Imagine you are on your deathbed. What do you want to look back upon in your life as your proudest achievement(s)?
If they were asked about you, what would your closest friends (and enemies!) say about you?
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Life can be confusing. At times it can be incredibly hectic and filled with a never-ending list of things to do. Other times it can be unexciting, with our brain is desperately trying to find ways to pass the time (and if you’re especially unlucky, your life can be both hectic and boring…)
As we follow the treadmill of life through our various stages of adolescence through to adulthood, the question that usually is on our minds is often ‘what’s next?’ How do we get that dream job, new house etc.
Let’s take a step back.
Take a moment now to reflect on what you want to do with your life. It does not need to be fully thought out, but just a short statement of what you would like to achieve.
Once you are ready, let’s bring it back to your life right now. Are you on the path to achieving what you want to do?
If you are, then great! You are working towards the achievements you want for your life. Hopefully you are feeling content and fulfilled. If you aren’t, you may want to visit what may be causing this disconnect: whether the reality of your dreams are different to what you had hoped, or perhaps something else.
If you responded ‘no’, how does it feel to say this out loud? If you are feeling motivated to do so, what could you do to make some change in you life to take you towards what you are like to do?
Alternatively, you may be feeling that lots of people have asked you about ‘life missions’, and the honest answer is that you don’t know, which is a completely acceptable response! So if this is the case, what would you like to do to figure this out?
Asking ourselves what we want to achieve, and what our legacy is can feel like a bit of an odd exercise. Nevertheless, I’ve personally always found it extremely enlightening to reflect upon why I do what I do, and what I want to leave behind. It is what motivates me to strive for positive social change through my coaching career.
The modern world is competitive, and the importance of being ‘the best’ is drilled into us from an early age. Parents, teachers and wider society emphasizes this to us pretty quickly: we are told that being the best and brightest through education will get us a good mark; this will get us into a prestigious university and a high-flying career, leading to a successful and happy life.
We understand that this experience of striving for grades at school is stressful, painstaking and can often be a little excessive. And whilst we accept that perhaps judging people at the age of 13 for their end of year exams may be a little premature, we can justify that this is part of a grander scheme of teaching individuals to strive for greater things. In practice, the outcome can be pretty mixed. It’s only in later in life that we realise that what we thought were extremely important things, such as exams are only marginally so.
We come to terms that there are things that we could have done with learning earlier through school, but accept this as a fault in the system. Unfortunately, what we do not realise is the negative effect this whole experiences causes. Constant striving for greater achievements is actually harmful: both for ourselves in our wellbeing and in our professional career.
Firstly, for those that did not ‘achieve’. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why giving people as young as twelve the message that they are a failure for getting a C in their science class is problematic. We learn from parents, teachers and peers that we are simply incapable in this domain, which is now a fact of life for us. It is no wonder why people grow up thinking they are unintelligent; after all, this is simply what they have been told throughout their schooling life.
But what about those who did achieve at school? Unfortunately a different set of unhelpful life narratives develop. High-achievers often define themselves by their higher grades at school, and get branded the brainy ones (or even more unhelpfully are told by aunts and uncles that they will be the next Prime Minister). This means that these high-achievers find they build their self worth by how they are ‘graded’ at school, which carries over into a sense that having a prestigious job title equates to success and doing well. They are also weighed down by the pressure put on them.
This comes crashing down when the realities of the job market hit, and suddenly these ‘high-achievers’ at school who learned to define themselves by their successes are not, by society’s standards, successful as they desperately try to find gainful employment. I’ve spoken to many people who get hit at this stage by a large bout of imposter syndrome – wondering whether everything up to this point was simply a fluke and now they are being found out.
And ironically, this unhealthy defining of ourselves by achievement is also extremely counterproductive in the modern world, as it instills a fear within us of being bad at any skill. And in a world where the world is ever-changing and new skills are needing to be learned every decade, we find ourselves populated with high-achieving and bright individuals paralysed at the idea they are not good enough and scared to be found out about it.
