These days everybody from the car dealer to self help books give advice that you should do what you love to do. In finishing Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, I was struck by the theme throughout the book of the importance of having hope that you will find happiness in life. When you give up, you become old and ugly. And a phrase that sticks with me is “the rust of repetition” from Gabriel Garcia Marquez memoir Living to Tell the Tale. This isn’t something I want to become – rusty, old or ugly.
A few conversations yesterday touched on these themes. One was talking to a recruiter about his craft and the importance of making your resume interesting enough that they want to talk to you. My point was that whatever you’re hired to do – unless it is a very strict job description, like creating software code – you will come into the company with the teaser that got you there and then contribute in a way that you aren’t able to articulate. This applies to management type positions. That is why it is so hard to describe yourself and why they say chemistry is so important and now behavior style interviewing is a way to tease the real person out.
Another conversation was with a colleague talking about a book his wife is reading (a VP at a large, successful local company) The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tommorrow’s Employees by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd. We spoke of the new classifications that are being created for different generations – in chronological order (amongst many others) :
- Traditionalists
- Baby boomers
- Generation X
- Milleniamists
- 20/20
The idea is that each group has something in common that distinguishes them from each other and that you could use these cues to find the best way to communicate or motivate them.
Of course, we don’t fit into little boxes which is why the job descriptions don’t work well for anything that falls out of the narrow task oriented jobs.
Also, on a personal note, in evaluating what I’m good at - I tend to come into a company and do the things that others don’t want to do – not because I’m the janitor but because I like the challenge of tackling the hard problems. Also, they happen to be long standing problems that have been hanging around. I think it started because as a woman in a man’s profession, I couldn’t go head to head with the men, so I took up the things that nobody wanted to do. But after awhile I realized that I like the challenge of taking something so complicated (whether it is people problems, how to get departments to work together or solving a technical problem like finding equipment to repair scratches on conductive surfaces) that nobody else wants to do it.
For example, at one company they wanted to build their own printed circuit boards for a decade and nobody could get it done, but I did. I bought used inexpensive equipment and set it up, trained and got it going. Then I moved on. In another situation, I came into a dysfunctional team (a few times this has happened). This isn’t one of my favorites but it falls into the same category. I had to evaluate the people, their skills and how they fit with the needs of the company, and then manage to change the staff (some left, got fired, etc.) and bring in new talent and build a good relationship to go forward.
What problem is waiting for me to solve now?
If you’ve read my blog at all, you see that eventually I bring the analysis to some kind of spiritual orientation, so I tend to look at things from a cosmic perspective.
Is this because I’m a babyboomer or because I was born to a religious family or because of my ethnic background or the month and year I was born in?
We will never know but it’s all about expanding how we look at things and not trying to have “one size fits all” and not to reject people who don’t fit into the box. They might be the one who makes it all fit together.