Cross-training for Work and for Life

October 26, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Figuring out whether its time to look for another job is about more than how you’re treated as an employee and whether you’re acquiring valuable skills. Being appreciated and becoming more capable are important, but they’re not the whole story.

Whether your work is “the right fit for you” is also about whether the product or service your work is producing is making life better for those you care about. It’s whether your work gives you the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from making the kind of difference in the world that you want to make.

If your work isn’t providing that, it’s not giving you enough.

Too many of us park our values at the door when we go to work. By doing so, we never access the deep-seated motivation that comes from contributing (even in a small way) to something larger than ourselves. This kind of positive energy not only carries us over the humps in the workday, it also produces an afterglow that extends into our lives after work.

Spend some time today thinking about the work you do. If it’s providing something you feel is making a positive difference, tap into that value chain more deeply so that your sense of accomplishment is enhanced. Talk to satisfied customers, find ways to collaborate with valued suppliers or company partners in your community. Join fellow workers who are doing the same thing. Expand both your inputs and outputs to experience how the work you’re doing is having an impact in ways that are important to you. However much your company will benefit from this, you will benefit more.

On the other hand, when you look critically at your work, it may be impossible to find “the value proposition.” Our 24/7 consuming economy produces an endless stream of products and services with no thought about whether they actually improve anyone’s life. If you’re taking no more than a paycheck from your work on what amounts to a deadening production line, it’s time for you to find a job that’s also energizing and life affirming.

There are lots of ways to start doing so.

It’s not just thinking about what you’ll be doing tomorrow, but also what you want for yourself long term. (I Am (not) My Job). It’s taking your thoughts and grounding them in concrete plans to get the work that you want to be doing. (Vocational Training). Because we spend much of our waking lives on the job, it’s about getting the most out of our work everyday by preparing for it beforehand and then digesting what happened once the workday is done. (Get Ready for the Work of Your Life Everyday). If your line of work doesn’t justify this kind of time and attention, you should probably be doing something else.

It’s identifying working people you admire, because of what you can learn from them about work. (Neil Armstrong on Work). It’s about surrounding yourself with a supportive community that shares your work ethic (Being Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself) and having wise people who truly care about you when you’re swamped by your limitations and need guidance. (Can There Be Redemption in the Lance Armstrong Tragedy?) As important as anything, it’s about improving your value awareness so you never lose sight of what’s most important to you, either at work or in life. (The presidential candidates provide Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference).

This conversation is about cross-training for work and for life. Your worklifereward will come when each one is continuously energizing the other.

Take More Control of Your Next Job Search

October 2, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To get many jobs today, you have to fit a pre-determined mold—if only you can figure out how to pour yourself into it.

It’s no longer: submit your resume, have an interview, establish personal chemistry, get the job. These steps are simply irrelevant for many positions today, particularly those you apply for on-line. Instead, it’s far more likely that you’ll provide information about yourself via some personality testing, and that the employer’s algorithm will decide whether you get the job.

No surprise. It’s answer will almost always be “no.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible to participate in a meaningful way in this kind of process.

How can you determine beforehand whether you have more or less of what an employer is looking for? Do you answer their personality questions truthfully or try to give them the answer you think they’re after? When you don’t make their cut, how do you find out “why you didn’t” so that you can make a better pitch and present yourself in a better light the next time?

In this brave new world, applying for any job on-line is increasingly a “shot in the dark.” When you don’t know their rules, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to succeed at their game.

Well maybe it’s time to start making the job search more about your game.

These posts are about taking control of your working life by, among other things, helping you find the job that’s right for you. The goal is work that empowers you when you’re doing it, and helps you to make the kind of difference in the world that you want to make.

As a result, these posts won’t help you to get better at pouring yourself into some job computer’s pre-determined mold. But the increasingly common ways that jobs are being filled today do suggest something that everyone in the job market can do to take more control over where their careers are going.

My advice is to learn more about who you are, and what you’re best at, by giving yourself your own personality test. They are tools for self-discovery as well as for filling many jobs today.