So whilst the solution to this issue is bringing young, bright intelligent people to learn new skills to equip them for an ever-changing future, this is an extremely difficult emotional journey. To do this, we will need to first un-learn many unhelpful life narratives that we have been taught about their own value as individuals being based upon what we are good at, rather than our inherent values and beliefs. We will then need to learn how it is okay to be bad at things, and be able to improve upon them through hard work and dedication.
This will not be an easy ride, but we owe it to explain these realities to those coming through the education system expecting big and bright things society has promised them, only to find an impossible job market.
Let’s face it, sometimes life can be boring. Eat. Work. Sleep. Repeat. We all have grand aspirations in life, but sometimes our day-to-day realities can get in the way. We have a job that is going alright, some old friends that we meet up with on the weekends, and a fairly stable home life. Weekdays are filled with some TV and a takeaway if we’re feeling particularly unenthused by the idea of cooking (which happens far more times than for myself than I care to admit..)
It can be quite easy to get stuck in a bit of a monotonous rut, and none of this is helped by being shut indoors by COVID-19. Whilst we probably have gotten more used to our quarantined existence now, it can get a little bit tiring doing similar things, often in the same boxed room. The days also have a tendency to blur together. The effect this can have is a general sense of numbness – the lack of enthusiasm seeps through wider life, and for me most of the time ends up in an evening slouched on the sofa.
So how can we break this rut that life has got us stuck in? The answer might be something new to stimulate us mentally. Remember the excitement of our first day at work, or taking up a new hobby – When was the last time you experienced that? If it hasn’t been for a while, perhaps you might want to think about finding something new to do to rekindle that creative energy inside of you that might currently be stilted.
A new challenge can take up any form, and doesn’t need to be giant or grand. It can be as simple as learning a new skill or taking a course in something you’ve always wanted to. I started writing these articles in my spare time, often doing this after a long day at work. It’s quite surprising that whilst I usually start writing them feeling quite tired, by the end I’m a lot more energised, with a greater sense of mental sharpness and fulfilment for having achieved something.
And whilst COVID-19 can sometimes make it harder to do certain activities due to being stuck at home, it is quite amazing how much we can still do using digital workarounds. Naturally we’ve all seen the transition of our gym workouts and yoga sessions indoors, but there are equally a great numbers of interesting online course for all sorts of things (look at coursera.org for free courses for instance). I have been taking Spanish and Bengali language lessons online using Italki.com since before the lockdown, which has been a way I keep my language learning up and a sense of development outside of work. If languages aren’t your thing, and you’re lacking inspiration, you could do worse than taking a dip of pretty much any how-to video on Youtube which piques your interest; after all there is an introductory video on pretty much any subject.
In many respects, learning something new is as important now as it probably ever has ever been. There is a key point about our own mental wellbeing, and ensuring that we feel productive whilst being locked up indoors. But also, from a practical point of view, our world of employment and stability is shifting, and you never know when having a backup option of something different might come in handy.
Now, I’m not saying you’re going to start coding tomorrow and become a millionaire overnight. But if coding is something you learn you enjoy, you will probably gain some useful skills and experience out of it. And who knows, let’s say that if you’re working a customer sales job it might give you an insight as to how to improve things within your organisation and get a promotion. You would be surprised how often this happens, and there are certainly plenty of people who have combined seemingly random skills to make a brand new creation that no one would have ever reasonably thought of before.
So it’s good to try new things. But as a word of caution, it’s best to pursue a new hobby or skill that you genuinely enjoy – if you’re doing this activity purely because you feel it will benefit you, you are not likely to be enthusiastic and are far more likely to give it up later down the line. You also won’t find it particularly fulfilling either. So just bear that in mind, especially if you find yourself pushing to gain proficiency in ultra-quick time.
So if you feel like you’ve got some room for some inspiration, why not learn a new hobby or skill?
We’re pretty much done with learning, right? After all, our education system pain-stakingly puts us through around 15 years of learning at school, and anywhere between 3 to 6 years at university. As the old life-script goes, we are born, we go to school, we work, we retire and we die. The suggestion is that we spend the early part of our life learning, until we hit the working age where we are doing until we retire.
