Seth Godin would teach us all that ‘people like us do things like this’.
This week at the clinic we lost a member of the team, someone who had been here for a very short period of time, having left a similar job and then quickly decided to go back to the similar job that they had left.
The first reaction to that is heartfelt disappointment that we had been shunned.
It feels like a criticism of our values or our culture or our environment or our business.
“Why on earth doesn’t everybody want to work here all of the time?”.
The fact is that people like us…
If you move from one job to another because you want a change or a challenge or a new environment or a test and then are offered more money to stay at the job you were at and then return back, then money is your differentiator.
If you seek excitement and challenge and life and experience then it’s essential that your job provides you ‘enough’ of the money and then you can seek out the other things.
I am extremely lucky and privileged that a long time ago I reached 'enough' and in fact I was in a position where I could reduce my enough down to seek more of the other stuff listed above.
That dynamic, the calculation or equation where that exists is different for different people, at different levels and different jobs.
The individual that left the position with us had a very similar pay bracket to the one I had when I first qualified in 1994 but the attitude between short-term and long-term is different from person to person.
In our place the ‘people like us’ question is answered from the top to the bottom because we try to get everybody to what their stated ‘enough’ is, in relation to the job they do, so that we can get onto the good stuff.
Sometimes though, people test that theory and then realise that they weren’t actually ‘people like us’ and they were actually people like them which is the them that they came from when they tested out being ‘like us’, only to decide they were actually like them.
Very quickly I can get over ‘the insult’.
I’m comfortable with the values that we have as an organisation and with the journey that we’re on but more than that, I’m comfortable with the fact that it really is not for everyone and some people will try and decide that their place is somewhere else.
And after the initial disappointment, that is entirely fine.
Blog Post Number - 2776
Leave a comment