There are plenty of tests out there. They’re easy to find and relatively inexpensive to take. And while an expert will always be able to tease out more nuance from your test results than you’ll be able to, there is still plenty that you can learn from them about “how you like to operate” and “where you might find your best fit” in the working world.

It may not be where you’ve been looking for jobs at all.

To get a better sense of the direction that’s right for you, there are tried and true assessments you can take on your own. Examples are the Myers-Briggs (to help you identify career choices that are compatible with how you make decisions, draw conclusions, arrive at judgments and relate to others) and the Strong Interest Inventory (how your personal interests compare with the interests of people in particular careers). Determining your “preferences” will sometimes confirm what you already know, but could also surprise you. Talking to others about what they like and don’t like about their work can provide some additional ways of thinking about your test results.

And that’s the point: to think about your results with an open mind, and start to put together a career path that’s right for you. For example: how have your “preferences” already contributed to your success? And how do the successes you have under your belt qualify you for what you really want to do next?

Let your head and your heart ruminate on what you discover. Sleep on it, dream about it. Do some research about possible jobs that are out there. Make some notes. Test your conclusions with friends and family. Dream about it some more. But most of all, take what you’re discovering about yourself and your unique value in the marketplace seriously.

Then you’ll be ready to start looking for jobs where they’re playing “your game” with “your kind of rules.” It’s about taking control of your working life.

Vocational Training

July 20, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

People who go on to make a real difference have one thing in common. They have prepared themselves for it by becoming more “thoughtful” and “committed.”

The process begins by developing your value awareness, discussed in the last post. While our schools can provide an ideal environment for deepening your understanding of your values, values training can be undertaken at any time or place in your career. So can planning for the transition from where you are today with your work to where you want to be. You plot your course to energizing and fulfilling work by making a plan, and then following it.

I learned about personal business planning from a mentor in the venture capital community early on in my career. I was getting ready to launch a start-up, and kept talking to him about how I wanted my business to help people. He pulled no punches when he said at the time: “make your money first, and once you make enough of it you can do all the helping you want.”

My expression then (and after similar exchanges) must have told him I was unconvinced. As a last resort, he suggested I prepare a personal business plan to get a better grip on my motivations. Maybe that exercise would straighten me out.

Well it did, but not in the way he intended.

Values are the fuel — Values are your fuel

The deeper I got into this planning exercise, the more my initial goals were confirmed, and the clearer my future direction became. What did I most want to do and why? What am I “best at,” and what were the most revealing demonstrations of the “highest and best” roles I had played—both at work and outside of it?

The goal of the plan was the job I was seeking. To identify it, I needed to know why it was the right job for me. In other words, that I’d be accomplishing something I felt was important and that I’d feel fulfilled at a very basic level while doing it. While this required familiarity with my principles and improved “value awareness,” it also required identifying real world opportunities where my values could fuel my work.

What was my right job? Could I find it or would I have to create it? This required research. What are people I admire doing? How did I see myself helping people? What is the work that’s already being done to help in this area, and where are the opportunities for me? What do I need in terms of salary and job security? Questions like these: I needed to find answers to all of them.

My skills would be my work tools. For me, advocating, organizing, visualizing, problem solving, all were on my skill list, so I had to come up with examples of each that demonstrated my qualifications for the work I wanted to do. I needed to take my best shot proving the first part of the equation: that I could do it.

Experience (the flipside of the equation that said “I had done it—or something like it—already”) would be described in terms of roles I had played. Times when I had had some success as a coordinator, prime mover, creator, or gatherer of resources to get something done—often after work, since many of us spend more time excelling in our personal lives than we do in our working ones.

clutter_iStock_000009700659XSmall — Planning plots your course

Skills and experience: two different ways to illustrate what I had to bring to the party.

A personal business plan aims at lining up what you’re best at and what you’ve done in your life that you’re most proud of in order to demonstrate your suitability for a job that will bring you similar measures of pride and satisfaction.

Instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into a job you don’t want to do, you are actively pursuing work that you have already been getting ready to do during the most centered and accomplished moments of your life.

That may well be your definition of work that matters.

As such, it is work that is worth striving for.

Learning how to become more “thoughtful” about the work you should be doing, and more clearly “committed” to its goals has everything to do with preparing yourself for it.

Personal business planning is a valuable way for you to become more thoughtful about your work.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which is taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)

Learning as Roadmap for Finding Your Life’s Work

July 12, 2012 By David Griesing 4 Comments

How do you decide what you should do with your life? How do you figure out what “a good life” would look like for you?

How do you sort through the possibilities and choose the kind of work you will do? After years of working, how can you transition from a deadening job to work that will energize you?

What happens if you never learned how to think and feel your way through questions like these?

Why aren’t we getting more help here?

One thing is certain: our schools should be doing a better job preparing our kids to lead good and satisfying lives at work and in their communities.

Unfortunately, our students aren’t prepared, because our schools aren’t helping them to identify what they value the most, or showing them how their values can transform the work they will do into a vocation. Increasingly, our kids are left to figure out “how best to live” with no real guidance from educators at all.

Every student is seeking information that will give their lives direction and meaning. But instead of providing this information in a user-friendly way, students get a lesson here (a glimpse of the heroic in English class) and a lesson there (on the football field, in the lab, or from a counselor), but are generally left to put these assorted pieces together on their own. As a result, most students never manage to assemble a roadmap they can follow when they go out into the world.

What follows should not be surprising.

Our kids spend time doing this and that, and dream impossible futures, but they are increasingly unable to discover a path in life that will bring them genuine satisfaction. (For years, Stanford education professor William Damon has discussed why so many young people “fail to launch” in books like The Path to Purpose (Free Press, 2008))

While it won’t change everything, there should be a class in every school that will help students identify what they value the most, and how to apply those values to the decisions they are confronting everyday.

– Students could be given tools like the Rokeach Value Survey to identify their most important terminal and instrumental values.

– They could learn about the value choices made by peer groups and admired individuals, and consider how making different values their lodestar (like “equality,” “fairness,” “freedom” or “security“) can influence their choices about life and work.

– They could learn how their values will change over time as their value awareness improves, and how those changes relate to new goals they will start identifying for themselves.

– They could learn how their behavior and decision-making is guided by their values, not in the abstract but by considering decisions that are being made around them everyday: about allocation of school resources (new equipment for the football team vs. a new chemistry teacher), school conflicts (like bullying) or a political issue polarizing their community.

There might be an institutional drive to combine these value-choice exercises with resume writing or work-interview101—an extension of what guidance counselors are doing in our schools already. That’s ok, because this curriculum has everything to do with the work you will do after school. But it is not just about finding A Job, it is about ultimately finding or creating The Right Job for who you are and what you value the most, so you will gain fulfillment from your effort and maintain a life-long sense of purpose.

To help ensure this result, “resume writing” and “mastering the interview” modules could be combined with an extended exercise where each student prepares his or her own plan for the future. It would be a practical exercise on where their individual values might lead them in the real world. (I’ll elaborate in the next post.)

Why aren’t we giving our kids this kind of learning experience today?

Most students leave school without a compass for navigating the working world. Having only vague ideas about the kind of work that will bring them satisfaction or how to go about getting it, a tremendous effort goes into finding any job—any kind of paycheck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When students truly want to do something, know why they’re suited to do it, and understand the value to themselves and others that will be gained by doing it, their goals aren’t random and ill-defined, but specific.

Our schools need to be helping students to identify what they value the most, how to identify real-world work that vindicates those values, and how to bring their strongest competencies into their working lives.

What kind of coursework could be more relevant to them or to the challenges they face in the world?

When our schools start integrating their disparate lessons into a curriculum that helps students find their vocations in life, they will be providing our young people with a valuable roadmap that points the way to working lives with both meaning and purpose. And as teachers, Americans, inhabitants of a troubled planet, we would get something too: a chance to mold a hopeful and energized generation to go forth and make the world a better place.