Of course, this model accepts there will be some learning; for example as we grow older, get married, have kids etc. But for the most part, our formal ‘studying’ has ended. The life script says that we look to build that 40 years of experience in our field before retiring.
In modern times however, this script no longer works. We are now looking at new technologies and opportunities regularly: for example we are using new software and tools every five to ten years. And probably more importantly, people are wanting to do more with their careers than previous generations. We have far greater opportunities to learn, change and shift than ever before.
This life script was built in an era of sending the majority of the population into factories for manual-labour work, and doesn’t fit in the modern realities we live in today. We now look to move jobs every few years and want the autonomy to do things we enjoy, or switch it up once we want a new challenge.
Unfortunately our education system was not built to prepare us for these new realities. Instead of instilling us a learning mentality of picking up different skills, it rather encourages us to find what we are already good at and specialise in it from an early age. In the UK we usually pick only three to four A-Level subjects by the age of 17 before heading to university to pick one or two.
And whilst specialisation in of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, it does narrow our choices quite quickly. The real problem though is how this builds into our own understanding of learning and being ‘good’ at something. The narrative is that we are naturally good at some things, and bad at others, so it is best to pick your good subjects and leave the bad ones. This leaves little space for us to pick weaker subjects that we learn to improve and picking up the life lesson of perseverance along the way. And whilst not every school can offer courses in fashion design, video editing or coding, schools can instil a mindset of learning new skills whatever your more-traditional subject route may be.
This idea I describe is explained more fully in Mindset by Carol Dweck, an excellent book which sets out the idea of a ‘fixed mindset’ vs a ‘growth mindset’. Essentially, an individuals ability to learn and grow is predominantly based upon their belief in their own ability to learn, rather than any inherent intelligence. If they hold a fixed mindset, they believe their attributes and skills are broadly static, as such they will make little effort to learn and grow outside of what they already know. A growth mindset however is the idea that you can learn and grow, and with this belief you can make efforts to learn new traits and skills.
The book actually demonstrates that we over-emphasise the importance of ‘natural intelligence’, and that in reality people who have exceeded in their fields are mostly ordinary people who worked extremely hard to develop into the best they can be. Examples used are Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy, who actually were seen as very ordinary at school, but as we know are household names to this day due to being pioneers in their respective fields.
So bringing this back to us. The modern world gives us more opportunities to shift, learn and grow, even if we weren’t necessarily brought up to be prepared for this. What we do have control over though is our own relationship with learning. If we can shift to a growth mindset, along with the idea that if we work hard enough upon something we can get better, we can succeed in doing things we never believed we could.
As part of this, we need to let go of the notion we are ‘bad’ at something inherently. People I coach often find this idea difficult, as they think they are good at their subject, and bad at others as a matter of fact (which by the way, also puts an unhealthy pressure on making sure they can demonstrate they are good at their ‘good’ subject, leading to efforts of needing to constantly prove themselves). This is not easy, as when we are bad at something, we get frustrated and want to stop. Don’t. Learning doesn’t happen overnight. You have to persevere to learn.
For me, I never wrote articles before, now people tell me they find them valuable. Neither was I a coach, but I just decided one day to take a course because I thought I would enjoy it. Now these are both things I do and no one questions me on it. I wasn’t ‘inherently’ good at either of these, rather I learnt by practicing, and had to overcome being pretty shoddy at first. I should add as well that neither of these are skills I necessarily ‘need’ for my career, and yet by developing them I have far more opportunities for myself in the future.
So, take a moment to think about what new skill you want to learn. How are you going to shift your own mindset to work and get better at this new skill?
Today is the last day in my current role before moving to a new, exciting job on Monday. Whilst I’m staying in the same department, it will be a fresh challenge and exciting new area of work.
Like any moving of roles, the feeling is bittersweet; the change means leaving behind my old team behind where I’ve spent the last two years. And even though I’m not moving far, my day-to-day interactions will fundamentally shift and my relationships changing as a result.
