It’s Time to Be Proud of Your Work

November 8, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Part of deciding whether to stay or leave your job should include thinking about the quality of the products or services your company provides. When your productivity is aimed at meeting “real customer needs,” you are likely to feel you’re working at something worthwhile, giving you a powerful motivation to keep on doing it. The case for staying becomes even stronger when what you’re making or doing is aimed at actually improving your customers’ lives.

Unfortunately, we rarely think about the value of what we’re doing at our jobs. Big mistake. When your time and effort is going into producing something that’s worthwhile, you feel a sense of personal accomplishment that’s missing when you’re just “pushing it out.” On the other hand, feeling ownership and being proud of the fruits of your labor is a key ingredient in fulfilling work.

Being a part of the hamster wheel of our consumer society doesn’t give you a sense of fulfillment. Endless consumption has one goal: convincing people that they have needs they never thought they had, and then selling them something to fill the manufactured void. It’s Mad Men advertising of “the new and improved” because it will somehow make your life cleaner, brighter, faster, better. The goal is to get you to “I want it” without ever pausing to consider “whether you truly need it at all.”

It’s the same when it comes to services. Do you really need an accountant every time you’re facing a column of numbers, an attorney every time you have a disagreement, or a doctor every time you have some discomfort? The answer is: probably not.

Whether you really “need” something is a question you should be asking before every purchase that you make, but the parallel question about work is also worth asking. Is what you’re making or doing at your job merely fueling the consumption wheel, or are you producing something people truly need to make their lives better? In other words, is your work about something you’re convinced is worthwhile?

Start by considering whether YOUactually need whatever product you’re making or service you’re providing: that’s perhaps the most revealing Q&A of all. Is your company actively striving to delight its customers—by always improving basic quality and how service is delivered—or is its commitment to innovation less apparent? What real value is it adding to what’s out there already?

How does your company conduct its business? Do your co-workers, your company’s suppliers, and the local community benefit from the way your business operates? Is the smiling face your company presents to the world part of its public relations campaign or part of its DNA? Given these and similar factors, are you proud of being a part of your company or not?

Many of us assume that having a critical perspective about our jobs begins and ends with answers to the following questions? Is the job helping me pay my bills? Is it convenient to get to? Are they nice to me when I’m there? What I’m saying is that you should be getting far more from your work than a paycheck, a convenient commute and a non-threatening work environment. To settle for so little is like being a frog in water that’s slowly coming to a boil—all the life will be cooked out of you before you realize it.

A fellow blogger recently began his discussion about employee engagement in the following way:

Every day the spirits of millions of people die at the front door of their workplace. There is an epidemic of workers who are uninterested and disengaged from the work they do, and the cost to the U.S. economy has been pegged at over $300 billion annually. According to a recent survey from Deloitte, only 20% of people say they are truly passionate about their work, and Gallup surveys show the vast majority of workers are disengaged, with an estimated 23 million ‘actively disengaged.’

He goes on to make several useful observations about what managers can do to improve workplace morale. But as I’ve agued here and in prior posts, the most fundamental remedies for being disengaged from your work have to do with what you can do for yourself instead of what a manager or boss can do for you.

You can and should bring new knowledge and expertise into your work at regular intervals—whatever your work is—so that what you’re accomplishing makes you feel continuously energized. (Work That Produces Continuous Reward). And you should ensure that you’re proud of, and therefore empowered by the work you’re doing, even if that means leaving the job you have now and finding the right one.

Energized. Proud. Empowered: this is how you’ll feel when your work provides added value.

On Having Courage and Dignity Under Fire

June 22, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

You pursue work that matters because you want to leave the world a better place than you found it. By doing so however, you

inevitably run afoul of those who want to keep everything more or less like it is.

Attracting controversy also pushes you into the spotlight. With the lights in your eyes and a welter of voices clamoring around you, the heat of the moment calls upon you to say and do things that can either advance your goals, or set them back.

How you’ll respond at such times is important. It’s helpful to think about it, start visualizing how you want these moments to play out before they arrive.

While there are many who have handled these situations badly, there are also those who have summoned up the kind of amazing grace we can learn from. This past week brought just such a lesson.

Margaret Farley is a nun, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and the emerita professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, where she has taught for 40 years. Throughout, she has been a celebrated teacher as well as the author of numerous books and articles, including Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York, 2006).

Last week, after concluding an investigation that had lasted 3 ½ years, the Vatican’s Magisterium (or Teaching Office) condemned Just Love, because it “affirms positions that are in direct contradiction with Catholic teaching in the field of sexual morality” and therefore “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.”

