Posted by Dave Lorenzo - Business Coach

As we approach the end of the year I know many of you will be assessing your current employment situation.  In many industries, year end is bonus time.  Typically, people who are looking to move on wait for their bonus payments and then they begin to look for another job.  This makes sense.

As you wait for your hard-earned bonus, you may become a bit nostalgic about your current employment status.  You may feel a bit guilty about leaving (or thinking of leaving).  You may even feel a sense of loyalty to your current employer.  This is natural.

Time helps heal the bad feelings that may have surfaced during the course of the year.  As you contemplate your next move, a little voice inside your head will begin to suppress the bad and accentuate the good aspects of your job, you boss and your company.

 Below is some insight from my book: Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs.  Please read it and reflect upon it as you make your decision.  Your future is in your hands.  Take control of it now.

There are two types of heroes in this world: Those who die nobly for a cause and those who live humbly for a cause.

My father is the second kind of hero. He worked for IBM for 40 years and his career was a model of loyalty, persistence and durability.

Loyalty is an important quality that was instilled in me by my parents. In growing up, my sister and I were taught to be loyal to God, Country, and IBM – in that order. Our family relocated on a couple of occasions so that my father could improve the scope of his career opportunities within the organization. Of course, decisions were always made in the context of what was best for our family, but nary a harsh word was spoken about the company that put the food on the table for so many years.

Twenty years ago, people would have accepted the longevity of my father’s career as significant but unremarkable. Such tenure symbolized a solid company that had the interests of its employees at heart. Today, when I tell people about my father’s 40 years at IBM, they are astonished. In the twenty-first century, a long career with one company symbolizes the staying power of the individual.

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed a seismic shift in loyalty, in terms of both the loyalty employers show their employees and the loyalty employees feel toward their employers. In effect, both the needs of individuals and the needs of companies have evolved over the years.

The best businesses in every industry are focused not only on how to succeed today, but also how to sustain growth and profitability for the long term. They realize that what works today may not work tomorrow, and that their currently successful strategy may be their competitor’s strategy in the near future. To maintain a competitive advantage, they must have the ability to nimbly move from one approach to another that will be even more effective down the road. Companies live and die by their ability to differentiate from one another and maintain that point of differentiation.

At the same time, the demands thrust on individuals in the corporate world have dramatically increased during the course of the past five decades. As technology advanced the ability to accomplish more with less effort, individuals have been called upon to perform tasks that previously required a team to complete. Processes such as Lean Management, Six Sigma, and Total Quality Management, along with millions of consultants, have streamlined processes to the point where maximum departmental or workgroup productivity can be identified and rapidly replicated. More recently, companies have realized that improvement at the workgroup level is not enough. Improvement or value creation must be taken down to the level of the individual. Throughout this process, the focus has shifted from businesses balancing the needs of their employees against the needs of their bottom lines to a nearly exclusive focus on how the individual can best serve the needs of the company.

Who, then, is ensuring that the needs of the employee are met? Whenever I interview a company executive, I ask him, “Who helps you manage your career and makes certain it is on the right track?” The person whose career has peaked at or below the mid-management level tends to provide an answer that references someone else – human resources, a boss, a mentor, and so on. The highly successful senior manager gives a strikingly different answer – one that reflects an entrepreneurial spirit. He invariably says, “I focus on my own career and development. My future is too important to leave in the hands of someone else.”

When it comes to managing their careers, today’s successful businesspeople – even those in corporate America – are thinking like entrepreneurs. They don’t wait for a road map to guide them or for a supervisor to tell them what to do. They work to increase their individual value and differentiate themselves from their competition by staying out in front of the latest initiatives. As a result of their self-analysis, they continuously adjust and improve their performance. In two words, they implement the practice of Career Intensity. In using this approach, they are rewarded with promotions and advancement. In effect, they are building equity in themselves – and that equity is portable. Unlike my father’s reciprocal loyalty to IBM, these individuals are committed to the companies for whom they work, but their ultimate loyalty is to themselves. This is the reason that, today, a successful individual’s 40-year career is likely to include tenure at multiple companies and a personal competitive advantage gained from focusing on value creation through continuous individual improvement.

 

Filed under: Career Commonsense
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1. […] Employers talk about not getting loyalty from the workforce, but guess who created that environment (hint: it rhymes with m-plaw-r)? All of the ra-ra team spirit stuff is fun, but when you get terminated what happens to those hours of team-building warm fuzzies? Should they evaporate? I guess the employer misses that part sometimes, when they FIRE you, you will be upset, and perhaps even see them and their team building exercises as hypcrotical at best. […]

   Pingback by JibberJobber Blog » Blog Archive » YOU’RE FIRED! Will you do us a favor and sign this before you go? — February 5, 2007 @ 09:35

2. […] The title kind of says it all, actually, but I did want to touch a bit about a throwaway line from his first paragraph, because I think it’s an important point that deserves more attention (and it’s something that has been an theme in my own career lately): Employers talk about not getting loyalty from the workforce, but guess who created that environment (hint: it rhymes with m-plaw-r)? All of the ra-ra team spirit stuff is fun, but when you get terminated what happens to those hours of team-building warm fuzzies? Should they evaporate? I guess the employer misses that part sometimes, when they FIRE you, you will be upset, and perhaps even see them and their team building exercises as hypcrotical at best. […]

   Pingback by Magic Pot of Jobs » the fiction of loyalty in business — February 6, 2007 @ 13:40

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