Differences!

A year back I told myself 'I am starting a race on a new track after a long time. Corners and turns may be different. I will just classify differences as different and stay away from associating value judgments with them.'

Have I been successful in my attempts?

I was successful in the first few months. I noticed differences. I discussed them out. At places I could make environment adopt to my style/needs. At other places i had to understand the environment and eco-system. There were instances when I didn't have an immediate resolution but a solution seemed possible in near future.

 A year down the line, a few differences have become sticky issues. There are certain places where priority of values for environment and for me is different. There are a few places where I perceive environment to be of a certain type but other stake holders don't seem to perceive it so -probably they are don´t see what I see.

How do I handle this situation? I am sometimes tempted to classify these sticky differences as bad. But then I hold on to my initial stance- ´what's different is just different. It's not necessarily bad!´

I think it's time to revisit differences map I had created a few months back. I then need to figure out my coping strategy- how exactly am I going to cope with some of the value priority differences that I encounter at work.

I remember what Charles Handy had said in one of his books - we rely on a faulty assumption that the organization will serve all our needs

It's time to think creatively again and use Handy's inverse doughnut philosophy.

 

-
Sourav

 

 

A Meaningful Life!

So what should our focus be: Work or Life? Do we live to work or do we work to live?

Maybe we need both. Work and Life are integral parts of our existence and hence probably the focus on ‘Work- Life balance’.

But then why do we separate work and life? Are we saying that work has no life and life has no work?

I disagree! Some year’s back I realized that work and life are intertwined and inseperable. Why do I say so? Well, I’ll probably talk about that in a different post.

Let me devote this post to a journey I have been living through over last year. A journey best described as ‘There is more to life than work and life’.

Life is not all about working hard and partying hard/enjoying to the fullest.

But that requires us to first relook at the definition of work and what we expect from it.

We have our own preferences, interests, and aspirations. We look at work as a platform which would provide us/allow us to completely express ourselves or be ourselves. Is that a reasonable expectation? We play a certain role at work and that role may not have the scope for us to do work which we find ‘complete meaning’ in.

Charles Handy talks of an inverse doughnut. We have an inner circle which is our work, but we also have a series of outer circles which represent the other things that we want to do. I like the way he verbalizes it ‘What work would you be willing to do at ‘zero’ cost/salary?”. These ‘zero costed’ set of work would constitute the outer circles of the doughnut and provides significant opportunities for us to do meaningful work and grow.

So there are two questions which we need to ask ourselves:

• At work, what work do I want to do a) beyond my KPI’s?, b)that doesn’t necessarily furthers my career growth?
• Beyond work, what work do I want to do even though I may get zero money for it or maybe to have pay some money out of my pocket to do that work?

We can be nostalgic our past, build for our future, but we can create only in the present. Are we creating enough in the present to feel that we are leading meaningful lives?

As a manager, what we can do is probably sensitize our team members to the question “What all would you want to do for zero salary or non-monetary benefit?”. We may not get an answer straight off but atleast we have got our team members to start thinking about what gives meaning to them.

-

Sourav