Your relationship with work

How do you identify with work? What does work mean for you?

I’m not sure I’ve ever taken the time to answer these questions; pretty important wouldn’t you think considering the amount of time we devote to working right?

And having worked for the past 18 years, across 5 different businesses and countless clients you’d imagine having at least some kind of response.

But the reality I find is that ‘most’ of us didn’t have a clear cut trajectory into the careers we find ourselves. Or at least not a widely considered one.

What were the key factors driving find work after university? 1. It was what everyone else was doing 2. What else was I supposed to do 3. It would be good to have some money to go out and starting climbing the societal ladder.

I had no idea what I wanted to do.

A degree in Psychology from a respected London University and two years stocking shelves at Boots in Gatwick Airport. Not much of an introspective.

I fell into market research, and after a few years fell into management consulting. I didn’t really know what it entailed, but it paid well and sounded good. There was sign-on bonus too (that the recruiter mostly took, but I didn’t resent that — not too much anyway considering he’d found me the role).

A few years on, I had done what ‘most’ people had done in my industry, I’d worked hard, got promoted a few times, jumped ship, got promoted there a few times and just kept on working towards the next level. They call it ‘up or out’ (or at least they used to). That is you’re expected to be promoted every 2–3 or so years; if you aren’t working hard enough to be promoted to the next level after that done, you are ‘performance managed’ which is to say you’re sidelined or moved on. I don’t think that’s an issue; you just need to be clear what type of industry you’re in and what kind of game you’re playing.

But hear’s where that does become an issue; when you’re a hard-working, ambitious person early in your career, you throw yourself full heartedly and are rewarded with the promotion, the kudos, the bonus and the pay. And then the game resets at a new level. Even when you break into the ranks of Partner, you realise you’ve just broken the ceiling into the ground floor of another pyramid.

So my relationship with work (having been in Consulting) had been periodically short-term one. Always pushing for the next promotion, the next level, but never really considering what game I was playing and to what end. I think it’s fair to say most of us play the game this way.

But when I made the hard call to end the game I’d been playing for 15 years (in March 2020 of all years), it was truly the first time I was forced to consider my relationship with work. And what a healthy outcome that turned out to be.