- Current organizational designs propose horizontality, and that shift in hierarchy should be read symbolically as a need to horizontalize relationships as well, seeing each other as equals.
- Hierarchical position should serve as a reference for degrees of greater responsibility, not as a basis for arbitrary power or old-style subordination.
- An archetype is a universal pattern of behavior that grows stronger when amplified, so stimulating the fraternal archetype in work relationships makes people more coherent, lucid, assertive, and productive.
- Practicing fraternity in the exchange of knowledge, experience, teaching, and care builds interpersonal competence and extends that pattern of relating into every other department of a person’s existence.
With the Industrial Revolution came management, along with its decisive and widely accepted influences. Even today those influences are crystallized in many corporate cultures, but they are inadmissible to forward-thinkers and to new generations who long for adaptation, growth, evolution, and transcendence, an impulse intrinsic to human beings.
Within the Cartesian model we observe a verticalization of hierarchies. However, more current organizational designs propose horizontality, and this hierarchical shift should be symbolically interpreted as a need to also horizontalize our relationships: to see each other as equals, practicing the principle of fraternity.
Why should work relationships be based on equality rather than subordination?
There must be a relationship of equality rather than the old-style subordination typical of management hierarchies. The relationship between leaders and those they lead, what we are to one another regardless of hierarchical position, should serve especially as a reference for degrees or levels of greater responsibility, not for arbitrary power.
As Eugenia-Aspasia states in a text channeled by medium Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar: "The fraternal archetype, which manifests so well among friends and between kindred siblings, reveals precisely the kind of balanced horizontality, of partnership between equals, that faithfully portrays the fundamental equality that exists and should be made real among all beings, since the subordination of all of us should happen only in relation to God."
What is the fraternal archetype, and how is it practiced at work?
The term archetype refers to a universal pattern of behavior that, when amplified, grows stronger. We therefore have an ideal to seek and develop within ourselves: to stimulate our fraternal archetype in work relationships. In doing so, we become more coherent and congruent, our ideas and attitudes grow more lucid, conscious, assertive, and productive.
When we succeed in applying the fraternal spirit in the expressions of everyday life, in the constant exchange of knowledge, experiences, teachings, and care, we will be climbing to new and meaningful levels of relationship, building interpersonal competence, and extending a pattern of relational exchange to all other departments of our existence.
Companions on the Same Journey
As in a company, so in life. To recognize that we are companions on an evolutionary journey, that we are together, side by side, hand in hand, in a synergistic movement from within to without and from without to within, and that we can contribute far more than we imagine when we commit to beginning with ourselves, to being and living genuine fraternity.
The short answer
Fraternity in the workplace means treating the move toward horizontal organizational designs as more than a chart: it is a call to horizontalize relationships and see one another as equals, with hierarchy marking degrees of responsibility rather than arbitrary power. Because an archetype is a pattern that strengthens as it is amplified, deliberately stimulating the fraternal archetype in everyday exchanges of knowledge and care raises the level of relationship and builds interpersonal competence. It begins with oneself.