Winning - Jack Welch [89]
Because there is no way to disentangle money from decisions about job and career, the best you can really do is come to terms with how much money matters to you. Just remember, it can feel very noble to say that you don’t care about being rich; it’s another thing to live with that decision over the years, especially as mortgages and tuitions start to pile up.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting money or feeling indifferent to it or anything in between. But if you’re not honest with yourself about those feelings during the first years of your job journey, you’ll end up doing a lot of second-guessing later.
Now on to the signals of job fit, which have been listed in no particular order, since they all count.
PEOPLE
That said, the first signal concerns people, because everything else about a job can be perfect—the task, pay, location—but if you do not enjoy your colleagues on a day-to-day basis, work can be torture.
This may seem obvious, but I am surprised how often I meet people who have taken jobs in companies where they do not share the organization’s overall sensibilities. By that, I mean a range of values and personality traits and behaviors, from how intense people act, to how comfortable they are with confrontation, to how candid they are about performance, to how much they laugh at meetings.
If you join a company where your sensibilities don’t fit in, you’ll find yourself putting on a persona just to get along. What a career killer—to fake who you are every day.
I know a woman—we’ll call her Claire—who is an MBA who became a manager for a nonprofit after graduation. At first, Claire thought she had the perfect job—she could use her business skills to run an organization and still “make the world a better place,” to use her words.
But several years later, Claire was at her wit’s end. Her colleagues made every decision at a snail’s pace. “It doesn’t make any difference if we are picking where to have lunch or coming up with a marketing plan,” she recounted. “Nobody can ever feel ‘not heard.’ Everybody has to reach consensus. It’s driving me crazy! This organization has all the right intentions, but nothing ever gets done.”
Finally, Claire decided that she could no longer tolerate the sensibilities mismatch she felt in a nonprofit environment, and she began to search for a consulting job in the private sector. She identified one firm in particular that was known for its pro bono work, and she consoled herself with the notion that she could work there and still keep one foot (or toe) in the “virtuous” world.*
The problem was, the firm wouldn’t hire her. “You haven’t worked at the same speed or with the same kind of intensity we require,” they told her. “We need someone who can hit the ground running.” Basically, they said, “We need someone like us.”
Claire is still at her nonprofit job, resigned to stay there and make the best of it. The sad thing is, she said, “I found ‘my people’ at that consulting firm,” but it was too late. “They just didn’t see I could be like them.”
You too need to find “your people,” the earlier in your career the better. Even if a job seems ideal in every other way, without the presence of shared sensibilities, it’s not ideal for you.
OPPORTUNITY
The second job-fit signal concerns opportunity, as in, how much does the job offer you to grow and learn?
Without doubt, it can be very appealing to take a job where you suspect you will have no problem hitting it out of the park. Surefire success