A new job is a new chapter for me, and an exciting next step in my career. And yet, I’ve spent very little time celebrating everything I’ve achieved in my current role, nor taken much time to celebrate finding gainful new employment. Instead, I’m left thinking about the pragmatics of my new job and how I plan to hit the ground running.
So, have I spent enough time recognising what I’ve done over the last two years? I came into a new role on promotion; persevered in a fast-paced and pressurised environment; took up management responsibilities for the first time; shifted roles internally; took up additional responsibilities on delivering diversity and inclusion for my group on top of my current role, all whilst delivering across my work strands to a high standard? Honestly, probably not. In fact, the only time I was boastful about any of my work was during job applications!
So why am I falling into this trap? Perhaps this is due to my ingrained voice telling me not to linger upon my success, as I fear this will make me take my eye off the ball for my next role. Perhaps it’s that my brain is programmed to just look for the next thing to tick off an imaginary list of never-ending achievement in a competitive world. Maybe it’s something else completely.
Whatever the reasoning, it means I move onto the next stage of my career without fully appreciating the challenges I have overcome, the skills I have gained or how far I’ve made it in my journey. Without taking the time to accept my accomplishments, it’s fairly likely I will lose sight of the amount I’ve achieved through perseverance and hard work. I know this is unhelpful as it is going to undermine my sense of self-worth.
The irony is that other people have already pointed these things out to me, and if the situation were reversed I’m sure I would say the same to them too. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that I am like many of us, where we don’t give ourselves credit for the challenges we have overcome or the things we have learnt from our journey. When it is other people though, we are happy to do so.
So perhaps I’ll take a bit of time this weekend to reflect on some of my achievements before starting my new job. If, like me you have neglected to celebrate yourself, you’re invited to join me.
You’ve joined your new team, excited to make a fresh start and prove yourself. You’ve read all about the company ethos and there were some nice words on how it values excellence. In particular though, they highlighted they prioritized results, which you expected meant you could demonstrate your worth through your work ethic. Whilst there were some minor warning signs such as lack of consistency on your exact role, you didn’t want to make a fuss about it at the time.
Unfortunately you weren’t aware of what awaited you when you started. Weird and awkward communication styles in the office, rumours of team members not getting along and a boss who you should never disturb. But you’ve signed the contract and rely upon this job for an income, so it would be hard to abandon ship right now.
All of these experiences seem completely at odds with what you’ve heard a workplace should be like, particularly when every other article on LinkedIn is about how important it is to collaborate and speak up.
Sadly, a lot of people don’t realise they are caught up in a dysfunctional workplace until its too late, and are already pushed out the door due to breaking some unwritten rules. If you think you might be in a dysfunctional workplace, here are some ideas to get you through:
Do what you need to to get by – you don’t need to be a martyr.
Unless you don’t really need this job and have a retirement savings account filled with spare $$$, you’ll probably need a job to pay rent. So the dramatic storming into the bosses office, giving him a piece of your mind and leaving in a blaze of glory is probably not a good option.
So understand what you have to lose, and accept that the situation isn’t ideal. Do what you need to to keep your job, and keep your head down to the weird politics happening around you. It is not for you to change a problematic office environment as the newest person, so don’t feel you have to. Indeed this is where many of us can get caught out – we are told how important it is to speak our mind and push for change, not realising many workplaces do not appreciate someone pointing out their faults. So keep your head down if you need to. Your own survival is your main priority.
Understand the terms of your employment
If you’re currently wondering why your working dynamics are so weird, you’re probably not feeling too secure in your current job. In a volatile environment, people disappearing overnight tends to be a fairly common occurrence. So it is important to verify what clauses are in your contract and what exactly you have signed up for.
If you’re unlucky, your employer may have stuck a very unreasonable (and at times legally dubious) clause about ending the contract prematurely. It’s important you understand that this, particularly if you feel anything fishy is going on. A particular note of caution if you’re currently on probation, as this is the easiest point you can be offloaded. So double check any internal policies for how things are meant to be done (if they indeed exist), and if appropriate, consider getting Trade Union membership in case the worst case-scenario happens.