In other words, the views Margaret Farley expressed in her book put her outside the boundaries of her faith. Her teaching itself—through argument and discussion in her book—was found to be an improper path for believers to follow in seeking either truth or understanding.

A half century ago, Margaret Farley chose to commit her life to a religious vocation of teaching within the Church. Since then, her work and her life have been united by this spiritual purpose.

Given her choices, the judgment she received last week is different than the rebuke of an employer, on the one hand, or the criticism of vested interests you are challenging, on the other. In each instance, what she has faced is more extreme.

The leaders of her own community of believers have publicly found that her work is incompatible with those shared beliefs. They have defined her as standing separate and apart from them. For a citizen, the word would be “traitor.” In a community of believers, it is usually “heretic.” Imagine standing where she stands today.

My aim here is not to take a side in this controversy but to comment on how Margaret Farley has conducted herself and continued her work in the midst of it. It is her courage and dignity—not her scholarship—that is teaching us today.

Her response was: Simple. Straightforward. Clear. Amidst a blizzard of media commentary (including in the New York Times and Washington Post) Margaret Farley issued one statement and gave one interview. She said her book was never intended to express “official Catholic teaching” but rather to help people “think through their questions about human sexuality.” It was an effort to move away from “taboo morality” and bring “present-day scientific, philosophical, theological, and biblical resources” into the discussion.

Not Angry or Contentious, but Disappointed about issues never addressed and opportunities lost. The Church said: “Sister Farley either ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others.” She, in turn, asked: “Should power settle questions of truth?”

If we come to know a little more than we knew before, it might be that the conclusions we had previously drawn need to be developed, or even let go of. [To say that wasn’t possible] would be to imply that we know everything we need to know and nothing more need be done.

Not Seeking the Spotlight, but Standing her Ground once she was in it. Because the Church “is still a source of real life for me, it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth getting a real backbone that has compassion tied to it.”

Margaret Farley was my teacher at Yale. I know her as humble and earnest: engaged like the best teachers, careful like the best scholars. I sense enormous reluctance in her notoriety: for her to be taken as a champion for divorce or gay marriage, or even as a spokesperson for believers who are drifting from their Church because of its difficulties addressing questions of gender and sexuality. But her reluctance does not preclude her resolve—and this is where we find her today.

Once Margaret Farley was thrust into the spotlight, she knew what to do.

Dance Card

February 7, 2012 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Sitting here at the collision of two startling streams of information got me thinking about being inspired by powerful individuals, and how their inspiration can affect our work and our lives.

A high school reunion in October revived a network of old friends, as well as some new ones I never really knew back in the day. This connectivity has been unleashing a torrent of lines and images about missed classmates, things we have forgotten, and how great it is to remember. The other night I tossed a “whatever happened to my most memorable teacher?” into the stream of recollection.

She taught English. I had her for only a quarter of my junior year, but her class and all she brought to it had left its mark. In the volley that followed, I explained her with these words:

I had never met a woman like that before. I can still feel the longing so many students had for her (like moths trying to merge with a flame), and how almost abandoned I felt when she did not return my last year. But I never thought our school was enough to contain or sustain her. She was too far ahead. Like a comet. I have a soundtrack in my head with the Sixties in it, but she in many ways was its personification. I don’t remember much about the class I took with her or what I read. It hardly mattered. It was really just about her. A whole new world burning through her eyes.

I expected to hear that she had gone on to conquer new mountains, to stir up dust in bigger corners, and change more lives. An old friend who knew the story better dissolved this simple future with a couple of quick sentences.

I know a good bit about Portia and her somewhat tragic life after leaving Branford. She and her husband Tom owned beautiful land in Massachusetts. They had a daughter, who was named Shelburne after the land, and Portia was expecting their second child. Tragically, while ice skating and sledding on a pond, Tom was pulling Shelburne on a sled and the rope snapped. The sled skidded onto thin ice and it broke through, taking the child beneath it. When Tom attempted to rescue her, they both ended up dying in the freezing water. Two weeks later, Portia gave birth to Lucia.

My friend knew that another relationship and daughter eventually followed, and that Portia had stayed with the memory on that beautiful land, but little more. I learned that in the intervening years she has also been farming and selling her harvest, has written a children’s book and edited multiple volumes of literary criticism with Harold Bloom and made jewelry. But the fulfillment of her promise cannot be so easily framed.

Your work and your life have gone on courageously, but how could the heat of your comet not have changed when so many cold mountains had come into your heart?

