences. The aim is to bring into question the answer taken for granted, trying to look from a different perspective what we do, what we are, what we say.
Notes
1. Training that hardly refers to anthropologies and to Bildung poetics, training intended as the deepest meaning of human building and transformation/enrichment (e.g., Gennari, Citation2001), besides the image of the actor reduced to a Über-marionette in Gordon Craig's theatre (Citation1908, p. 5).
2. Lyotard (Citation1998, p. 32). On the post-modern subjectivity development cf. Wood & Zurcher (1988).
3. As Severino wrote (Citation1982, p. 263), “we begin to pay attention to the abyssal powerlessness of power culture. We begin to discover the incurable disease. But who cares? The West is a sinking ship, where everyone ignores the leak and works diligently to make navigation more and more comfortable and where therefore no one wants to argue about nothing except prompt problems, and where problems themselves have meaning only if it is possible to glimpse the specific solving techniques. But does the real wellness come if we are not able to discover the real illness?”
4. “If they will end looking back, the majority of the people will discover that they have lived a life ad interim, and will marvel looking that what they left without considering and enjoying is exactly their life and that they lived exactly in waiting for that. Usually this is the path rule for the human life: a man mocked by hope ends dancing in death's arms” (Nozick, Citation1990, p. 8).