You’re not always going to be 100% aligned with your management. You’re not going to be in synch with their vision, impetus, and how they make decisions. There are times they are going to be the bull in the china shop, barreling through delicate systems they don’t have the power to see because they are looking at things from such an abstract distance. And depending on the size of your organization, you and your world might be some unseen minutia, a numerical representation of some sort sent by the Mars Rover Curiosity. Indeed, you may be nothing more than a curiosity, a tiny blip on the radar, if anything at all. Leaders don’t get it, and their not supposed to get it. In many ways, your career is going to be about enduring their decisions.
And that’s good. Any time they make a sudden move, it will make you sweat. Things they do may do damage, disrupt lives, cost jobs, utterly destroy things it took years of hard work and careful patience to develop, but in the chaos, the frenzy panic and disarray, you’ll have some of the best opportunities to do beautiful work, if only to triage the valuables you can rescue. Often, in the wake of the tsunami, you will find the opportunities to build things you hadn’t dreamed of before.
It doesn’t mean you have to like it. But in the midst of the storm, there will be enough material flying around, lines on maps disintegrating, org charts teetering, that you will be able to step forward and stake out new claims, build a career that wasn’t possible until then.
It was right after 9/11 when the broker-dealer I was working for, absorbed another broker-dealer’s operations within our clearance services. It was the largest client we had taken on to date, and it was messy. For months I attended meetings of representatives from each department affected by the changes, and all people did was yell at each other. It was an exquisitely painful sequence of events for a lot of people which made the careers of some people, and ended others.
A couple of years after that, we went into a merger deal with a major regional bank. A number of us were thrown into a reorganizational whirlwind without much guidance. We had to feel our way through changes that seemed absurd, if not outright destructive. But it was during that period that I gained the experience and differentiation that allowed me to pursue my current career, as a subject matter expert and change agent at a leader in the software industry. Now my job is 100% about ungluing the foundations of people’s work lives and forming them anew, and better. The opportunity was good for me then, and the fall-out from dealing with my team is good for the people who have to endure the changes we bring help them about. Yes, it’s stressful, to some degree, and to some it will seem as though we are there simply to create unnecessary work and havoc. But the residual effect is a gain in gray matter and knowledge that these people end up accruing. They will plunge into the depths of the world they are living in, the purpose and functions of every action and nuance of their work days. They will be giving themselves an education more valuable than any certification or MBA program.
At some point in the process it may seem as though one has entered a hospital’s psychiatric ward. People will either completely zone out and stare at the walls, or they will act out hysterically. It is especially important for those of us working for the software vendor, for some the enemy and harbinger of crisis, to go from patient to orderly as quickly as possible. But it is a good idea for the people working for the client enduring the change to do so as well. When we do, we form bonds that are lasting, and we do great work together. We participate in the Whole System and create worlds, treasures, unknowable until then.