Thriving On The Job Important To Success
It’s not enough just to “survive” on your job.
“Surviving is about staying in place and hoping for the best,” said Peter LeBrun, career counselor and president of LeBrun Career Consulting in Chicago. “Thriving is about continually assessing where you are and taking steps to improve your job situation or making a change.”
LeBrun, who consults with individuals and corporations, warns that ignoring the awful reality doesn’t make it go away.
“Survivors often hang on too long,” said LeBrun, who has a bachelor of arts degree in sociology and a master’s in education.
“Sometimes, surviving is the best you can do. But it definitely will catch up with you.”
And when it does, you may find that you’ve wasted a lot of time being unhappy.
LeBrun cites the case of a 28-year-old factory employee who worked hard and improved his skills. But he still wasn’t promoted.
“He said he was frustrated because other people were favored over him,” said the counselor. “That could be true, but he finally saw it wasn’t the whole picture.”
The worker ultimately discovered, by asking, that management didn’t consider him a good candidate for promotion because he appeared to be inflexible, abrupt and not a good listener. He’s now working to change those perceptions - successfully.
An attorney, age 32, told LeBrun she hated her job. “For the past three years, she’s put up with feeling this way, but now she realizes she has other options and is looking into them,” he said.
“Thrivers” learn new things about themselves and then take action. “It’s up to you to be in the job that’s the best fit,” LeBrun emphasized.
To ascertain whether you’re “surviving” or “thriving,” the counselor suggests answering these questions:
Are you passed over for choice jobs or assignments?
Have you stopped learning new things in your job?
Do you frequently dread going to work?
If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, LeBrun suggests getting career counseling, talking to people in your company whom you respect and examining your needs.
“You don’t have to change jobs or careers right away, but even doing things differently where you are is a good beginning,” LeBrun said. “Take on more responsibilities, define your values, volunteer for new projects, ask for training, take outside courses.”
Thriving, he says, “makes you feel more secure in an insecure world and leads to more money and new opportunities.”
Just as workers must be concerned about their well-being, so must managers. And surviving change is the biggest challenge corporations face today if they want to thrive.
Insight into problems that businesses face in a time of wholesale staff reductions and the competition of a global marketplace is offered by Arie De Geus, a visiting fellow at the London Business School and a board member of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning.
De Geus is author of “The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment” (Harvard Business School Press, $24.95). In it, he describes two types of companies: the “economic” one, which exists to produce maximum results with minimum resources; and the “community” company, in which “optimization of capital is a complement to the optimization of people.”
Not surprisingly, De Geus, who for 40 years was a top executive at Royal Dutch/Shell, holds with the latter. “The company itself is primarily a community,” he writes. “Its purposes are longevity and the development of its own potential… Care must be taken…(in) defining membership, establishing common values, recruiting people, developing their capabilities, assessing their potential, living up to a human contract…” By “managing for longevity,” De Geus says companies, too, will not only survive but thrive.
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