Is Yours A Job, Career, or Calling?

June 28, 2010 by 29 Comments

Monday morning. How did it feel to get out of bed and anticipate another week?

Much of your answer will depend on how you choose to see the work you do.

Job

If you see your work as a job, you consider it primarily as something you do for money. That’s not to say that, at a level, you don’t enjoy it or don’t get along with some of your colleagues. But the chances are you have little real engagement to it.

What’s important is that you earn the money you need to finance your life.

When this job is done, you’ll hope to get another of the same. You live for the weekend, for holidays and to retire.

Career

Having a career means that somewhere along the way – at school, or university perhaps – you hit on a chosen field within which you wanted to work. A profession maybe like accountancy, or law. Or teaching, or science, or medicine, or business management.

Whatever, study and training have probably been an aspect of your journey to date. Progression is important; there’s a strong sense of the career ladder and you want to get as high up it as you can. In fact, a lot of your motivation is about getting more or better, whether that’s in the shape of salary or benefits or any of the other outward trappings of career success.

When your current position comes to an end, you’ll want a move that signifies progression or at least one that you can position as such on your CV.

Calling

When what you do for a living feels like a calling to you, work is its own reward. You turn up and do what you do because you love it. It means something to you beyond the here and now.

You bring something of yourself to the world, and the world needs it. Whether that’s your entrepreneurialism, or your unique writing voice; whether you’re finding the antidote for a serious disease or are developing the prototype for a new invention. Whatever, how you choose to do it will be pretty unique to you.

Sure, you want to be paid for your work, but that’s an outcome; a consequence. The primary thing is the work itself. In fact, you enjoy what you do so much and it’s such a part of you that the idea of retiring seems a bit strange to you.

So, Monday mornings, like any other mornings are other exciting days to work on your thing.

So, which is yours: Job, Career, or Calling?

Filed Under: Reinventing work, Work and life Tagged With: ,

A Month of Birthdays

June 25, 2010 by 38 Comments

Believe it or not, this blog is a year old this month. And it was my birthday yesterday. As you read this, I’m easing back for a few days, basking in my gratitude for this last amazing year.

Join me in a slice of virtual birthday cake and indulge me as I share with you some of the highlights.

Creating

I started blogging because, simplistically, I thought it would bring together two passions of mine: my love for writing, and my thing about the role work plays in creating meaning in people’s lives.

In tandem I was ready to build more of a practice of clients who came privately to me, as opposed to having been referred and paid for by corporations, with all of the strings that tended to be attached. That meant building brand new networks.

In the beginning I had only an intuitive sense of what I could do with the blog. But the energy and enthusiasm I unleashed in myself just by starting it was reason enough to keep going.

I was a novice to the technical side of things. Still, I hungrily taught myself the basics of WordPress, as challenging in the beginning as that was. I also threw myself into learning about the wider social media world. As someone who’d done business in a traditional way for years, I felt like I’d stepped off my safe planet onto some fourth dimension, of immense potential.

Suddenly social media was opening doors I could never have imagined. If only, to begin with, in my own head.

Search for meaning

Offline it used to be pretty easy. My networks knew that I was the “go to” coach for the kind of stuff I do. Offline you don’t have to be so sharp: people know what you do and your experience speaks for itself.

But how on earth do you articulate that online to people who don’t know you from Adam?

Attempting to get clarity, I searched around in my niche and found a few terrific blogs and bloggers. Pam Slim’s Escape From Cubicle Nation is great for those wanting to set out in a entrepreneurial direction. Scot Herrick’s Cube Rules has terrific advice for people dedicated to sticking with their office jobs. In the beginning I put out some thought pieces, both for those who were thinking of quitting their jobs, and those in employment alike. I knew I wasn’t really hitting the nail on the head or being totally, authentically myself. But I had to search for my own voice and my own angle post by post.

Meantime, I was so convinced that social media was going to take my work in a new direction – and one that would allow me to work more from home – that my other half and I decided to move out of London. He doesn’t need to be in town, and I was concerned that having The City on my doorstep would tempt me to default of more of the same. So in October we took our courage in both hands and took up home in a 300-year old converted cottage in the Chilterns. Big change, but ultimately such a joy.

