If we have the good fortune to be high enough up in the corporate food chain that we manage others, our opportunities to help restore health and a sense of balance to the workplace are amplified.

Again, we need to start by looking at ourselves, and making sure we’re not a source of workplace virtualization. It is imperative for us to guard against being overly swayed by our employees’ skills in summarizing and presenting what they’re doing.

If we want to create a healthier work environment, we need to be sure we truly know what they’re doing, and how well.

If we can’t always physically be there with them, we need to cultivate other ways of staying adequately in touch. In doing this, we should consistently stress direct information rather over the secondhand kind. In fact, we should become a bit uncomfortable when everything we see is too summarized, polished, or neat.  

We also need to develop the habit of regularly going outside the standard sources of summarized information, just to see if the different sources square up. (We must be careful, however, to avoid blowing some stray snippet of anecdotal information out of all proportion: this can be a form of overly symbolic and therefore dissociative behavior in its own right, and can drive those under us crazy).

We have additional opportunities to directly evaluate people’s work even before we hire them. There are many kinds of samples of work that we can reasonably ask applicants to provide, if we just take the trouble to figure out what these might be;  and there is simply no better way to tell the difference between somebody who does good work and somebody who merely presents himself well in an interview.

As for the potential of being put off by such a request, the best candidates actually tend to be pleased to have an opportunity to show something they’re proud of to somebody with an interest.