(This is a guest post by John Fletcher. John is an Englishman now resident in Europe, with a long career in the public sector in several countries. He has spent a good deal of time in working environments outside the Anglo-Saxon world, and has written and lectured on organizational issues.)

We all have to make decisions about our careers, but do we really make them on the right basis?

 
You can be happier in your work — if you take the time to think about what you are doing and why; and if you manage your working life for your own true benefit.

Who do you really work for, yourself or your organization? I don’t mean that in the trivial sense; I’m not about to write in praise of selfishness, or of the ruthless careerist who puts his or her interests above that of their colleagues. I have a more serious and fundamental question to ask: who’s in charge of that part of your brain which makes decisions about your career and your happiness at work?

A simple example will make what I mean clearer.

Let’s assume you are an outgoing individual, a good traveler, you like people and perhaps you speak several languages. You’ve found your niche, maybe, as an international manager in a large organization, or the Deputy-Head of International Marketing, and you’re happy in what you do.

Then one day your personnel authorities call, and they offer you the job of Head of Management Planning, replacing someone who’s just about to leave unexpectedly. They use flattery (”We’ve had you in mind for some time for one of the top jobs”), and gentle threats (”It would be good for your career to take this job”). They may even use blunter threats (”Of course, in these difficult times, all of our middle-tier posts are being carefully scrutinized”).

How will you make your decision?

Whatever you decide, it will probably be for the wrong reason

You may want to curry favor with the management hierarchy. You may be afraid of getting a reputation for being difficult. You may shy away from explaining to your spouse or your colleagues why you didn’t take the higher salary on offer. You may be worried about being thought selfish and insufficiently dedicated to the organization. But it’s quite unlikely that you will ask yourself more fundamental questions — especially: Is this a job which will make me happy?

If you take the job, as you probably will, you will justify it to yourself and others by talking about more money, more responsibility, bigger office, get home earlier, don’t have to travel so much. For part of the time you may even believe it.

But in the end, if you have taken a job for the wrong reasons, you will be unhappy. Soon, this unhappiness will be obvious. Your colleagues will start to mutter that you were over-promoted and were a bad choice for the job. Far from being grateful, your management hierarchy will have forgotten past promises, now that it has solved the problem of how to fill that job. And if you are like most people, you’ll be puzzled how you got into this situation and how you can get out of it.

The unseen power of corporate norms

In fact, the problem is not really one of technique or strategy, but one of attitude. All of us, even the most independent, take our norms and our opinions to some extent from the culture in which we work.

This is not always a bad thing, especially if those norms and opinions are positive ones. But many of us make the mistake of confusing those norms and opinions with our own, until we are no longer capable of distinguishing between the two.

At this point, you will have so internalized the norms of others that you do not even really appreciate that you have done so. Then you may very well start to say things and do things which do not reflect your own feelings and desires, but those of others, no matter how much you may genuinely believe what you say and do.

There are a number of names for this condition: political theorists talk about “false consciousness.” or how, for example, ordinary people in the nineteenth century rejected democracy out of loyalty to a King or Queen, even though democracy was in their best interests. It’s also part of the Buddhist concept of samsara, which means living for others. Interestingly, Buddhists describe this state as a kind of Hell — not a bad way of reminding us that lying to yourself about what you think and what you want is a pretty good way of making yourself unhappy.

The second part of this series (next Friday) considers both good and bad ways of escaping from this trap.

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