Focusing down

Moving house really did mean that I had to up the ante on the blog. By Christmas, I understood the whole blogging and social media thing so much better and so could begin to set targets for my business based on using it.

By then too, I was able to articulate for myself that my offering is about coaching and inspiring professional people to work and live on their own terms. I was starting to really get that my difference was in supporting people’s own process, rather than telling people what to do. Correction, I was starting to be brave enough to say that.

Additionally, I could see that there was a wave of people at work who tended to be more my kind of client than any other. They were those who were consciously directing their own lives and questioning the role of work within it. And in February, I put some of these thoughts out in my post on The Silent Rise of The New Work Pioneer.

I also started to get braver about putting my personality across, and wrote a real piss-taker in my How To Make Sure You Never Get Aheadpost. Now that was fun!

The clearer and more focused I got, and the more confident about putting it out, the more the comments and retweets came. More than that, the better I got to know and connect with people in and around social media, the stronger these networks and connections have become.

Whilst in the beginning an intuition drove me, I’m now motivated by the clarity of my vision and sense of direction.

Leveraging

So, things are now at a point where coaching prospects and clients are starting to come through the blog, both directly and indirectly. In addition, I’ve just run my first workshop, was very happy with the outcome, and am ready to start adding that as a product, which I’ll be running from September.

Of course, there’s more development to come yet. The New Work Pioneer Manifesto needs PDFing and sending out. There’s a book to be written from some of the material for The Worklife Makeover. There’s another, longer workshop in development, and next year I plan to add an Interactive Learning Environment to the site.

It’ll all get done. But the point is that I could not be building these things, and seeing them generate results without the foundation work that’s been done.

An interesting, but unexpected, twist has come this week when in just one day I had several requests for consultancy support for social media for coaching businesses. My own personal development coach has been telling me for months that I need to package an offering. I didn’t see myself adding this to my business portfolio. If I can help people light up their businesses in the way I have, and enrich their experience of work in a similar way, why wouldn’t I?

Well, I’m off to eat more cake and drink more champagne now, but as I chomp and slurp, I want to thank you guys for being around these last weeks and months. It’s been fabulous and I’m only looking forward to more.

Cheers!

Filed Under: Reinventing work, Work and life Tagged With: , , , ,

The Worklife Makeover Review

June 21, 2010 by 30 Comments

I ran my first The Worklife Makeover workshop last Friday. Sure, I’ve run workshops before, but it was the first time I’d done so under A Different Kind of Work’s banner.

I loved every minute of it, which at a level would have been success enough. But, as it happens, the workshop was successful on many more fronts.

Over the weekend, I asked myself what had contributed to it having achieved such a great outcome.

Great People

The most amazing group of people turned up. Some were readers, some bloggers, some clients, some friends and some a mixture of all four. Whatever networks had brought us together initially, I realised after that I had a mutually trusting and respectful connection with each of them. There was, for me, some magic in that.

Everyone who said they’d be there turned up. I had zero drop-out. Quite unheard of. They all came with the expectation that they were there for an experience and so they got it.

One of the key contributing factors to the day was, then, the power of relationship, and the solid foundations that gives to doing impactful self-development work.

Belief

As the people who were there on Friday will testify, belief is a big theme of mine!

Looking back, I know that I went into the day knowing that it would be great. In fact, I’d designed, developed and planned the whole event on that basis. That indeed it was so reinforces to me the power of operating from that place.

Play

I ran this version of the workshop as a pilot and was quite upfront with people about just that.

Taking any pressure off of myself to need to get it right freed up space in me to relax, play and be in the moment. In other words, I made it okay for myself just to be.

Venue

The room I chose for the event was awesome. I wanted a venue where people could gather in what would feel like a comfortable front room. It needed not to be some mediocre training room with a board table and bottom numbing chairs.

Charlotte Street Hotel excelled on all fronts. A beautiful room and immaculate, inobtrusive service simply and elegantly set the stage for the work we were doing.

Presence

Last week was an odd week for me in one major regard: I could not write to save myself. Luckily, with the benefit of the insights I’d had the previous week, I didn’t force it.

My sense now is that I was somehow gathering up my creative energies for the workshop. I reflect that so much of what makes a difference in my work is, well, me. Yes, my session had structure and content. But it was being worked around people’s real, burning issues. There’s no amount of mental preparation you can do to be with that. I enable the shifts because something of my presence in the moment facilitates it.

