Jealousy or Envy
Advait Kurlekar
Independent Director, Business Strategy, HR Consulting, CXO Coaching, Process Improvement, Start-up Mentor, Adjunct / Visiting Faculty, Workshop Facilitator
A few days ago, we were conducting an off-site for one of our clients on #teambuilding . As is always the case, the crowd included someone who had recently joined to someone else who has been around for many years. Add to it the complexity of the team being in multiple locations, sometimes even within the same city. When we did our exercise asking the attendees anonymously (through chits) about what they personally felt was the biggest #challenge and #impediment to them working in a team (forget #highperformanceteams !) a surprise element on that list was ‘#jealousy’! Frankly we were taken aback! It’s not that across organizations people are not jealous of others, at the end of the day it’s a very competitive world out there and there’s only that much room at the top.
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But this word has never been so strongly articulated in these kinds of workshops that we have facilitated. Is that a sign of a broken team or is it just that today’s young people don’t mind sharing their innermost genuine thoughts in plain words as they get busy elbowing out others while navigating the corporate corridors? When that word came up on the whiteboard, we could see lot of people sort of smirking at it, more like oh, even I could have shared this then!
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That got me thinking about two words that are often used synonymously – jealousy and #envy . But in my view, they are different. Jealousy clearly has a highly negative connotation. In my view it reflects an emotion of hatred about the other person purely because one believes that the other person doesn’t really deserve that he or she has achieved that has made one jealous. It could be a promotion, it could be being tasked a special assignment in the company, it could be getting selected for some high profile (and of course international) #training programme and many such more opportunities that one thinks one deserves, not the other.
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Envy, in my view, can be looked upon as a positive emotion. One would envy a person also out of #admiration . Which means one has accepted the award or special privileges or whatever the other person has got as much deserving and there is a sense of #selfdisappointment that one has not been able to achieve the same. So there are no negative emotions about the other person, if at all they are about self.
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Shouldn’t we be envious of more successful, talented, wise people around us and not be jealous of them instead? What are your views?
CEO@ Rise and Fame, Percent Pulse ????Token Experiences for Customer and Community Engagement - Fashion, Luxury, Sustainability, Mental Health ?? Raising Pre-Seed Investment
1 年LinkedIn Social Media Manager ??
Freelance Trainer in Communication and HRM
1 年Very well put ?? ??
Making world sustainable bit by bit | Co-founder of EnergyBae( formerly Develop Train Maintain)
1 年Very aptly put ..!! It's really true and being envious is always been a positive thing.
IIM Calcutta | ESG & Sustainability | People Operations & Management
1 年Very aptly described Advait Kurlekar, important inner workings of the human frailty!
Entrepreneur | Agriculture Job Board | Agrochemicals | NHRDN, Pune - Core Team Member & Lead - DEI Initiatives
1 年Hi Advait, I think once a platform and an environment is established to seek guidance to handle being jealous and also to express envious encounters, life of an individual would be easy.. there is another aspect to this what if an employee is experiencing jealousy from a team mate, how he handles a jealous team mate and all such situations.. the more the openness at right desk the more the easy!