Corporate Idealist

photo credit: sunsets_for_you

Last night, my wife and I received our first baby blanket for our daughter who arrives in January. It immediately got me thinking about an old, colorful blanket I had as a child. It had a picture of Snoopy on it, and while I did not need it to fall asleep every night, it was a must-have for Saturday morning cartoons or story time in the middle of the afternoon.

Whether it’s a pacifier, a stuffed animal, or a blanket, kids have security devices that help normalize their rapidly changing worlds. Adults have networks, expensive items they own, or careers. Or not.

In a conversation I had this week with a freelancer, he told me that he believes he’s more secure on his own than he is with a salaried corporate gig. I see his point – he’s at the mercy of his own skills and his ability to find new business rather than depend on someone or something else to make sure he still has enough work to do.

Then, I read this beauty by the very talented Carlos Miceli. He reminds us:

Job security may be the worst goal you can set for yourself.

The concept is outdated. If it ever existed, it was way too long ago.

Too much randomness rules our lives to aim for any kind of perpetuity.

He’s got a point. But so do those people who find a job they love working for someone else, reaping the best possible scenario of security or stability.

So the issue isn’t whether you should start a company or go work for one. The issue is what makes you feel most secure. Is it a salaried job somewhere you can climb the ladder? Is it hanging out your own shingle? Is it in teaching others how to make that decision?

Where do you feel most safe and sound when it comes to work?

photo credit: roland

In 1997, Columbia / HCA was investigated for fraud relating to Medicare and Medicaid and paid a settlement of $1.7 billion, which was, according to the Wikipedia entry on HCA, at that time the largest fraud settlement in US history.

Having worked at HCA in the early 2000s, I personally learned of the measures that had been put in place within the company since that time to prevent future violations or misdoings, partly mandated by the settlement and partly instigated by HCA itself: primarily, there was a universal Code of Conduct which all employees were required to review annually, and an Ethics and Compliance department with a tip hotline for anyone who observed any violation or potential violation of that Code of Conduct.

I bring this up because one of the statements I heard a few times during my years at HCA from some of the company’s top leaders had the ring of a lesson hard learned: they advocated telling all you know, as soon as you know it, to anyone who should know.

An article in HarvardBusiness.org about The Right Way to Manage Surprises reminded me of all this the other day. The first suggestion in the article was this:

“1. Don’t wait so long to tell (or to ask.) It was 1998. I had only reported to Ken Chenault, our CEO and Chairman, for about three or four months at that point. I was managing our US corporate travel and commercial card businesses. And I had a little problem. It was called the Asian Financial Crisis. Remember that? I can still feel the puddle of sweat on the middle of my back as I told Ken in September I was going to miss my numbers for the year. But I’ll also never forget his response. He said, ‘Ed, you’ve done all the right things to deal with the issue but next time, don’t wait so long to tell me. We have more options if you tell me earlier.’ He handled the situation with grace and I learned a lot about leadership. Tell early. Ask often. Get surprises out in the open as soon as you can. That way you move beyond shock, can focus on action, and work to get closure. “

It often seems that there horrible consequences to coming forward with bad news, but leaders certainly need to know when something has gone wrong. The situation will likely only get worse with delay. And yet it takes a brave soul to march into the CEO’s office and ruin his or her day.

What suggestions do you have for being the bearer of bad news? What advice do you have for leaders receiving bad news? Tell us in the comments.

photo credit: *Zara

I’ve been thinking about happiness at work lately. Having started my own company just about six months ago, and being happily busy and productive, the relationship has been obvious to me between doing something you love and being happy at work. Duh, right?

But it’s more than that: there’s a feeling of empowerment in having chosen my occupation rather than letting it choose me, and being busy with work that I feel good about. I mean, that’s not earth-shatteringly novel either, I realize, but the difference is huge: I went from being a passionate advocate for doing the right thing in multiple environments where that made me a pain in the CEO’s butt to now being a passionate advocate for doing the right thing as CEO of my own company.