Be careful who you open up to
This is not meant to sound like a spy thriller, however if you’re noticing that people tend to speak to each other in quiet voices, and go silent when certain people walk into the room, you’ve probably got a toxic atmosphere. And if you’re currently feeling stressed by your situation, it’s natural to want to open up.
Unfortunately, opening up to that friendly-looking colleague or your manager can easily come back to bite you. It is surprising how common place it is for managers to relay conversations to their seniors, so what you thought was an anonymous suggestion suddenly becomes seen as a named criticism from you.
If you’re in this situation, it’s even more important that you don’t compound the situation by vocalising your discontent with your manager. You may be tempted to speak to someone else in the team about how your manager is not being particularly open or fair. However, the person who you have said this to is more likely to close ranks against you than help, simply as they have more investment in their relationship with your manager then you. This is an easy way to get brandished a trouble-maker which is an extremely hard title to come back from, particularly when in the world of work your manager is likely to have all power over you and your employment.
Find your escape route
If you’ve kept your head down, you hopefully have passed your probation and have found a corner of the office where you can do what you need to to get to the end of the working day. You may have even found a way of making it more comfortable for yourself.
Either way, this is not a place you’re going to thrive, and you are better off finding a better environment where you can genuinely enjoy being in work (which is genuinely possible, I promise!). It can be quite easy to settle after a while and resign ourselves, however if you take the plunge and find a way out, you’ll most likely be much more happy for it. So don’t lose that ray of hope of finding a better working environment, and keep searching to find it.
For anyone currently in a toxic environment, you do have my sympathies and I hope you manage to make it out alive!
If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably just come back into work a bit bleary-eyed after a long weekend with the bank holiday. It’s a nice novelty, considering as a country we have one of the lowest amount of public holidays in the world. This is particularly the case if you’re in England and Wales, where we don’t have a public holiday for either St Andrews or St Patrick Days which are the case in Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively.
So whilst the break hopefully has allowed us all to reset, this is probably something we wouldn’t have done if it were any other week. We usually appreciate the feeling of having some time off, so this is a good moment to reflect: what if we could tap into bringing ourselves out of our work routines more often?
With the current pandemic, it sometimes can be hard to get away from everything going on in the world of work, and the news is often pretty bleak. Naturally this may be ebbing away from your motivation, and doing tasks just feels harder. For me it certainly doesn’t help that I don’t even know what day of the week it is! Unfortunately, I’m equally guilty of trying to solve this ‘issue’ by pushing myself to grind through our motivational-low. But do more reminders, alerts and notifications telling you what to do really solve the underlying problem?
So perhaps a new way of looking at it: if you are feeling demotivated, this is your body and mind trying to tell you something. Rather than treating this as a negative, take this that your own self is telling you that you need a break. And from experience – ignoring it won’t make it go away, it will rather compound it and make it worse.
So if you’re finding your hitting a brick wall, rather than trying to do more, trydoingnothing. Turn off your laptop. Shut down Social Media. Disconnect yourself. Move away from the grind. This will help you gain some perspective, and a chance to recharge your batteries.
If you’re constantly grinding through anything day-in-day-out without a chance to pause, the meaning behind why we are doing these daily tasks falls away. We get more focused upon delivery as opposed to why we were doing the task in the first place. So try and take a moment away from work. Considering how long we go without a real break, this is likely to solve some of those motivational lows, and give you new perspective on what you are doing and why it is important.
Hopefully this bank holiday was a good chance to disconnect, but next time don’t feel obliged to have to wait till the next one (25th December!!) to have a break.
Many of us have a very difficult time making sense of our careers and the wider job market. Often this starts with applying to hundreds of jobs, getting a handful of interviews to finally landing that role, which quickly turns out to be a dead-end. Why are our experiences of the workplace so much worse than what we expect?
Here are four realities about your career that you were never told.
University education is only an entry ticket to apply to white-collar jobs.
