In Short Order -- Sylvia Lafair

In Short Order with Dr. Sue Vogan

Sylvia Lafair, PhD, co-founder and President of Creative Energy options began her career in psychology to explore why people do what they do in personal relationships. Seeing the connection between how families behave and how work teams operate, she developed corporate team building activities to stop office politics and enhance team communication and collaboration. She loves to tell the following story: “My husband, Herb Kaufman and I had developed one of the most well respected personal growth centers in Philadelphia. A participant in one of the seminars asked Sylvia if she would work with his senior leadership team. Her surprised response was “Why?” His response was ‘They’re fighting.” Her retort was “So what.” And what he said next led to a career change that has been amazing and totally unexpected. He was thoughtful when he responded “Look, you work with families and you help them learn to get along better. My team is like a family and they need to learn to work together more effectively.” “That,” as Dr. Sylvia Lafair said, “was when the light bulb went on. No one else had put the two together. Think of it this way, there are bosses like parents, co-workers like siblings, salaries like allowances, and even time outs called performance improvement plans.” "My research shows that much as we like to believe our behavior is entirely rational, our thoughts and actions are often driven by the roles we learned in our families as children. And under pressure, we tend to revert to old patterns, often creating workplace drama that diverts attention from the business and undermines productivity. Once individuals see how their stress behavior shows up at work and what to do about it, they immediately take these new insights home with them.”