How Taking Your Marriage For Granted Can Kill Your Career

June 17, 2011 by 13 Comments

Meet George.

He’s a fictitious client, but not that fictitious.

He’s a lawyer. At school he had the ambition of getting into a top university and doing a law degree. So, he got top A Level results, and is invited to do law at Oxbridge. He gets a first.

Along the way he meets Sophie who’s studying international business studies.

While still at university he sets his next goal: get hired by a top firm to do his professional exams. Being such a stellar candidate, the Magic Circle firms line up to offer him a place.

He accepts one of these and begins to see the next horizon of ambition opening up to him: get qualified so he can actually call himself a lawyer, become an associate of the firm, and then work his way up to be accepted into the hallowed sanctuary of the partnership.

While he’s grafting at the coal face, he asks Sophie to marry him. They have a big, expensive party. White dress. Beautiful photographs.

She’s working for an investment bank and they handcuff themselves to a mortgage for a bigger house that they can’t really currently afford, in a good part of town, knowing that their income can only grow.

The early years of married life are full. They’re both caught up in parallel achieving and, although they see little of one another Monday through Friday, it’s exciting and they share their sense of themselves as a successful, young career couple.

Then Sophie becomes pregnant. It was in the plan, and they’re both delighted. For a while she slow tracks her career to spend more time with the baby.

Meantime, George is working away. He has specialised in International Capital Markets and, if not pulling all nighters to meet the deadlines on deals, he’s travelling across Europe and The Middle East.

Baby number two comes along. And Sophie starts to have a different take on life. She enjoys motherhood and wants to be successful in work without having to follow investment banking career rule protocol. She wants to make work fit life for a change.

She hires a coach, quits the bank (they’re doing another cull so that she walks away with some cash), and sets up a niche business doing organic baby foods that she markets to her network of professional mothers.

Part of the life she now seeks is about spending more time with George and her children.

At which point, it starts to become apparent to her that George is not around much to spend more time with.

She tries talking to him about it.

“We can’t all run flaky businesses,” he says, “and one of us needs a secure income.”

Months and years pass. Nothing changes. George is missing his children’s first words, their first steps, their bath times, their funny little sayings, their first days at school, their first report cards.

Sophie tries talking again. She’s sad that he’s missing out and that his children are too. It would be great if he’d at least come to parent-teacher evenings with her.

But by now he’s been appointed as an equity partner and really does feel that he has something to prove.

“I need your support,” he says. “Not your criticism.”

Things continue as is. Or so it seems.

The first thing I know about any of this story is, in fact, a call from George’s HRD.

“He’s top talent,” she says. “But his performance appears to have hit a wall. His associates and peers are complaining about him, and his Managing Partner is concerned. We’ve all been very understanding, but there’s a finite period of time that our support for him can continue. I think he has some work life issues…”

Then, George himself is sitting in front of me.

“My wife, Sophie, left me,” he says and begins to unravel.

He has never questioned her or their marriage at all. They’ve been together forever, so he has assumed they always will be. Sure, he knew she was pissed at his hours, and his travel, and the dedication he puts into his job, but she’d known that this was his thing when they married. It had been hers too early on. It was unfair that she’d changed the game on him.

Now he’s embroiled in a different kind of legal battle. They’ve, of course, engaged their separate top divorce lawyers and are going through the painful minutiae of their lives. The children, money, property. Who gets what.

Yes, he’s aggrieved that she has up and left him.

But it’s only now that he confronts how important she and his children have been to him. He has hired a cleaner and the firm has a laundry service he can use. But it’s hardly the same as walking into an orderly home day after day. And he wonders whether he can offload his Waitrose online shopping to his PA or how else he’s going to ever return to the phenomenon of the abundantly full fridge.

And he’s seeing more of his children than ever now.

Because that’s the agreement the divorce lawyers struck in court. Which is as odd as it is sweet. Seeing them there, all by himself, in what has been the family home. Forming new relationships with them. Finding the words to say he loves them.

And with that he has lost the ability to oversleep at weekends to catch up on his energy. At least every other weekend, when he has them. Though, in any case, sleep is shot. There’s no such thing in his life as rest.

He has spent the first months since Sophie left in continued denial. Imagining she’d come back; that this was just some big protest to capture his attention. She has it, so why isn’t she returning?

Imagining too that he could wall off his broken heart when he went to work. But he can’t. His emotional upset spills over. Being exhausted, he can’t focus. His fuse is short and he snaps at the least little thing.

And the longer she’s away, the more reality is hitting him. Still, he struggles to understand just what’s happening to him.

He can’t believe that she says she no longer loves him.

He can’t believe the words that are being conveyed to him about his behaviour via his legal council.

Neglectful. Abandoning. Emotionally abusive.

