Your Life's Work
Know yourself: The first move toward finding the perfect job
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Bob D. Mcdonald & Don Hutcheson
If you don't know yourself, you're sunk.
This is a central theme of the Lemming Conspiracy, which says people let systems control their lives and careers if they don't know themselves and don't have a clear idea of what they want their lives to be.
The result can be devastating, for individuals and companies. You can lose productivity and change jobs without finding what you're looking for. Companies lose valuable people and work ineffectively and inefficiently against people's natural abilities.
Harriet, for example, was at the point of quitting her job. Every night she went home so stressed she had a hard time relaxing. She complained about it constantly to her husband and friends. She didn't know what else she would do, but she couldn't keep doing what she was doing.
Until six months earlier, she had loved her work. She started work for a property development company five years ago and had risen steadily in the firm.
She built a strong reputation for rock-solid management of several properties and liked the sense of building value in real estate and in business investments.
Six months ago, she took charge of a restaurant her company had acquired. The restaurant made money, but was not an outstanding success. Harriet liked the people she worked with, but even on her first day at the restaurant, she went home with a headache. That headache was her companion for the next six months.
She tried analyzing her job. She tried to bring some system into running the restaurant. But every time she sat down to go over the orders for the past year, she was interrupted within minutes by a new crisis. She felt she could not even get to what she thought of as her basic job.
The restaurant plunged ahead, not losing money, but not showing much improvement. In every other job Harriet had in the company, she was markedly successful. Now she felt like a failure.
Problem-solving styles
Harriet decided to go through The Highlands Program to try to figure out what she might do other than her job. She found out she was working against her natural abilities.
Harriet's natural abilities made it easy for her to plan and systematize. She had the logical problem-solving ability Highlands calls "concept organization." She could analyze a problem, figure out the logical steps to a solution, create a plan and a timeline and direct others on how to carry it out.
This was how she typically tackled problems at work, and it was how she had succeeded in other jobs. When she tried to use this same problem-solving style to manage the restaurant, however, she nearly drove herself crazy -- and everyone who worked with her.
Harriet also systematically looked at her skills and experience, her personality and her interests. Each of her previous jobs had involved organizing many elements and people, priorities, materials and resources. She liked doing that and did it well because none of it seemed like an emergency to her.
When emergencies happened at her other jobs, she consulted her planning chart for the right priority or answer. With the restaurant, there was always a crisis and no plan. She tried to work the way she typically had in the past, and the result was a disaster, at least for Harriet.
When a cook didn't show up or a customer complained or they ran out of onions for the main course, she had to make up a solution on the spot. Harriet realized she hated this way of working.
Working against abilities
When she looked at it this way, the answer to her dilemma seemed obvious. She wasn't going crazy, having a midlife crisis or becoming lazy or stupid with age. She was working against her abilities, and what she was expected to do had no relationship to anything she had done in the past or anything that fit her interests or personality.
She took this information to her boss and showed him what was wrong. The job she was doing required an ability called "classification," a quick, nonlogical, nonlinear problem-solving ability. People high in this ability love being handed a new, thorny problem.
When Harriet was handed a new problem at the restaurant, she tried to think about it, figure out a logical solution and a plan to keep it from happening again. By the time she had done this, five new problems arose.
Harriet got to change her job to one that fit her skills, experience, personality and interests. How? Because she figured out specifically what those factors meant for her, and she carried around a clear, specific picture of the kind of work and the kind of roles she did best, and why.
By luck or design
She got out of the pit of despair the restaurant had become for her and recommended someone who could do the job well. Within the next 18 months, she avoided two positions that would have landed her in a similar mess and accepted one she knew would be right for her.
Getting to do what you do best is not a matter of luck. It's a matter of knowing who you are. Until you understand this about yourself and have a very clear, specific picture of it, landing in the right job is a matter of luck.
Hutcheson and McDonald are the founders of The Highlands Program, a nationwide life and career-planning service based in Atlanta, and the authors of "The Lemming Conspiracy." Write, fax or e-mail (strategies@businesschronicle.com) Your Life's Work c/o Atlanta Business Chronicle. Their column appears twice-monthly.
Latest News |
