First, we begin with a TREND: We will all begin to realize that “being different” outside of work, that is, trying to be one person one hour, another during another, is an implausible waste of energy. Welcome to finding a career to match our personalities, circa the year 2011.
In her book Am*Bitch*ous, Dr. Debra Condren says that career oriented women have to fight in order to get any work-life balance. Women, she exclaimed, are constantly fighting between maintaining their personal lives and maintaining their professional ones. Women feel that there has to be a sweet spot. You can give up on some personal goals and some professional ones, but in the end you can have it all!
Society with a Small “s”
Dr. Condren believes that for women there is no such thing as real balance. Achieving an apparent balance means that you’re doing everything partially and nothing well. Maybe she’s wrong and this is true not just for women but for every one of us who has to get up at 6 or so, slop on some soap, and drone off to work! It’s coming, though, because work personality–life personality balance is what the new decade is really about. After 10 years of struggling to figure it all out, we can have our cake and eat it too. Read on. Picture this: the guy kisses his wife, pats his teenaged daughter on the head, chucks little Timmy under the chin and ruffles his hair, then heads off to work. At work, he spends his day being Mr. Tough Boss. He yells; he screams; he is a hard-ass who pretty much spends his day wishing he could get home a little earlier so he wouldn’t have to continue being At Work Guy (AWG). He knows his employees hate him, but it’s just the freaking way it has to be, and he wishes to heck they knew he was more than Mr. Tough Boss. He is desperately seeking a way to balance his work personality and his life personality, and he doesn’t know how to do it because he’s that guy. His career, he figures, depends upon him being him. But there is no such thing as work personality–life personality balance.
If you’re maintaining any semblance of balance, it’s because you’re still dividing yourself between two goals—and because it is just too difficult to maintain a personality that is not your own, you’ll continue to end up unhappy and frustrated. What Carl or Cindy C. had better comprehend is that by removing the pressures of “trying to achieve balance,” we’ll have a much clearer idea of what jobs are really right for us—what careers we should kill to move up in. No matter what, it will be about moving up, because that’s the meaning of aspiration. In the new era, our natural dispositions and personalities will point us to careers where we can feel fulfilled inside and outside of work—and act as the same person! We need to ultimately maintain the same personality in both periods of our day. Instead of trying, and ultimately failing in the attempt, to balance our lives, why not find the right position or career in which we can truly be ourselves and work to maximize our vividly appealing and obvious strengths instead of constantly trying to minimize our faults?
In the coming period that I love so much, I promise we will all begin to move away from classic positions and traditional leadership roles. Instead, folks will veer from the steady path toward positions that are more in tune with who they see themselves as being. As baby boomers leave the job and find that their only possible next step is to create their own next step, and as Generation Zero takes to the workplace with an “I’ll try it for a few months, and if I don’t like it, I’ll take my toys and go home” attitude, you’ll see more and more workers (some skilled, some not) searching endlessly for the right position at the right company.
The right position at the right company will play to people’s individual strengths and allow them to work best within their personality type (and if they don’t find the right position, don’t expect them to stick around for long). Change the pronoun now! It’s really a matter of being you! Don’t you love my use of exclamation points! So, hey, with some effort you can manage your workforce better, get higher levels of productivity, feel like yourself at work, and not pretend to be someone else. And gone will be the harried days when Carl Corporate comes home exhausted and disgusted and in desperate need of an after-work martini to help him shake off the horrors of his day. In his place will be a healthier, happier man who can be himself both in and outside of the office. I want to know him. And you want to be him.
An excerpt from the new book 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade from RLM PR CEO Richard Laermer. Contact Richard Laermer at [email protected]