He can’t believe that the courts are on her side.

“Of course my numbers are down,” he says. “How could they not be?”

His heart is no longer in the game and his head is scrambled.

“What’s the point?” he’s asking himself. “What has ever been the point?”

Good questions. Questions that I wish on his behalf he was not having to ask in retrospect.

And I suspect there’s going to be more pain yet for George before there will be answers. But even George himself, with the benefit of hindsight, can offer some reflections on how it could have been different.

Top of his list is that he didn’t listen.

“I just avoided what was going wrong. I imagined it was a phase and that it would go away.”

The moral of this tale? Don’t take your marriage or core relationship for granted. It should never be a finite thing. It needs to adapt and grow with one, other or both of you, and if it doesn’t you’re setting it up for failure. If you find communication difficult, confront that as early on as possible. Even seek out a relationship coach or counsellor to help you have the tough conversations that you might not otherwise have.

While you build your career and are learning the intricate skills that will allow you to advance and propel it, learn too what it takes to have a good relationship, and allow yourself to grow as a person and not just as a professional.

What about you? What other advice would you offer George? What lessons might you learn from him?

Creative Commons License photo credit: HikingArtist.com

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Work and life Tagged With: ,

Would Your Workplace Creativity Benefit From A Naughty Step?

June 13, 2011 by 5 Comments

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Neil Usher (@theatreacle on Twitter.) Part property professional, part performance poet, part parent. You can find out more about Neil at the end of the post.

So where do you do your thinking?

This post had its roots in some tweets between @ThinkingFox and @JulesJ85 where the former suggested that I might be on the naughty step, and the latter that we both might be. I responded that this location was where I did my best thinking!

I’ve spent almost twenty years designing workplaces, focussing on creating spaces that are motivating, enlivening, and that foster both interaction and focus. I’ve visited numerous great examples of the “latest thinking” in design, and hung out with those on the fringes of the profession such as psychologists and anthropologists, all to try and increase my knowledge and capacity to improve the design and build with each iteration.

Much to my immediate dismay, I recently concluded two things:

Firstly, that given a choice between the latest fast and chic IT kit and connectivity or a superb flexible workplace, I would choose the former. Human beings are amazingly and inherently adaptable and we can devise workarounds for the latter but in this day and age its hard to work around slow and cumbersome IT kit and infrastructure.

Secondly, that we all have our own special places to think that are – in the vast majority of cases – not the workplace. Effectively the workplace is used for everything else – and therefore everything but. The artificial just cannot compete with the unique and natural pull of our own creative essence.

Why is it that we find our inspiration in the gym, the shower, the pouring rain, the 65 bus to Kingston, the café, the splintered bench third on the left through the park gate, or the naughty step?

In the case of the last of these, I imagined that creativity was inspired by reproach. However a stimulus of any form may not always be required, the space may just be the spot that sparks creativity or lucid reasoning. I am not sure that there is a reason why, it just is – and there is nothing wrong with that.

However there are implications for workplace designers. We have to acknowledge that however much effort we put into delivering spaces to think and create, the occupants will always find their own special space, most often outside of this environment, regardless of what we do. It’s not easy realising that your opportunity to make a difference is fundamentally limited by human nature.

And just for the record, the idea for this post came to me on the number 23 bus between Oxford Street and Paddington. My workplace just provided the facilities I needed to write it down. ;)

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Neil Usher a global workplace manager, with nearly 20 years’ experience in a variety of sectors and countries. He writes today’s post in a strictly personal capacity and as such, to find out more about Neil, please visit his Theatreacle Blog or head over to Twitter and say hello.

Filed Under: Thriving @ work Tagged With: ,

The Shocking Truth About the Origins of Your Inner Work/Life Battle

June 10, 2011 by 10 Comments

Such a simple conversation.

I could have missed it in amongst all the others going on in my coffee shop one morning last week.

But I was sat pondering work/life issues for some new stuff I’m planning and was attuned to what went on.

A mother had come in with three children and was sitting chatting to another woman, with the youngest on her lap. The other two, on half term holiday, were playing around the baby’s pram, parked up a few feet from the shop door.

What struck me first off was just how well behaved they were in comparison to some of the café’s regular kids who can make the place look and feel more like a badly run crèche.

Just then a man who’d come in for a takeaway walked past and recognised the eldest child, a little boy. I make up the story that he was a school teacher. Or maybe the father of the child’s little friend.

“Hey, Thomas,” he said. “How you doing?”

“Fine,” Thomas said, clutching at the pram handle for confidence.

“You having a good holiday?”

“Yes,” the wee boy said.

“What you doing today?” said the man.

“Shopping.”

“You’re shopping, Thomas? What do you mean? For food, for…?”