Unless you have a clear route such as training to be a doctor, university degrees are pretty much seen as solely an entry requirement to apply. Many of us when applying for jobs aimed for the most elite universities with the most prestigious subjects, hoping our specializations or thesis will give us an extra edge. In reality, 95% of the time this will make little difference to your future; what and where you studied doesn’t really matter much for recruiters. As of 2017 42% of the workforce in the UK is a graduate, so it is no longer seen as valuable as it did for previous generations, instead it has become the new criterion to sift people out who don’t have one.
Some firms are now even removing the requirement of needing a University degree to apply for their talent entry schemes, as they recognize that this is such an arbitrary requirement that all it serves to do is reduce social mobility. Whilst this is a positive move more broadly, it does short-change many of us who were told that university would give us a leg-up in the job market.
Doing extra-curricular activities help, but less than you would hope
We were encouraged to get involved with our university societies and organisations with the oft-used phrase of it being ‘great on our CV’. This is only partially true – and few even use CVs for job applications anymore.
Extra-curricular activities are a great way to find what you enjoy and understand what your strengths are outside of formal studies. This can certainly help guide you to new experiences and what you ultimately want to do. It is indeed possible to use this evidence in job applications and interviews as well. Nonetheless, most organisations mostly have little interest in how good you were in leading your university knitting committee if it is not directly relevant to the data admin job you are applying for.
Whilst we hope that Employers will look at us as three-dimensional humans with thoughts and feelings, due to the sheer amount of people applying, this is often boiled down to whoever ticks the (subjective) box best. Which brings me to my next point..
Job applications are often a game of Russian roulette, and interviews are about practice, not actually about your talent.
Most of us broadly got an idea that job interviews would be coming down the track. If anything, younger generations are likely far more experienced with interviews in relative terms – I balked when I was tutoring a sixteen year old who spoke about preparing for her multiple interviews at different colleges (who of us knew how to interview at sixteen!!).
What we weren’t told though was that job applications would become a horrible process of sending individualized cover letters or statements to hundreds of companies each looking at slightly different things, nor that the assessment process would include completely arbitrary verbal and non-verbal assessments, group assessments and additional interviews. We certainly weren’t told that 95% of companies will not even bother to acknowledge or reply to us.
In reality, getting through this is as much a game of luck and persistence than any real skill. this is partly due to the sheer amount of people applying to each job meaning the bar has been set unreasonably high, and employers have no incentive to do anything other than quick-and-easy selection (e.g. statement scanners looking for the correct buzzwords). I’ve seen first hand how this has played havoc on people’s confidence, sense of self-worth and wider mental well being.
More prestigious firms have recognised this issue, and have reacted by setting a long-drawn out process to try and make it fairer. Unfortunately, these processes then turn into a game of passing each cookie-cutter assessment round, where the task is to give the best answer to what they are looking for. It is no wonder there is a whole industry of prepping graduates for interviews with prestigious firms, often at exorbitant prices.
The age of working hard and staying loyal in a job/firm and progressing slowly up is dead.
We understand that people move around jobs more, and that it’s okay to move from company to rival company. Nonetheless, we still are left with the impression that hard work will allow us further opportunities to prove ourselves, and eventually move up in the workplace. Now that we’ve finally got our foot in the door, try to work hard and impress our employer as much as possible, taking any task we can find to demonstrate our value.
Unfortunately, this enthusiasm quickly dissipates when we realise that the person next to us does half as much work for twice as much salary (and that person isn’t going anywhere anytime soon!). We figure out that we are quickly expected to do the additional tasks we volunteered for without any recognition or reward. Worse yet, if we’re unlucky some colleagues may feel threatened by our additional efforts and ambitions, preferring to keep their peaceful ecosystem of mediocrity. You quickly find yourself isolated and being left unhappy.
Your employer will likely be ambivalent to your sense of feeling fulfilled from your job, as well as whether you are really achieving what you want to.
Why am I telling you this? Because the sooner you come to terms with these facts, the sooner you can look to take your future into your own hands. The next step for you is to work out how to be truly valued and fulfilled in the world without relying on your employer.
