There is a a major reorganization going on in my company. We can look at it as white space for new opportunities. But it’s pretty threatening.
Over the years, I have had to cut many people. It’s probably the least appealing aspect of my job, next to but maybe not close to the annual ritual of setting employee ratings. It’s also very hard on my managers who have to go along for the ride. But as I tell them, we have a choice to play the company’s line, or not, and if we don’t, they’ll bring in someone else who will.
To some extent my job is to push back, try to bring some “sanity”. But being an utmost believer in free will, I cannot deny that the company itself has the right to define how it wants to operate, with what expense levels, what geographies, what capabilities. Not everything my managers want to do is crazy, by any stretch. For the most part, I find management to be thoughtful and well intended. But of course it’s very easy to forget the human aspects of all of this from a distance. I think my job is to articulate consequences and provide alternatives, but ultimately I cannot cover the sun with my thumb and reality is what it is.
At least annually I give my group the “free agent” speech, where I tell them we are all employed at will and we should approach our careers with a basket of capabilities mentality. Our best bet for success is to stay fresh with our employability, learn new things and be ready for action no matter what the circumstances bring. I hear through the backchannels that many hate this speech. I know. It’s hard to absorb those truths.
It’s raining in NY today. How many of you dear readers actually love the rain? I’m sure just a few. In fact, when I look at my own series of beautiful inspiring images, most of them are sparkling sunny blue skies (just a couple of gray skies). How many of us wake up and say “yay, it’s raining today”?? But on the other hand, which one of us has ever been able to stop the rain? If anyone has the perfect “rain dance” or “dry dance”, write me and if it works, you won’t be disappointed with the fee I pay you.
Maybe we are genetically predisposed to like certain aspects of reality, such as colors, shapes, smells, etc. Also, we are prewired to get stressed out about uncertainty. We tend to weigh “negative” outcomes much more heavily than “positive” outcomes and if a situation has the chance of being equally negative or positive, we will hate facing it. For us to embrace risk and uncertainty, we need to clearly see how the benefits massively outweigh the costs.
Clearly there are some survival aspects to preconditioning and genetics. But much of our preferences is cultural, learned, ingrained by a lifetime of viewing things in a particular way. We have been brought up with a mentality of entitlement. And the reality is that there is very little if anything to which we are entitled. Particularly, jobs in the US are not something to which we are entitled. We live employment at will. We cannot be discriminated against by certain protected statistical categories, but other than that, anyone’s job is ultimately fair game and that’s true from the top, down to the file room.
Dear readers, the point of all of this is to say, shit happens as much as wonderful happens and we can’t control it. It may snow in NY tomorrow. It’s April. But we all have choices we can make day in and day out, particularly about who we are and how we interact with the world. We can be serial whiners or a ray of sunshine. We can speak up, or not. We can be frustrated bullies or equanimous gray beards. And once we choose our responses, we have to let go, detach from the outcome, in the certainty that in the end, all that matters is what’s inside each one of us.