Realistically, not everyone is going to start their own company, or will even want to, but we all still need to find happiness. So how do you reconcile happiness with long days doing work you sometimes may not love?

Coincidentally, in some of the blogs I read regularly for inspiration, I ran across a theme this week pertaining to work and happiness.

Gill Corkindale in HarvardBusiness.org had a piece on When Work Doesn’t Make You Happy that addresses that very question, and finds that choice, to the extent that we have it, is key:

“It all comes down to choice, and this is where I believe happiness lies. In choosing — as far as you are able — what you want to do and how you will do it. While not all of us can choose our work and colleagues, we can all choose how we approach things — with an open, optimistic, and positive outlook or with a frustrated, irritated one.”

In a somewhat similar (but perhaps more direct) vein, Jason Seiden, in a piece called Screw Your Career Path. Live Your Story, advocates embracing the surprises in life and finding your true self in the way you live out your choices:

“It’s time, as individuals, to remember that we are each protagonists in our own stories—not fictional ones, either, but real, live, actual, here-I-am-in-the-flesh-stories. [...] Only protagonists can know surprises, friendship, obstacles, twists, victories, villains, daring, love, temptation, loss, luck, setbacks, choices, laughter, tears… only protagonists can know success.”

And finally, from the managerial perspective, SmartBlog on Workforce covered the happiness-productivity connection in a piece called 3 ways to maximize your workers’ happiness — and performance:

“The secret to maximizing performance is to create an environment in which your employees are happy. A happy employee is highly engaged, flourishing and has achieved an acceptable work-life balance.

We know that high employee engagement leads to high performance. Recent studies by the Corporate Leadership Council, Towers Perrin and Development Dimensions International, show that a highly engaged workforce results in a 20% improvement in employee productivity, a 50% reduction in unplanned attrition and a 23% increase in customer satisfaction.”

It’s as if there’s been something in the air to make us all think along the same lines.

What about you – have you been thinking about the link between happiness and meaningful work, or between happiness and productivity, or perhaps the three-way link between happiness and meaningful work and productivity? What conclusions have you come to, different from what we’ve quoted above?

photo credit: Dennis Wright

Peter Bregman has a really insightful piece called To Get More Done, Slow Down in HarvardBusiness.org:

This life is a marathon, not a sprint. Most of us don’t go to work for 20 minutes a day, run as fast as we can, and then rest until the next race. We go to work early in the morning, run as fast as we can for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, then come home and run hard again with personal obligations and sometimes more work, before getting some sleep and doing it all over again.

[...] Not an athlete in the world could sustain that schedule without rest. Most athletes have off-seasons.

So if we’re running a daily marathon, it might help to learn something from people who train for marathons.

[...] Here’s what I learned: if you want to run a marathon successfully without getting injured, spend four days a week doing short runs, one day a week running long and hard, and two days a week not running at all.[...]

And when we do take the time to rest, we discover all sorts of things that help us perform better when we’re working. Inevitably my best ideas come to me when I get away from my computer and go for a walk or run or simply engage in a casual conversation with a friend.

I quoted a lot because I love the way the common sense of it builds, one piece upon the last. It’s not a unique observation, nor particularly novel, and it ain’t rocket science. But it does bear repeating and reinforcing.

What I think is interesting about this idea of slowing down is that it’s not so much that you get more done, as the title of his piece suggests, it’s that you accomplish more. Subtle difference, that, but I think a powerful one: when you take your time getting your work done, you tend to do the most meaningful stuff naturally because you don’t have time for all the trivia.

At least that’s what I find. It’s easy to get caught up in a crazy-hectic, run-around frenzy trying to keep up with my email inbox, my phone calls and voicemails, my to do list, my face-to-face meetings, my IM client, and more often these days, the work-related stuff that comes in via my Twitter direct messages and Facebook messages. When I quiet those inputs and choose my focus, I tend to gravitate towards the weightiest task; the one that’s going to have the biggest reward. Whether that’s a proposal that’s due or a presentation I need to give, my instincts know what to do when the volume of the chaos is turned down and the pace slows down with it.