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.

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.

I am a Work in Progress

April 22, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

How you introduce yourself has everything to do with how you see yourself.

I am a writer. A speaker. A company starter and a dispute resolver. But that’s not all that I am. How others see me, and even more importantly, how I see myself, is contained in the words I use to describe myself. These words should include all the things that you are, including what you’re working to become: the dynamic as well as the static parts of you.

All of us are works in progress, tadpoles becoming frogs.

That’s probably why it’s so limiting when people are summed up with adjectives that speak only to their former glories. Academy award nominated actress. Nobel prize-winning economist. President Clinton. What we hear is that you’ve already come and gone. Summed up, and no longer becoming.

Over-simplified packaging (even to honor) probably derives from our survival instincts. A stranger approaches: is she friend or foe? As we start learning more about her, we put her in one category or the other. Where is she in my pecking order, and where am I in hers? Today it’s no longer safety we’re most concerned about, but meeting the expectations we have for ourselves, and that others are busy imposing upon us.

What I’m talking about is scrambling those expectations in the ways that are best for you as soon as you start talking about yourself.

Doing so changes everything: the way you see your work, the way you think about your life. Because these are the words you are choosing to define yourself.

Social media has made tagging ourselves the very springboard for conversation. This wasn’t the case “in the olden days” where self-description was limited to more specific occasions (Resumes. A few lines in a yearbook. A short bio when someone was introducing you someplace).

Today, we are constantly introducing and branding ourselves. When there is truth in our marketing, these kinds of tags can move our expectations (and the expectations that others have about us) to the rich-with-promise places where they need to be.

I have a friend who describes himself as “the home inspector lawyer, professional speaker, and raconteur.” His promise is that he’ll help you with your home inspection problems, and that you’ll have fun while he’s doing it. Joe is many things, but first and foremost he’s an entertainer: happiest when he’s making you happy.

I am collaborating with a woman who describes herself as an “empire builder.” Whose empire, you might ask? The stated goal is that it’s mine, but (in truth) some of the best energy in our collaboration also comes from being a part of what Amy’s building for herself. And then there’s the software developer at a client’s company whose bio begins with “puzzle piecer.” When I read this, I see my fragmented jigsaw puzzle sprawling over a table and Jonathon’s getting a charge by helping me find that recalcitrant piece.

People like this who involve other people in what they’re doing—and with who they are—are influential people. There are even meters for tracking their influence (like Klout; PeerIndex; Appinions; and PeopleBrowsr, the creator of something called Kred). The endorsements of influential people are important precisely because there are all of us out here who want to be involved with them and learn from the choices they’re making.

Mark Schaefer, a Rutgers marketing professor, has put his finger on the way that influencers are creating buzz with their followers in social media today.

This is an entirely new marketing channel, and when’s the last time we had one of those? Done well, it can be enormously effective because you’re getting this advocacy [for whatever it is you’re offering] organically.

But organic marketing is really only part of it.

It’s not the reflected glory from past accomplishments that influential people are providing, but future promises. In the words they use, each of them is involving our expectations with theirs. Not by offering a static summary of who they are, but by opening a door that invites you into a shared experience you begin creating together: truly, a springboard into the future.

Think about defining yourself this way.

It’s more than just words, of course. But the right ones invite others into your work-in-progress—while putting your best foot forward.

I am (not) my job

April 14, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

We’ve all had the feeling in the pit of our stomachs. Somebody asks you “What do you do?” They seem to think they’ll learn a lot about you by asking, but you’d rather they never had.

Maybe your job needs too much defending or explaining. Or you’d rather not have to think about “what you do” when you’re not doing it. Maybe you don’t have a job to talk about. Maybe it’s just an inadequate measure of who you are.

It doesn’t have to be.

“What do you do?” is usually a stranger’s second question. (The first—“Where are you from?”—is just an icebreaker, before getting down to business.) As he sums you up, he can already see your age, sex and race, and how well you present. Your job provides all the remaining information he thinks he needs for his snapshot of you.

Because it’s a demonstration of your worth. It gives him your rung on the social ladder. He thinks he’ll learn something about how hard you’ve worked and how smart you are when you tell him. You don’t have to let the question sum you up so easily.

Never just say: “I work at ___,” “I’m a ___,” or “I’m studying to be a ___.”

Tag yourself differently. Take the opportunity this question presents to define yourself in the ways that you want to be defined.

I was struck the other day by a column about work in my local paper entitled “It’s Not All That We Are.” The writer had been watching her co-workers, who had lost their newspaper jobs, leave for the last time. They got some final applause when they left the newsroom from the employees whose jobs—like hers—had been spared. Then she wrote:

“When the applause ends, a dreadful silence sets in.”

In this moment-after, when you could hear a pin drop, the importance of a job like writer or copy editor “takes on mythical proportions.” Indeed, when it’s gone the void can seem so huge that it’s hard to find what’s left of the person who held it.

At times like this, a job can seem like all that we are. The dread hangs in the air over those who have been left behind, silently wondering what the applause would sound like for what remains of them.

It’s not just that our work is too important in our lives. It’s that the other things that are important about us are not more front and center—holding their own with our jobs as essential and obvious parts of who we are.

It’s those things about us that can’t be taken away when a job is.

While the question “what do you do” is looking for a quick summary of your utility in the world, your answer should always speak to your contributions and your value in broader ways.

Your answer should no longer be a label or a tag, but a very short story.

It should speak to your present but also your future. (I am this, working to be that.) It should speak to your commitments. (I write or draw or raise dogs, I travel, sing or climb, I help my elderly neighbors, I march in parades.) It should speak to your spirit. (I live for the silence after a snow has fallen, or for the roar of twenty thousand baseball fans.) You need to put this kind of information out there too.

A very short story in 3 parts that says: my job is only part of “what I do.”