The Georgia Scroll
October 1998
Designer Services in the Executive Suite
Expensive talent makes expensive mistakes. Therefore, it has always been cost-effective to provide expensive talent with the kind of care and maintenance that will allow it to function at peak efficiency.
Thus, we have sports teams that travel with their own trainers, exercise physiologists, sports psychologists, chiropractors, hypnotists and sometimes other, more idiosyncratic personnel. White House residents have been known to consult astrologers, psychics, numerologists, and what-have-you.
Top-level personnel have always had a variety of services available. Some have had a decidedly recreational flavor, whatever they were called in the accounting department. Others have had a more therapeutic or medical tone, and this is true of both the physical and the mental/emotional domains, although the mental and the emotional needs of top talent have unfortunately, in the past, either been ignored or assumed to have been met under the guise of recreation, medicine, or prayer. Given that research consistently indicates that the majority of visits to the primary care physician are, in fact, emotionally based rather than, strictly speaking, medical, it is clear that taking care of people involves much more than repairing them or throwing them away once they have been damaged or broken. It is also much less expensive.
One hundred years ago, in the days of the kindly family doctor whose black bag held all the tools of modern medicine, and the hospital was a place where people went to die, the whole person, for good or ill, was generally attended at home. In those days, before antibiotics and breath-taking (and breath-takingly expensive) medical technology, people who were sick were often sick for a very long time, and recipes for the sickroom contained about equal parts rich, nourishing food and brandy. Nowadays when people do get sick they are rushed through a dizzying series of processes and procedures, because modern medicine is something that happens to parts of us and no one expects you to enjoy anything, let alone a meal.
What, then, are the services that care for the whole person in a positive way, and elicit the best performance from them as well?
Much of this has already been going on under the guise of psychotherapy or counseling, but we are seeing now the introduction of a new class of services that specifically proceeds from the assumption that the clientele is healthy, and the intent is simply to help them function better, rather than to repair them. These services come to the purchaser, and are not services covered by medical benefits, although they could well be considered part of a benefit package. Professional organizers and coaches are two such. There is no defined credential or training here, and the providers range from fully qualified and licensed doctoral-level Psychologists to genuinely nice and very enthusiastic persons.
As with the more traditional providers, there is a range of skill and effectiveness here, and the best approach is always to seek out those who are recommended to be effective, discrete, and reliable.
Ann W. Gustin, Ph.D. 9/98
Last modified: June 22, 2001