That requires me to be available.

And I was.

I could not be happier with the feedback I got. People emailing and Twittering. And, if you want to share some of the online buzz, head across to Eleanor Edwards and read it from her too!

Filed Under: Inner work, Reinventing work, Work and life Tagged With: , , , ,

What I Learned From My Broadband Blackout

June 11, 2010 by 34 Comments

I had the realisation this week that I’d started to see reliable high speed broadband as a basic human need. It came in the midst of a 72 hour period during which I had none.

I didn’t vote for Mr Cameron, but I was pretty happy to see on Channel 4 news that his government is pledging to plough £300m into enhancing the UK’s broadband networks.

After my days of feeling that a key pivot of my business had been entirely disabled, I can concur that the UK needs it to support its endeavours for new entrepreneurial growth.

So, you might expect that I’d be having a rant today about lost productivity, but you’d be wrong. As it turns out, there was some unexpected magic in my broadband blackout.

The Power of Surrendering

After hours of battling with my ISP to get the problem resolved, it became apparent that the whole thing was out of my control.

It crossed my mind that I could do offline stuff on my Mac: draft emails, blog posts and whatever else was on my To Do list.

It also crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, I was being directed to attend to other things. I’ve worked my butt off recently and have a busy summer, ahead of a break in August. Perhaps the right thing to do was nothing?

And that’s what I chose. So I put my frustrations aside and paid attention to what was present for me.

My brother and nephew have been around this week and so I was able to be with them in a way I may otherwise have not. We had some special moments of fun, warmth and connection. I finished reading The Tao of Pooh and got back into reading Ian Rankin’s Rebus. I hung out in a local (wifi-less) coffee shop. I watched TV and slept longer hours than usual.

It was like a thaw set in. All I can tell you is that I felt myself relax to a different level of being.

Trusting to People and Relationships

Fuelling my desire to fix whatever technical problems, was a feeling of responsibility; a wanting to be present for people I work and connect with remotely, and for actions that were in progress. Among them key things like my newsletter development, and artwork for my offline marketing materials.

Facing the reality that, without internet, I was unable to follow up in the ways I’d have logically wanted, I found myself knowing that people would understand. I decided to trust that the relationships I have with people are bigger than temporary communication problems.

People would get my real intentions, or they wouldn’t. I’d prefer that they did. But if they didn’t that was going to have to be too bad.

Allowing my own fallibility, and trusting to the goodness of people, assisted my process of letting go.

Realising Results Don’t Always Come From Pushing

When I was writing about the opportunities in the silence the other week, I hadn’t anticipated this silence of my own.

But during those broadband-free days, where a concern had been the impact on existing and new clients, something interesting happened. I had some good old-fashioned phone calls from new people looking for coaching support.

It did make me chuckle. I’d obviously freed up some energy in myself and people had found their way to me despite my internet problems. It was very affirming of something Nick Williams often says:

“There are greater forces at work than market forces.”

I end this week back online and on excellent form. Besides anything else, the time and space has amplified in me something I already knew:

Work is not just the action that happens out there in the world, the activity and the striving, it’s something that happens in here too. It’s a process that’s afoot at a soul level, in ways that we don’t always understand or even need to.

The synchronicity of the timing for me of all this doesn’t escape me either. Next Friday I’m running the first workshop I’ve marketed through this blog. I have the most awesome group of people coming and I’m very excited about being with them.

Of course, the topic of the workshop is worklife, central to which, I believe, is our being. Isn’t it interesting that, as I take my work to a new place, something shifts deeply in mine?

As I said, something magical happened this week.

Filed Under: Inner work, Thriving @ work Tagged With: ,

“I’ve Landed My Dream Job–Now What???”

June 7, 2010 by 3 Comments

Today I’m delighted to welcome Scot Herrick to the blog to tell us a little about himself, and in particular his new book, “I’ve Landed My Dream Job–Now What???”

Scot, tell us a bit about you.

Christine, thanks for this opportunity! In the business world, I’m the Principal of CubeRules.com and the author of “I’ve Landed My Dream Job—Now What???” I have a long history of management and individual contributor positions in Fortune 100 sized companies. Outside of the business world, I’m happily married to Kate and father to my stepson.

