It can be tough to like your job, much less love it. You’re putting your time and effort at the disposal of someone else, and they’re mostly just interested in you … getting work done. How unfair!
That’s what sets people on the direction of starting their own company and being their own boss. Unfortunately, there’s a whole other bunch of tradeoffs involved in doing that.
How do you keep yourself from getting burned out in your job? You’d like to think that the transaction is simple: You do valuable work, and the company pays you in return.
There’s a number of pitfalls in this simplistic approach:
- What the company defines as valuable may not be very motivating for you (even if you’re pretty good at it).
- The pay’s power to motivate you diminishes over time as you adjust your lifestyle and expectations.
- This totally ignores the fact that you, your boss, and your co-workers are all complex human beings with desires, aspirations, and lives outside work.
- In almost every work environment, you’re competing against other companies and organizations which are constantly increasing performance expectations.
What would change if you were working in partnership with your boss?
In a partnership, you focus mostly on the commonalities, where you agree and share goals. Where do you agree with your boss?
- You both want work to get done which has value.
- You’d both like to have that generate a paycheck which is fair.
- You’d both like the work environment to be motivating and productive.
- You’d like to like working with each other.
This will have some twists and turns, of course, but you get the idea.
When you gather around shared goals, you’ll start seeing the difference as more minor, just annoyances to be worked on. You won’t tend to fixate on them.
What are you doing to develop a partnership with your boss and co-workers?