This article was written for Discuss HR and first posted at the beginning of this week.

It’s two weeks now since many people started to come back to work following a break for the Christmas holidays.  It was a break – but not necessarily a rest.  Last week the popular press was full of stories reflecting the fact that petitions for a divorce are highest in January:  no doubt 2013 will be the same as any other year.  Just as businesses have negotiated their way through holiday rotas and are starting to get back on track, who knows what little wobbles are taking place as men and women in the workplace are distracted by the aftermath of Christmas in their personal lives.

Reflecting on the joys and challenges of Christmas, I found myself pondering the enduring significance of our families of origin in the workplace.  In the mid 1990s, I first encountered the world of behavioural competencies and my expertise in this area still makes a significant contribution to my income.  One colleague, though, used to say that you could find out everything you need to know about how someone will perform at work by asking them about their family of origin.  Are they a single child or one of several?  And where in the pecking order do they sit?

Wikipedia reports that Alfred Adler (1870–1937), an Austrian psychiatrist, and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was one of the first theorists to suggest that birth order influences personality. He argued that birth order can leave an indelible impression on an individual’s style of life, which is one’s habitual way of dealing with the tasks of friendship, love, and work, though it also reports that such theories are controversial in psychology.  But how do our experiences in our family of origin manifest in the workplace?

Take, for example, the relationship between a manager and those people he or she manages.  I wonder how much early family patterns are manifest in the relationship between an individual and his or her boss.  It takes maturity, for example, to realise that just because an individual has the role of manager, it doesn’t mean that he or she has the skills – the full ‘kitbag’, if you like – to execute the role effectively.  I see a parallel here with life in the family:  how easy it is to continue to struggle with the gap between one’s ideal parents and the parents we actually have.  Moreover, if we struggle to make requests in the family or even imagine that it’s for our parents to know what we need and provide it, this behaviour is likely to show up at work where we may unconsciously see our boss as one more parent figure.

In my own life, I have found that work and family go hand in hand.  Taking part in 1999, for example, in a large research project into what makes for an outstanding teacher, I was well prepared by a wise colleague for the experience of walking into a school for the first time in years.  And it’s not just walking into a school that evokes our inner child – one coaching client of mine was at a loss to understand why he struggled to speak when meeting his CEO until he made a connection with his early memories of his father.  Another client could not say “no” in the workplace until he had first found a way to say “no” to his parents’ most difficult requests.

One of the implications, it seems to me, is that work is a place in which, over time, we mature and “grow up” or, equally, fail to mature and grow up.  Through my work and personal experience, I know how much coaching can contribute to this process, bringing huge benefits both to clients of coaching and to their place of work.  As I complete this article, though, I find myself wondering, how important is it for HR and their “sister” professionals to be aware of the shadow cast over our work by our families of origin?  And, insofar as we have insight, what do we do next?