Bamboo You

When Work Screws You

My earlier post on job security has been haunting me in the past few days as I get word from various friends of how their employers are screwing them. I'm tired of watching competent people with a desire to do good work get trampled under the boot heel of employers who seem oblivous to the dysfunctional ways in which they run their organizations. But I also recognize the economic realities of needing a paycheck. So how to make poor work environments bearable while you explore other options? I think the answer lies in shifting your understanding of yourself in relation to your employer.

Most conscientious people I know join an organization with the desire to do what's best for their employer. They recognize that they are being paid to help the company do it's work and they want to make their individual contribution to that process. The longer they work for the organization, the more deeply connected to its fortunes they feel and the more they  pour themselves into their jobs and into doing work to get the company ahead.

When the company is treating you well--essentially holding up their end of the bargain--I think this is the right thing to do. But many people seem to operate in this mode long past the time that they should. It's like being in a bad romance, where you keep giving yourself for the good of the relationship without recognizing that your partner is not doing the same thing. It seems to be particularly true for those people who "live to work, " as opposed to the people who "work to live."

As I watch more and more organizations NOT holding up their end of the employment contract, creating workplaces that make it virtually impossible to feel successful and competent, I begin to believe that we need to start thinking of our employers in different ways. Rather than always thinking about how we can do well for them, I think we need to start considering what they can do for us. Not in the sense of salaries and benefits (although those are obvious baseline issues to be addressed as well), but in exploring how we can wring from them every last opportunity for learning and growth that we possibly can.

Several years ago I was working with an employment and training program where we were helping dislocated workers find new jobs. One company that we worked with had horrible working conditions, poor pay but great training. Another company (same industry) had great working conditions and great pay, but wouldn't hire anyone who didn't have the skills and 6 months of work experience. The first company, not surprisingly, had very high turnover. We tried for months to get them to see that the pay and work environment were killing them, but they didn't want to hear it. Eventually we began to advise workers to go to the first company for six months to get the training and work experience they needed and then when they had used up the learning opportunities at the first company, they should apply for a job with the second. We helped a lot of people that way.

This is something you can do for yourself, too, if you can shift your way of thinking about your employer. My rule of thumb has always been to pay attention to what I love doing and to my strengths and to use my employer as a way to develop my skills as much as possible. If you begin to see work as a learning opportunity and a way to make yourself more marketable, then you can sometimes make the unbearable bearable for a while. The key is to know what you want to build in yourself and then to figure out how you can use your current employer to make that happen. I think there's tremendous satisfaction in learning how to use them before they've used you up. And it positions you well for that day you can go in and say "Thanks, but I'm moving on, now."

Poster from one of my favorite sites, Despair.com

The New Breed

A little article in Fast Company about the "new breed of programmers" got me thinking this morning about what Thomas Friedman has called "versatilists"--people who have a broad range of skills that are also very deep and highly developed.  And in the case of many jobs lately, it seems that these skill sets are in areas that we haven't generally considered to co-exist very well in a single individual.

Programmers (the subject of the article) are a prime example of this. Typically, the belief has been that you can get a person with people skills who isn't necessarily that great at programming or a programmer who has atrocious people skills. And according to many employers, trying to find someone with both has been a search for the Holy Grail. To this point, it seems that companies could get by with programmers who had social issues, but with the rise of social networking platforms like MySpace and Flickr, the demand for techies who play well with others has exploded. Says Fast Company,

"As such, standard tech job listings on cutting-edge sites like CrunchBoard or 37 Signals often call for "excellent communications skills" on top of LAMP, DRUPAL, AJAX and open source experience. They also co-mingle with listings for consumer insight directors, online audience managers and other marketing-like positions."

This development fascinates me, in part because I think that it has the potential to make work vastly richer and more satisfying to most people. I've often questioned the notion that workers are really as specialized as we've tried to make them be. I know tons of tech people who are very social (can anyone say D&D?) and I know a lot of social people who love to play around with technology. I think in the past, though, it has suited companies to be more narrowly focused, so they've designed jobs that were more specialized and compartmentalized and then expected workers to fit into the the neat little boxes they'd created.

As companies begin to see the synergies created by cross-breeding various strengths and capabilities from widely divergent areas of thinking, I believe that not only will we see some amazing developments in terms of products and services, we'll also create a work environment that is more rewarding for workers. I'd like to see more individuals push this envelope as well, working harder to develop some of the capacities in themselves that have seemed contradictory in the past. I think we'll all be richer for it.

The Bamboo Project Manifesto

A few days ago I was cleaning out some of my bookmarks and came across Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. I'm a big fan of manifestos. There's something revolutionary in them that I love. I also dig the idea of making a public declaration of my beliefs. It forces me to really think about what they are.

For several months now, I've been working with a partner, discussing the mistakes we see in how companies manage their people and the kinds of mistakes that people make in managing their individual careers. The world is changing more rapidly than we can really keep up and it seems to us that new things are required for how we all operate.

At any rate, through this blog and its companion, Bamboo Us (written by my partner) we intend to explore the issues that face both individuals and organizations in the 21st century (that sounds a little grand, actually). More to the point, we want to explore the ideas that can help us all work better and make work better in a changing world.

So our manifesto. . .(a work in progress and in no particular order):

1. Life is too short to focus on "overcoming your weaknesses." We have far more weaknesses than we could ever overcome anyway.

2. You should live a little bit of your future every day. Even if you're not sure what that future is, take a step toward it, no matter how small

3.  Life is more fun when you're on the right bus, sitting in your favorite seat.

4. Live your values. Know what they are, revisit them often and always seek to keep your life and your career in alignment with what you believe.

5. Change something small every day. It will help you learn how to take on the big changes. And sometimes it will help you avoid "big" changes altogether.

6.  Stop courting perfection. It's a myth and a lie perpetrated by those who would have you believe that you can control the world. You can't. So give it up.

7.  Build a career from your strengths and find ways to manage around your weaknesses. Then help others do the same.

8.  Embrace your mistakes. They will teach you far more than your successes.

9.  "Do what works. Kill what doesn't. Repeat." (borrowed from Seth Godin)

10.  Know the rules. Then break 'em and make up your own.

11. Let your experiences shape you, like water shapes the rocks over which it flows. Don't try to dam the water or divert it to another course. It will find find you. Let it do its work.

12.  When everything's going right, the universe is trying to tell you something.

13.  When everything's going wrong, the universe is trying to tell you something.

14. For the individual, professional development is a right, not a privilege. For an organization, it's an investment, not an expense. For everyone, learning is the bedrock of success.