Maybe it’s high time to make a change . . . for everyone’s sake
 

When it comes to jobs, far too many people are in a state of more-or-less comfortable misery. This is the state wherein, according to Daniel Johnston’s book Lessons for Living: Simple Solutions for Life’s Problems, “You’re miserable, but you have gotten used to it.”

We all know the feeling of sticking with something beyond its productive benefit or purpose—whether it’s an old pair of jeans, or shoes, or a relationship that you just keep on giving “just one more chance”. What causes us to knowingly stay in situations or hang on to things we know we ought not to?

The answer to this question is the same as to why most people are still in jobs that offer no true satisfaction.

For many people, it feels easier to stick with an unhappy known than to attempt to find a better place in the unknown. Fear of the unknown holds them in jobs that they don’t enjoy, in relationships that aren’t working, and prevents them from living a better, happier life. Granted, there are risks associated with change, but that doesn’t mean you should fall victim to the false notion that there are no risks in not changing. In fact, the risks of inaction often far outweigh the risks of doing something new.

Job satisfaction is falling widely

What’s interesting to note about job satisfaction levels in recent years is that they are declining across the board, regardless of age, income or even residence. Workers below the age of 25 have over a 60% dissatisfaction rate, the worst level since the inception of The Conference Board job satisfaction survey. While age, money and geography can make a difference in these survey results, people overall are simply less and less happy in their jobs.

Clearly something has to change. Is it the work itself? Is it specific company policies? Is it compensation and/or benefits? Personally, I believe that changes in these things could have short-term impacts on job satisfaction. But, for a long-term solution to this problem, what has to change is employee attitudes and expectations.

I think people must modify their personal definition of what “satisfaction” from a job actually means. For example, as younger workers enter a new position, they’re excited by the nature and meaning of the work itself. As they advance in their careers, however, and rise in the organizational chart of their company, they get further and further from the job itself and assume more responsibility for management of the work process.

If the work itself is what they enjoyed most, they may find the change to being a supervisor robs them of much of their job satisfaction. Too often, this dynamic leads a manager to micro-manage—to try to stay involved in ‘doing’ instead of leading—thus aggravating those beneath them and causing voids in the management process they ought to be focusing on. If this process continues, they eventually lose interest in their jobs, their employees become increasingly dissatisfied and the overall work environment becomes laden with negativity and frustration.

A fresh perspective

If people could shift their definition of what constitutes satisfaction, and normalize their expectations about their jobs, overall job satisfaction levels would likely increase.

I have learned in my professional years to derive satisfaction less from doing the day-to-day work itself and more from helping others and motivating teams to get the work completed on their own. Mostly what I do today is manage the overall team outcomes and future directions. Being able to derive satisfaction from helping others advance their careers and managing the expectations of appropriate stakeholders required a major shift in my perspective.

Of course this wasn’t always easy. I had to learn some hard lessons along the way. However, I’ve been able, gradually, to relish this experience and successfully make the mental shift to re-define satisfaction for myself.

Don’t allow yourself to fall prey to comfortable misery within your career. Not only does doing so make for many unhappy days in your job and life, it serves no productive purpose for your company either. Instead, try to leverage your power to shift your thinking about what satisfies you. To be sure, sometimes a job change is the right decision, but it could be that making a mental pivot is all that is required.

Technorati Tags: change, risk-taking, self-improvement, leadership, developing others, not settling for second best

Never confuse aspirations with strategy

 
I had a conversation with a colleague recently about the relationship between having a dream and actualizing it. The quintessential self-help book these days that pursues this notion to an extreme is The Secret. It promises that if you follow the suggestions within, you can pretty much ‘have it all’.

The essence of The Secret is to have a vision, a dream—anything from winning the Super Bowl, to winning the lottery, or finding a parking space at Starbucks the second you arrive. All you need to succeed is to hold the dream and stay focused on it. Believing in the belief itself is the key to success.