You can find all the rest of my articles at https://tahmidchowdhury.co.uk/blog/. Sign up to my mailing list if you would like to receive them on a weekly basis to ensure you don’t miss them!
If you’ve been in a fairly large organisation you probably have come across a strategy for revolutionising your workplace via the brand new ‘transformation’ or ‘evolution’ programme. These projects promise big in pushing your organisation into the new technological future with faultless systems to be delivered within a few years.
If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably already seen several of these come and go, and likely your scepticism has grown with each one! These grand promises are often only partially met, and as priorities change the promises are quietly swept under the carpet, only for a new programme to take its place a little while later.
So why is it that change management projects have such a mixed rate of success?
A lack of genuine senior support, nor this being built into the organisation’s priorities
The first question of whether a change management project will succeed is how seriously the organisation itself takes it. Is this something that your CEO has personally staked their reputation upon delivering, or rather is it something that has been farmed off to a small team in HR to implement? If it’s the latter, it’s going to be quite an uphill battle!
Even if this has been publicly stated as a priority by your head honcho, it’s critical that the wider senior management understand and agree to this as a priority. How successful this is is dependent upon how good your organisation’s senior management is, and how well they buy into the wider organisational objectives themselves. If it’s common knowledge that the Director of Finance is dead against any modernisation of the 1990’s fax machines, you’re probably not going to move to integrated cloud-based computing solutions by next year.
Lack of everyone else’s buy-in. The wider workforce is apathetic, cynical, or has never even heard of it
This is an issue that I’ve seen lots, much to my frustration. With an understanding that senior buy-in is so crucial, leads spend nearly all their time getting agreement amongst their seniors. Through sheer hard work, they agree a great set of principles and set this out in a nice, pretty document.
One problem – no one in the organisation has ever heard of this, nor even knew this was important. Picture the scene: you walk into the office one morning and suddenly are told the business has set its ambition is to be the market leader in innovation within three years. You sneer, pointing out that it’s hard to be particularly innovative when the printer has been broken for three weeks. You have a quick flick-through the document before putting it into a drawer, never to be read again.
Any programme needs to have support from wider staff to be effective. To do that, an ongoing dialogue is needed throughout the creation process. Better yet, explain why a programme is needed, and speak to staff about what they want to see in such a strategy. If you can demonstrate you have listened to staff concern’s, the chances it’ll be taken seriously multiply ten-fold.
Your change management programme has grand, visionary goals without real actions to get there
You’ve worked hard, got agreement from seniors and balanced these with the requests of your staff, great! Staff are excited to read the new document to build a better workplace environment over the next two years. However, once they read it they are disappointed to only see grand visionary statements, and little genuine action to make progress towards these goals. Despite wanting to support the initiative, there is no real mechanism to do so. As work picks up and excitement drops, the programme is put on the backburner, with the result of little change.
Any change is an ongoing process, so the release of a new strategy really is a beginning rather than an ending. As such, this should be the point where communication should be standardised, and ongoing conversation should be taking place with the organisation. If the ‘delivery’ of the change management now is pawned off to that HR team, it’s really doomed to fail.
You can find all the rest of my articles at https://tahmidchowdhury.co.uk/blog/. Sign up to my mailing list if you would like to receive them on a weekly basis to ensure you don’t miss them!
You’re working your first or second job. Broadly, it’s okay. The salary is lower than you hoped, particularly considering the amount you pay on rent. The tasks have some purpose, though they are fairly monotonous and not quite making the most of your abilities or education. Progression opportunities are unclear. You are frustrated but don’t want to complain too much because you know plenty of other people who are trying desperately to catch their first break.
Does this sound familiar?
For many of us starting our careers, we have often had to overcome the grueling process of multiple job applications and assessments for months on end. Now that we have our ‘in’, we hope that through hard work and effort we can rise through the ranks and gain ever-greater responsibility. Unfortunately, the world of work is much more murky than we expect, and we quickly become disillusioned at the lack of opportunity. We then look for our next job, hoping for some improvement and greater responsibility. We find a similar role at slightly-better pay, and slightly-better responsibility. Unfortunately, this does not solve the underlying issue. Over time you resign yourself to understanding this as the world of work.