What inspired you to create your blog, Cube Rules?

Most of the business blogs out there focus on management or leadership or processes or some methodology (Lean, Six Sigma). Few focus on the professional individual, toiling away in the corporate cubicle, who wants to do a great job, enjoy doing the work and knowing how to best manage their work.

There are few tools to help them. Plus much of the advice out there (“10 ways to prevent a layoff!” “Use your resume to get the job!”) is simply not accurate from my managerial experience. Cube Rules was meant to fill this huge gap.

Who should be reading Cube Rules and why?

One of the great things you talk about here at A Different Kind of Work is the corporate experience you want to have as an individual. Your work focuses on an individual’s needs to match the work to the person. Cube Rules, on the other hand, focuses on the tactical ways to implement that great corporate experience on the job.

Cube Rules is about what it takes to land the job, be successful on the job, and have a satisfying career. So the articles and products provide the “nuts and bolts” ways of going about doing just that.

I’ve managed hundreds of individuals and very few know – and do – what is needed for success on the job beyond their job skills. Cube Rules can give a person the knowledge and tools to navigate the workplace.

How did your book come about?

It came about because of the same lack of focus on the individual when starting a new job. Most books talk about starting a new job from the “leadership” level – what to do the first 100 days in running a company, how to evaluate a board of directors and all that sort of stuff.

If you look for what it takes a professional individual working in a corporate cubicle to do when starting a job, you don’t find much. Except, of course, “you MUST be successful in the first 30 days on the job. Or else!” So what does “successful” mean? The book tells you how to go about getting to success.

What makes you believe that the first 30 days of a new job need such focus?

I’ll give you a great, true example. A company interviews candidates for a job and then ranks the candidates from one through whatever. They offer the first ranked candidate the job. The candidate makes one mistake – or is perceived as not getting how to do the work – and the company fires the candidate days into the job and offers it to the next ranked candidate on the list. When they find the perfect candidate, they stop the firing. The killer is that the person losing the job has to fight for unemployment because they were terminated “with cause…”

Now, while true, that’s extreme. But companies believe they need success from their new hires right out of the gate. You, starting a new job, need to get into the work and quickly integrate into the corporate culture. Otherwise, you risk losing the job or getting labeled as an “average” employee and having to break those perceptions. Once those perceptions are set, they are very hard to break.

If there was one piece of advice you’d highlight in particular from the book, what would it be and why?

I’ll provide two. One tactical piece of advice: Before you start the job, I ask that you determine how long your new job will last. Which is counterintuitive because you haven’t even started the job yet. But, no job lasts forever. Based on what you know before you start, will the job last two years before you are bored or three years before you are ready for a promotion, or eighteen months before the ending of the project…whatever. How long will the job last and why?

At the end of the 30-days, and armed with all the information you have found from your work, I ask that you re-evaluate how long the position will last. It will be a consistently moving target, of course, but when the time frame for finding a new job matches up with how long you think your current job will last, you need to start looking for a new gig.

Second, an attitude: the job has to be right for the way you work. The advice I give for the first 30 days is not only about you being successful in the new job for the company, but also determining if the job is right for you. The sooner you know the answer to the job being right for you, the sooner you can make adjustments in your approach to match the job to your needs.

The book is aimed at individuals. Shouldn’t businesses be paying attention to it to?

Yes, but most focus on simple “onboarding” where they ensure you have access to company systems and corporate benefits. They don’t look at all if the job is right for you and rarely focus on what management needs to do to incorporate your skills to help the company.

In fact, the whole onboarding process is something to evaluate about how the company treats employees. It is the first “company process” you encounter and how well that process is executed is your first hint about the management culture. I once started at a company where it took five weeks to get a computer so I could do my work. What does that tell you about management focus and execution?

I take the approach that if you are searching for the right job to match up with the right corporate experience you want to have, you’ll need to make the effort to ensure you learn about the work, culture, and management, plus determine if the job is also right for helping you do your best work.

What’s next on your agenda?

One of the actions I suggest in the book to do is a structured weekly review about the new job and what you should learn during the week (even if it takes more than a week!). I’m building some forms that help provide that structure. Plus, I’m working on a project that will hopefully help more people be successful in their job, not just when starting a new job.

