This is a tough one because I know, some organizations might not love me for this list. In the past months, I had many many conversations with people about their jobs. Most of these conversations left me wondering, why none (!) of these people quit their jobs. There is a peculiar form of emotional detachment when you look at job-enthusiasm. I have decided to comprehend all these conversations into a list of ten signs of a job worth questioning.
The purpose of this list is not to encourage you to leave your company if you can agree on more than five items. It should help both you and your company identify areas for improvement. It will be more and more a key factor to success if a company attracts the best players in the industry.
1) You are being asked to make a competitive analysis The concept of competition is outdated. In the past ten years, 100% of industries being disrupted, have been impacted by someone/a company from a different industry. If you look at what your competitors are doing, I can give you a straightforward answer: they all ask themselves the same question: “who is going to disrupt my business?” — they share your fears.
2) Digital Transformation is your companies engine to Innovation Digital Transformation is a dangerous trap. The Silicon Valley operates five years ahead of technology. In other words: each technology available is five years old the moment it is “on shelf.” If you understand digital transformation as a strategic journey for better use of technology for innovative solutions, you are going to spend an exponentially growing budget to stay in the race. If you understand digital transformation as access to available (or to be developed) tools that follow an honest passion for problem-solving, you are doing the right thing.
3) Reviews and evaluations take a significant part of your work Your company has a very unhealthy ratio of external delivery versus internal processes. Reviews and assessments weaken the self-confidence of everyone in the team. You begin to value external opinions over your instincts, expertise, and wisdom.
4) Scaling is the name of the game. One of the significant differences between linear and exponential organizations is the concept of scaling. Linear organizations hope for a product to scale in a market. Exponential organizations create markets. Markets don’t scale, markets are operating systems.
5) You need a high school degree to decode the company’s mission statement. A good mission statement has two possible beginnings: The problem we are solving is… or: What we do for people is…
6) Your company has just announced the innovation department. Innovation can never be a department of an organization. Every organization that is trying to be innovative from the inside is doomed to failure. Innovation must be an essential priority. Full.Stop.
7) Are you happy on Fridays and grumpy on Mondays? Work once has been the occupation we commit to from Monday morning to Friday afternoon — to earn the money we enjoy to spend from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening (and on holidays). This is a dinosaur concept and burn-outs are speeding up the process of extinction.
8) You hardly ever see your CEO Which also means: your CEO hardly ever sees you. Googles top management makes themselves available to the whole team every Friday at noon. Internal updates are shared but also questions answered. And if you are not in the Googleplex (alphabet headquarter in Mountain View, California), you can chime-in from Livestream and still have that dialogue. So much about the argument “my organization is too big to talk to the CEO.”
9) The paycheck is the reason why you still work for your company General truth is, everything in life is less complicated when money is not involved. The domino-effect of only doing what you want to do leads to higher income. You just have to start doing what you love.
10) There is a process for everything Structure is a good thing. When structure is something like a corridor within self-sufficient, decision-making is the name of the game. But: (too many) processes teach you to stop thinking. Nuff said?
How do you think about this list? Do you agree? Do you strongly disagree? Somewhere in between? Share your thoughts with me, and I am looking forward to this conversation!
However, if you agree with this list and you can see yourself too many times on this list: be the change you want to look at (in your organization or your industry), you will surprise how often it just takes a snowflake to create an avalanche.