If this is something similar to what you are currently experiencing, Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Were the expectations you had on the working world real?
Before starting our first job, we did a day or two of work experience and looked at the cool offices and think how exciting and fun this stuff must be. Before graduating, we red job adverts talking about jobs that are ‘dynamic’, ‘exciting’, with accompanying descriptions of glorious colleagues who you bond with over ping-pong tables and after-work socials.
We saw our parents, working in one job and slowly moving up the organisation through loyalty. We also studied, and studied to further honours than our parents and grandparents. We are often told that we will be the next Prime Minister or CEO. This does not consider that 42% of the working age population is a graduate in the UK.
All these experiences shape our expectations of work. In reality, the world of work is often an ongoing execution of tasks, week in, week out. At times it can be fun, but mostly it is rigid, boring and far less exciting than any job adviser will ever tell you. Whilst we expect that the world of work is meritocratic, it is often anything but. office politics, weird working cultures and dubious practices can be a real shock to the system, particularly when we work twice as hard as the person who gets that promotion.
The expectations that we had of the world of work were extremely different to the reality. It’s okay to be shocked by this. Give yourself time to reassess.
What do you enjoy?
We start our job, wanting to impress. We take on whatever task we can to demonstrate our worth, no matter how menial. We hope that by showing our ability to deliver we will be given more responsibility. In reality, we soon become known as ‘printer-guy’ and look enviously at our more experienced colleague who has learnt to keep their head down when any new ‘opportunity’ comes up. We slowly learn to follow their lead.
Have you stopped to ask yourself what you actually enjoy? Perhaps there was that day the person in HR was sick so you had to handle the records. As it turned out you liked it much more than you expected. However, they returned a week later so in your job you’ll probably not get that opportunity again. Have you spent time exploring why you enjoyed it, and what this could mean for you and your career?
Give yourself time to genuinely reflect on the things you have enjoyed within work, even if it was different from what you expected before starting. For me, before starting my job the idea of HR sounded very boring, in the end I’ve gotten further involved and passionate about Diversity and Inclusion as I understood the importance of it to an organisation.
Remember, finding a job that you enjoy matters. For your own success and happiness.
What do you really want to be doing?
Remember your conversation with your school or university job adviser? Back then, you perhaps dreamed of lofty jobs at the top of organisations,. Naturally your priorities have shifted since then, and the realities of the workplace are now pressing heavily upon you. Nonetheless, when was the last time you revisited what you truly wanted to do?
Remember that you are gathering really key data for yourself about the world of work which you did not have before. Having worked in a job, you may realise you don’t actually particularly like it, or more likely you may have found a new area of interest that you never heard of before.
Remember to regularly revisit what you want to be doing, and it is okay if this changes. In fact it probably will.Adapting your aims and ambitions to the reality of the workplace is the only way it can be realistic, and it is often what more and more people end up doing. For some, this means slightly tweaking their specialisation (e.g. moving from sales to marketing), for others it could be as grand as realising they much prefer helping people and running workshops, so they end up leaving their office job to become a yoga teacher. For the latter person, this certainly was not part of their conversation with their career counselor at school, however they are now much happier than in their office job
What is actually most important to you?
We hold degrees at great expense, along with continuous messaging about ‘making a difference in the world’. Naturally, we expect our careers to be a crucial aspect to our lives. We presume we need to move to the big city, leave behind friends and family and put up with lower living standards to make it happen. Perhaps this leads us to take up a tiring job with a long commute, and we are often tired to meet with friends after work. We haven’t been to the gym in weeks.
Our lives are one big opportunity-cost. By pouring your effort particularly into your career, you are reducing your chance to put your energy into other things you enjoy. Some are willing to make the large sacrifice of career above all else. But for many, there are things that are more important than the job. Your task is to figure out what really is your priority in life. It is for you to figure this out, and no one can decide this for you.
You are not going to get everything you want in life, so it is better to put your efforts into the things that are most important for you, and live without the things that are less important.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I hope this article helps you.