That’s the illusion and essential fallacy within The Secret, indeed within all cult-like thinking. The reality is that dreaming is not a strategy for success—nor is hope or willpower. If dreaming and visioning alone were sufficient, everyone who ‘dreams big’ would realize their dreams. Few ever do. Read the full story

Be careful where you place your focus and attention. Whatever you focus on will grow more prominent and more present to your mind.

If, like many people, you focus mostly on what you haven’t got, what you haven’t done, and how your life doesn’t match your hopes and dreams, those negatives can easily come to dominate your thinking. Not only will this depress you, it will block your way towards all the things you do want to achieve.

Some people believe you ‘program’ your unconscious mind to concentrate on ways to bring you more of whatever you’re focusing on most. I’m very unsure about this as an actual mechanism, but it certainly reflects the way things can seem. More likely, amidst the mass of more or less random events that come along, your mind is trained to pick out the ones that match the areas where you habitually pay most attention. If you’ve developed a deficit-based outlook (what you don’t have or do), that’s what you’ll notice first. Then, to the extent that your words and actions produce consequences, these will be negative as well. Read the full story

For many, change is unsettling, leading to feelings of insecurity, imbalance and instability.

“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will in evening become a lie.” — Carl Jung

We’ve all heard the expression “change is the one constant in life.” The truth is that every day we’re experiencing change in some way. Life evolves continually — at work, at home, at play and in relationships. Yet, if pain and suffering accompany change, they are less likely to come from the experience of change itself than from trying to hold on to the past and your familiar ways of thinking, being and doing. Underneath reactivity to change is fear of the unknown, fear of new ways of doing or thinking about things, fear about having to learn something new, and fear of letting go.

To tap the inherent growth and developmental opportunities within change requires you first to explore the question: “What am I afraid of?” This exploration allows you to understand what’s beneath your fear and what you can learn about it. Rather than talking a detour around it, suppressing it or trying to control it, you can come directly into contact with your fear and see what it wants to teach you about yourself.

You can only grow, personally and professionally, through change. You cannot change and grow while defending and holding on to the status quo — hanging on for dear life. Change is not a threat to growth but an integral part of it. Read the full story

Believe it or not, she makes a great case study on how to deal with a crisis.

While we may be fascinated by Britney Spears and her professional and personal downfall for voyeuristic reasons, there are real-life lessons that we can benefit from. On a personal note, I enjoy reading the tabloids and reading about celebrities and their trials (sometimes literally their court trials) and tribulations. For me, however, it is not about watching a car wreck for the purpose of seeing a car wreck; rather, it is about learning how these folks, with all sorts of professionals to help them, deal with the situations they encounter. Selfishly, I like to learn from the mistakes of others so that perhaps I can avoid them all together — or at least know better how to handle them should they, or similar situations, occur in my life.

Consider for a moment:

• What management techniques can be employed to manage a crisis such as Britney’s?
• What communications strategy should be followed?
• How do you turn around a bad situation?

So, back to Britney. I think it’s fair to say that most of us, if not all of us, can agree that she has not done a bang up job with “crisis management.” I certainly think that with all of her resources, advisors, handlers, etc., that she could have done a better job managing the media during her personal and family problems. Now, in fairness, the media hound Britney like a swarm of bees do a honey-filled hive. which is clearly more than most people could bear. But, regardless, it is equally clear that her handling of the situation leaves a lot to be desired. Read the full story

Maybe managers should just let their staff get on with it and see what happens.

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
Closer to reality than most command-and-control management

There’s been some discussion on this blog and others recently about the perils of micro-management and the obsession with measurable objectives. It’s accepted that this style of management sows distrust, and diverts attention towards things that are not necessarily important. I’m not going into all that again here, but rather I’m going to take a comparative example from the ways in which armies have historically been commanded, where there is a great deal of hard evidence about what works and what doesn’t, and where the consequences of organizational failure are usually fairly obvious.