(I’ll be talking about values and education at the #140edu conference, which will be taking place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City later this month. Join me by registering today.)

Different Marching Orders for Work That Makes a Difference

May 23, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What we value is as different as we are. Our basic goals and commitments—indeed the fundamental ways in which we view the world—are as different as our individual life experiences. So it should come as no surprise that in seeking work that has personal meaning, the approaches we take to finding itare different too.

In recent commencement addresses this month, Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney recommended two very different approaches for graduates entering the workforce. Wherever you find yourself as a worker—just starting out, trying to improve your experience in the trenches, or thinking about a second or third act in your working life—their recent remarks can help you when thinking about your own “next steps.”

Romney watches proceedings during the commencement ceremony at Liberty University in Lynchburg — Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Daniel Henninger compared their messages in A Tale of Two Commencements. Henninger clearly preferred Mr. Romney’s. But rather than “either/or,” I see their approaches as speaking to broad (and sometimes overlapping) segments along a procession of worthy vocations: from personal service as a quiet witness to political struggle as an agent for change you can believe in.

As we search for purpose-driven work that can bring us genuine satisfaction, there’s a place that’s right for each of us somewhere along this continuum.

Mr. Romney’s address was at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian school in America. Lincoln’s “doctrinal statement” says, in part:

We affirm that the Holy Spirit indwells all who are born again, conforming them to the likeness of Jesus Christ. This is a process completed only in Heaven. Every believer is responsible to live in obedience to the Word of God in separation from sin.

In other words, Mr. Romney was speaking to individuals who had already committed to living their lives in a particular, value-centered way. Most if not all in his audience already understood that transforming the world begins (and ends) with transforming yourself.

For Mr. Romney, your work in the world is not dictated by the social problem to be solved.

The great drama of Christianity is not a crowd shot, following the movements of collectives or even nations. The drama is always personal, individual, unfolding in one’s own life. . . [Here] men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life.

“What we have, what we wish we had — ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed; investments won, investments lost; elections won, elections lost — these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us,” he continued. Those things happen within us. For Mr. Romney, making the world a better place through your work is the result of “conscience in action,” and the never-ending commitment that it takes to always be ready for it.

As many of you already know, Mr. Obama spoke last week to my daughter’s graduating class at Barnard, one of the colleges making up Columbia University.

obama barnard — Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

His speech was a different from Mr. Romney’s as his audience.

For the President, the application of your values to your work is similarly self-defining. But while your career may lead to internal changes, his approach to work focused almost exclusively on value-driven engagement in the external world of politics. In other words, it is by transforming the world that you transform yourself.

The graduating women of Barnard have their own commencement as well as a larger ceremony with the other university schools. Until recently, Columbia College graduates received apples with their diplomas to symbolize the “core” curriculum they had studied. That is until someone removed the fruit because year after year Columbia men delighted in pelting Barnard women with their apples. Barnard women understand the politics of gender on their campus, and Mr. Obama connected with this understanding when talking about how values should inform their working lives.

“Remember, making your mark on the world is hard,” the President said. You need “to fight for your seat at the table.” Only by doing so will you be able to “earn equal pay for equal work,” and “fully control decisions about your own health.” Somebody told Labor Secretary Hilda Solis that she wasn’t smart enough to go to college, but she didn’t let others hold her down, and you shouldn’t either. There will always be “those who oppose change, those who benefit from an unjust status quo [and] have always bet on the public’s cynicism or the public’s complacency.” [D]on’t accept somebody else’s construction of how things ought to be.”

In their commencement addresses, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama offered fundamentally different marching orders to those approaching the work of their lives. In their starkest forms, one approach is about internal transformation, the other, external struggle. Think about these differences as you examine the work you have, and the work you want.

In his Journal column, Mr. Renninger found “less tooth and claw” in the Romney speech than in Obama’s. I think it depends on your worldview, and where the animals that need your taming reside.