“Shoes,” said Thomas. “I’m getting new shoes.”

“Lovely,” said the grown up. “What for? School, or play?”

Thomas mumbled the answer into his sweater, so I didn’t hear it, but the man did.

“Play?” he said “Oh, that’s great, Thomas. Well, enjoy your shopping.”

And with a smile and a wave to Thomas’s mother, he opened the shop door and off he went.

I sat there for a while and thought. The child couldn’t have been more than six years old and here he was already having work and life polarized for him in something so everyday as the shoes he was wearing.

I understand the need for children to be educated. I understand why, in the UK, for the most part at least, they wear uniforms.

But I’d never really thought before about how shoes could be so defining.

Yet we’ve all been there as children. Shoes for school; shoes for play. The styles required for one, not always okay for the other. Bits of ourselves getting locked away as we learn to conform, as we learn to compartmentalize ourselves into our various sub-components.

No wonder when I sit with coaching clients decades later, helping them unravel their work/life dilemmas that they struggle with the prospect that work and life are not indeed different things.

“It’s about your whole life,” I say. “Of which work is part. It’s about integration. Not separation.”

And sometimes they get there. But often, too, it takes time. That split between who and how you can be in one setting versus another is hard-wired from the beginning.

Which now has me thinking about all the other subtle ways in which we set up work/life splits. And what we can do to make it different.

What kind of things do you notice? How would you make things different to allow more work/life integration?

Photo credit: Richard Tenspeed Heaven

 

Filed Under: Reinventing work Tagged With: ,

How To Be Uber Successful By Watching Your Tongue

June 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Sukh Pabial from pabial.wordpress.com.

If there’s one thing I think makes a big difference in the way someone works it’s how they express their self awareness, and to whom.

This isn’t restricted to leaders in our businesses. Authenticity is a much-used word in our reading material. That, together with “being genuine”, “emotional intelligence”, “high value thinking”, and many other interesting buzz words.

What I appreciate though is someone’s ability to acknowledge a shortfall, and express it, to the right person in the right way.

What do I mean by this? Let’s look at what I don’t mean!

Think about someone at work who moans about their work load. They not only moan about their work load, they also moan about their commute. They not only moan about their work load and commute, they moan about not enough support. They not only moan about their work load, their commute and not enough support, they moan about others in their team.

And it goes on. And on. Draining just reading it, isn’t it?

That’s a good example of what I don’t mean but how about what I do mean?

Think of someone at work who is discreet about who they talk to, and about what. I’ve seen really good – successful – people do this. And they do it well.

They understand that only certain people need to know certain information. It shows me that people have the desire and motivation to do better, for no other reason than that they know they can. That’s really heartening to see.

What can we learn from people like this?

  • They appreciate the value of discreet personal relationships.They don’t spill their guts to anyone that will listen. They take the time to get to know their ‘audience’ and carefully choose who, for them, is reliable and helpful.
  • They are open to receiving feedback and acting on it.This is so powerful. It is something we should all be taught how to do, yet only a small percentage will ever do it well.
  • They are highly self-critical.That’s why they’re so good. Because they recognise that they haven’t reached a height that is acceptable for them. This in turn means seeking advice and support.
  • They listen to what’s going on around them.That is, they take in information from a wide source. This feeds their minds with a lot of useful opinions and thoughts that they can take, digest and decide what needs to be done.
  • They have different avid interests.You can’t concentrate on only one thing and be consistently successful. You need a distraction which helps relieve your mind and exercise other muscles.

I’m sure you do things which are equally successful. But therein lies the other key – learning from others to improve yourself. What do you think?

Sukh Pabial writes and thinks about learning at pabial.wordpress.com. You can also talk Twitter with him (@naturalgrump)

image:studiostoer

Filed Under: Self Development, Thriving @ work Tagged With: ,

How Safe Is It To Use The “S” Word At Work?

June 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

No, it’s not what you think.

It’s the word “soul”.

But that’s the question Phil Bowermaster, of The Transparency Revolution was asking me about the other day when he interviewed me for BlogTalk Radio.

It’s pretty common in career parlance to talk about the self, or the whole self. But using the word soul, as I have done in my eBook, The 7 Most Soul Sucking Career Mistakes Ever (And How To Avoid Them), takes things to a different level.

And is that okay?

In Phil’s interview we touch on all kind of career related things. Like the major disconnects we can experience between our values and how we live and work, and how we can begin to close the gap.

Oh, and also, the role organisations play in cutting through what I call corporate mythology. And how their getting real is in everybody’s interests.

Anyway, without giving more away, here’s the link to the interview.

http://www.transparencyrevolution.com/2011/05/your-life-your-career-your-soul/

I’d love to get your reactions in the comments!

Filed Under: Reinventing work Tagged With: ,