The Career You’ll Love

I was deeply affected many years ago by a workshop of Stephen R. Covey, when he explained that trust can be thought of as a bank account. Here’s the concept:

• You build up trust by your reliable and generous actions, those are the “deposits.”
• You lose trust when you make a mistake and damage someone, those are the “withdrawals.” It’s much easier to make a withdrawal than a deposit.
• When you damage someone more than you’ve benefited them, you’ve exhausted your bank account. They won’t want to trust you anymore, and it’s extremely hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
• Like bank accounts, deep trust is developed over the course of many years. It’s impossible to create deep trust in a short time.

This is a powerful idea, and explains a lot about how people work.

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Does your next job exist yet? Maybe.

But many times jobs are created, or tweaked, based upon specific needs at a certain time, even connected with the talents of certain individuals.

This is one of the reasons why some jobs are filled before they’re even posted: The hiring manager was taking advantage of a great match of someone’s existing skills to address a specific pressing need.

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One of the most frustrating things about working for other people is figuring out why they do such dumb things. Incomprehensible decisions seem designed to make your life difficult and stop useful progress.

It might be something as large as relocation, reorganization, or laying people off – or as minor as requiring useless codes on your TPS reports.

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It seems that recently many people, perhaps most, have struggled to be inspired by their work. With such an uncertain economy, 24/7 accessibility, fear of job loss, and lack of pay increases, we’ve created work environments where many focus more on keeping up with work than on making a great contribution.

There’s some really practical reasons why you should look to be engaged in your work:

• You become more productive, thereby more valuable to your employer.
• It helps you to be more creative and bring more energy to what you do.
• It affects the attitudes of those you work with, helping you to have some fun.
• It makes you happier and more satisfied with the work you do.

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The word “visibility” has gotten a bit of a bad rap inside organizations. I’ve seen it associated with concepts of playing politics, whitewashing, and generally creating a false image.

If your great work speaks for itself, why worry about making yourself visible?

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The term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) was introduced by James Collins and Jerry Porras in 1996. It’s a powerful concept.

It’s one thing to have a goal that’s practical. Let’s say that I want to save enough money to retire on – that’s very sensible and, hopefully, achievable.

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Here’s the bonus category: Yourself. We’ve spent so much time thinking about other people, we might have forgotten that it’s important how we feel about our own work!

Looking at it this way, you realize that you are independent of your work. So how does the work help you to achieve your life and career goals? How would you LIKE to relate to your work?

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I’ve broken out partners as a distinct category of stakeholders, because the relationships are much different than the others in our diagram.

The simple definition of “partner” is someone who works with you to deliver value to their customers and your customers, and to their management and your management. In the case of your teammates, the customers and management might be the same. In fact, that makes decisions much easier, because you hopefully have an environment that’s aligned and supports you working together.

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