One of the most important decisions you have to make is in selecting employers who will make effective use of your talents and will recognize and reward you for what you can contribute. If you can effectively predict your future with this employer, you can possibly enjoy years of a productive relationship which will leave you richer in experience and in a better position financially.
All this will occur when you intend to perform work of a particular type in sufficient quantity to receive a handsome salary with adequate benefits AND you connect up with an employer who is looking for a person with your particular skills and work ethic and is willing to pay for your experience.
Unless both of you are looking for you to produce a professional level of effort with an adequate exchange, it will not happen. Your intentions and the future employer’s intentions need to match in order for a satisfying relationship to develop. This will not occur if either of you is untrustworthy.
Let’s make this painfully simple. If you actually have to jump through hoops to sell yourself to this new employer, you are in for a difficult future. Either your qualifications do not meet the person’s needs, or you have not presented them clearly enough for them to be recognized. Or, you have not asked enough questions to understand what the job really entails.
If you are the right person for this job, you will have already asked why this job opening has occurred, especially in a management position. Is it a new position or was someone let go? If it is a new position, do these people really know what it involves? There is no challenge like being the first engineer working for a company that has never employed an engineer before or being the first sales manager of a company that is still selling through door-to-door salesmen. Or being the first purchasing agent for a company in which the president bought everything himself.
If you do not know why the previous occupant of this job left, you will be flying blind until you get this information and understand it fully.
When you discover a job requirement being presented by a person who understands your value to him and presents his needs in an unambiguous way, you have the potential for a job experience of a lifetime! All you have to do is to determine fully what is needed and wanted and continue to deliver this in abundance. This will keep your intentions and your employer’s intentions in alignment and satisfaction will occur on all sides.
It is not enough for you to want the job and sincerely intend to do the best you can. You need to be able to understand the job requirements, both written and unwritten if you are to succeed in the long run. You may find out that what the employer says the job is like bears little relationship to the working relationships within the company. If you do not have enough experience to determine what the exact situation is before signing up, you are not the right person for that job.
If you are not able to ask awkward questions about working conditions and compensatory time before you start, you are hosed when they expect you to work through weekends without any compensation. Getting to work on cutting-edge technology and breaking all sorts of barriers is no compensation when you find you have spent years and lost your family chasing technological dreams with 70 hour work weeks and months spent away from home.
When your intentions and your employer’s intentions match, you will gladly work under the most aggravating conditions because you have certainty in what is expected and the rewards you get match the risks. When the trust is broken, your sanity and your health suffer and you may take years to recover.
This situation can occur in a startup venture where you are given a piece of the financial pie and you and a few others engage in the creation of a viable enterprise based on a new technology or business arrangement. You all trust each other in the beginning and you work impossible hours and somewhere along the way the intentions of some of the executives change and the company is no longer the same, even though nothing has been stated formally or publicly. The original trust is gone and with it, the confidence in attaining a bright future disappears. It is now just a matter of time until the organization collapses under its own lies and either goes out of business or is bought out by a competitor.
The reason I bring up this unfortunate situation is that you can perceive the shift in intentions when they occur and if you are wise, you will make your preparations to seek another situation before the final bell rings. Any time you see that you can no longer trust those you work with or live with, it is time to seek a new relationship. If you cannot trust someone, you have no way of creating a future with them. If you cannot create a future, you have no way to bring it about.
In Part Three I will discuss how your perception of a person’s spiritual companions will aid you in deciding whether you can trust the person and create a future with them.