Now this has nothing to do with facile comparisons of business to war, or attempts to apply the ideas of Sun Tzu to modern management. We had enough of that a decade or two ago. But Armies are extreme cases of organizations which have to deal with the unexpected all the time. This is what the great military thinker Clausewitz called ‘friction’ — conflicting information and not enough of it, inadequate time for making decisions, problems of communication, an opponent who always does the last thing you expect. Armies have historically tried to deal with this problem in one of two ways. Read the full story

A parable of being stuck in the ’same old, same old’ rut of work and life

Groundhog Day 2005 in Punxsutawney, PA.
Photo: Aaron Silvers

Groundhog Day is the comical story of a reporter caught in a time loop where, when he awakens, it is always the same day — Groundhog Day. It’s about being stuck in the same old story and how to get unstuck. It mirrors parts of our life as we know it at work and at home.

Bill Murray portrays Phil, a man of little integrity and dubious character, who covers the story of Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He is caught in a repetitive pattern of life that he is not even aware of. Only because he awakens every day to the same day does it dawn on him that he is stuck in his own muck.

In business I see and hear the same thing. People in organizations will look at performance results and make comments like: “If we don’t do anything different, then why do we expect anything different?” They’re stuck, just like Phil, repeating a pattern endlessly. Read the full story

You can tell folks to change, but making it happen is something else

 
There’s a Chinese proverb that goes something like this: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” Leaders should know by now that people tend to resist change when it’s forced on them. “Telling” is what initiates the resistance. It causes those being told to spend their energy mostly on NOT doing what you’ve told them. Yet that resistance is not so much about the change; it’s all about being changed.

What’s the most common process for introducing change in our organizations? We hold a meeting. Tell people why the change is necessary and give our reasons for the change, the expected benefits and tell them be prepared to do it our way. Then, we become angry and frustrated as all heck when we experience their subsequent resistance and lack of buy-in. Usually, little or no change happens in the long run.

These differences in perspective, from ‘creative’ and ‘positive’ to ‘reactive’ and negative, create conflict when used in a ‘telling’ situation. It’s very hard for workers to trust in the “you are our most valuable asset” mantra while being told what to do, when to do it, how, and what result is demanded. The leaders’, managers’ or supervisors’ intentions are well-meaning. It’s the ‘telling’ part that causes overt, subtle or silent resistance. Read the full story

Some thoughts about one of today’s fetishes: setting clear life and career goals.

The conventional wisdom is that we all need clear and challenging goals for our lives; that life without goals is leads to failure and dissatisfaction. I wonder if this is correct? After all, many people give up on the goals they have set themselves. From New Year’s resolutions to ‘new me’ decisions, it’s goal setting that seems to lead to failure more often than to success.

Why should this be? Why should people find that giving themselves something to aim at leads to being in a worse position than when they started? Setting goals seems to be such a simple process. You take a look at yourself, decide what you want to change most, think about how to get started, then do it. What is it that goes wrong?

Here are some thoughts about potential pitfalls. They don’t happen to everyone, but they are definitely common enough to be worth avoiding. Read the full story

The most precious times in life may be those that jolt you out of your normal way of seeing the world

Most people value creativity and look to it to help them change. Yet change is more often about letting go of old ideas than finding new ones.

The main difficulty with change comes from being sufficiently happy with the way things are that you see no need to alter anything. Life may not be perfect, but it’s good enough; the effort and uncertainty change brings look too great to be worth it.

That’s why those moments when you’re fully open to change are so precious. Miss them and the possibility of renewal goes on indefinite hold.

Robert Thurman, Buddhist scholar and friend of The Dalai Lama, describes such times as ‘teachable moments’ — times when you recognize your current ways of thinking and coping aren’t adequate for what’s in front of you; times when life serves up something you can’t handle, at least with the approaches you’ve used before. Read the full story