Answers are less important (how much can we ever know, how much do we need to know?) than the energy that the thought of her still throws off.

She is felling trees up there to the thunder of Romantic music—how could it be otherwise?—her mane of unruly hair still catching the light, but perhaps with more minor notes and intervals of shadow now, more summoning up of both brass and wind than once would have been necessary before striding forward to claim new destinations.

It was also the stab of unexpected tragedy that brought me back into the story of Steve Appleton.

Until last Friday, when Appleton (51) died after his single engine airplane crashed in flames following a mechanical failure, he had been the chairman and chief executive officer of Micron Technologies, a company I knew for years as the last American competitor in the semiconductor industry. It was a distinction the company enjoyed largely because of him.

Grit and sheer life force had enabled Appleton to rise from Micron production worker at 22 to its front office less than ten years later. He also was notorious for pushing the envelope of life outside of work. A qualified stunt pilot, he flew in air shows performing loops and rolls at altitudes that were often below 100 feet. He surfed. He raced. When asked a couple of years back about the high energy levels he brought to everything he did, he said: “it is kind of a cliché, but I’d rather die living than die dying.”

Many analysts predict that Micron will continue to thrive because of the strong organization he has built and the competitive advantage it still retains in the industry. Maybe the success he had in business came because he knew not only how to rev things up, but also how to slow them down: a range that was as useful for dodging bullets as it was for seizing opportunities. Appleton told a reporter in 2011: “For me, it is something like the movie ‘The Matrix.’ The [memory chip] business is in slow motion in comparison to all the other things I do.”

So I wonder, in your dance with life and death, when the music finally stopped, did you reaffirm the bargain you had struck? Did you have second thoughts?

Again, it hardly matters that this final lesson from his life is one his on-lookers and admirers can never learn from. But the other take-aways are more than enough.

You had been fully awake since you were a child. You said it was sticks in grade school, knives in junior high and guns in high school that made you face death but claim life. The music I hear is an anthem reverberating through the last fire.

We remember those who have inspired us through the gauzy lenses of time, the fragmented updates we have of them, and the suddenness of breaking news. In the remembering, we fast-forward their found energy into our lives and into our work. They encourage us to accept the invitation, to get up, and to dance.

Values at Work

January 12, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

I’m learning that input sometimes comes through the blog, but just as often from outside of it.

One reader was confused about what bystanders, and making excuses for not acting in the ways that we should, has to do with bringing more meaning and purpose into our work. Since that’s the point of the last post Knowing What To Do , let me take another stab at it.

When your principles are vindicated through your work, both your work and your life are enriched. But this doesn’t just happen. It requires preparation.

Before you can take a stand on important things (and derive all of the personal benefits that will come to you from doing so) you need to know what your values are, and have some prior experience testing them out in real time. When you have prepared yourself beforehand, you have a far better chance of knowing what to do when the situation demands a principled response from you: when a woman has fallen in your path, when your children are being victimized, when a truly serious issue is presented in the course of your work.

It’s about being ready.

On the other hand, when we don’t take the time beforehand to think about what we value the most, it can be nearly impossible to “think straight” when confronted with the emotional turmoil of a truly consequential situation. My example was child abuse, but there are similarly serious kinds of dishonesty and victimization that happen everyday in the workplace.

In addition, when we have not gained the kind of experience that comes from acting on our values in small ways, it can be nearly impossible to know “what to do” when confronted with a serious set of circumstances that demands a strong and unequivocal response from us. Taking a stand in a situation where less is at stake can always prepare you for the situation where the stakes are higher.

When we don’t have these kinds of preparation, we make excuses for not acting like we should (such as thinking it’s enough to protect just your own children when there is widespread abuse) and worrying about things that are beside the point (like Conlin’s wife’s feelings). In the last post, I was arguing that if the parents in the Conlin tragedy had been ready, they would not only have acted more effectively for the children involved, but also felt more empowered as human beings when they did what the circumstances required.

The same kind of clarity and empowerment are necessary in our work if we want to be truly happy doing it.

Dilemmas both big and small that challenge us to respond in a principled way present themselves at work all the time. When we understand beforehand what is important to us (like honesty, respect, helping others, valuing relationships), and test those commitments by acting on them regularly, we have a far better chance of knowing what to do when something truly serious arises in the workplace, when emotions are high, and maybe our job or the jobs of our colleagues are on the line.

When we know what to do, and our decisions about work are connected to our deeper motivations, we gain a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.