What feedback would you like from readers here?

I’d love to hear what worked for you during the first 30 days of starting a new job, what didn’t work for you and how you solved what didn’t work for you. And, hey, I’ll answer questions about landing a job, starting a new job, or how to deal with the workplace as well.

And thanks again, Christine, for the opportunity. The work you are doing with the New Work Pioneer and building the right corporate experience for each person is really critical right now. Your advice in this area is a welcome addition to help people survive – and thrive – in the workplace.

If you’d like to follow Scot, you can do so on Twitter @scotherrick.

Filed Under: Guest posts, Reinventing work, Thriving @ work Tagged With: , ,

What Employers Need To Know Now

June 4, 2010 by 11 Comments

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that more people are quitting their jobs than being laid off for the first time in 15 consecutive months. Recent UK figures paint a similar picture.

The WSJ article reckons there’s two reasons:

First, there’s a glut of people who have sat out the recession in the relative safety of their current jobs, when they’d normally have been progressing their careers elsewhere.

Second, many people who have taken the brunt of tough cost-cutting initiatives, are now looking to greener pastures as a way both of voting with their feet, and moving on in their own lives.

No problems with any of that.

But, in tandem, I heard on my own grapevine last week that there’s been a sudden increase in the number of new Employee Engagement jobs in London. A quick look at those advertised online confirms that most of them are about trying to get some enthusiasm back into weary workforces.

As someone who has coached and consulted with some of the most successful companies in the world, I have to say that this seems to be a case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted.

Employers need to get the message that they can’t treat people badly and expect them to keep smiling

We’re not living in the early 20th Century any more. The world and society has shifted hugely since the first mechanistic concepts of people management were developed. People see themselves as having more choice. There’s a lot more consciousness in the system and people will exercise it to their own advantage.

Old paternalistic, command and control cultures are breaking down. People want to be treated as adults these days. They don’t want to be treated as recalcitrant children: lavished in good times; punished in bad. They want their personal power to be respected and valued.

If you manage staff, you can’t talk to them one day about how important it is for you to engage them, hearts and minds, next day unilaterally impose swingeing cuts, and not expect them to be angry about your breach of trust. These days they smell your spin at fifty feet.

Employers need to understand that damaging their workforces, means damaging their brand

I’m an advocate for the well being of people at work, whatever work they do. Work is more than just a cog in the economic machine. It’s a vital aspect of giving each of us a sense of purpose and direction in life. Businesses have a wonderful opportunity to engage talented, purposeful people, support them to thrive – and see their businesses thrive too.

Instead many – too many – continue to see their people mechanistically. Even if they’ve thought about “Employee Engagement” it gets managed as an initiative, rather than a living, breathing, vital part of business. It’s pumped out through town hall meetings and emails. The importance of the human, energetic relationship between managers and their staff gets missed.

Employers forget that their people have voices. That they talk to their friends about their experiences. That they write about them on social media sites. Hence others build a picture of what constitutes a “good” or “bad” employer in much the same way as they build a picture of a consumer brand.

Employers need to count the costs in both people and financial terms

They appear to be blind to the fact that there’s a wave of what they call “talent” streaming away from their organisations. That, indeed, many talented individuals are waving two fingers to the corporate world because they’ve had enough psychopathy to last them a life time.

This is not just a phenomenon fuelled by recession. As the Conference Board reported in January, Job Satisfaction Statistics have been trending downwards for 22 years.

But there’s a financial impact of all of this too.

Joe Light across at WSJ made a good guess at the financial cost of the turnover we’re starting to see as the job market eases off. He estimates that, at more senior levels, the bill is around 50% of each new person’s salary.

That’s not including the costs of paying for interim or consulting staff to cover key vacancies. Or the incremental recruitment costs from the bad will you inflict on putting extra stress on an already pressurised work team.

If you’re in the highly privileged position to be able to have people work for you, you might like to consider what that means going forward. You might like to connect with the reality that people have lives, that they have souls, that they care. That if you dare to provide the right kind of environment, they will bring these beautiful, human qualities to the benefit of your business.

My belief is that if employers adopt this kind of thinking, the rewards will speak for themselves. What do you think?

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Reinventing work Tagged With: , , ,