Come Ready To Do Battle Every Day

Warrior or Mercenary?

Your boss knows who the warriors are on his or her team and who are the mercenaries. The basic difference between warriors and mercenaries is that warriors fight for king and country (aka boss and company), whereas mercenaries are only in the fight for the money (their paycheck). Warriors believe in the mission and they support the leadership. Mercenaries believe in a quick buck and often can’t follow orders. Warriors fight to the death and mercenaries bail out as soon as the going gets tough.

All companies fight battles every day – that is why they hired you! The battle is always against the same forces – chaos and entropy. You may be surprised to discover dysfunctionality once you get inside the “world class” or “industry leading” company that hired you. Your company may have areas of excellence; for example, perhaps your company is nimble at product design, development and market introduction, but is chaotic with supply chain and logistics. Maybe your company is a world class manufacturer, but is running on disjointed systems with poor reporting capabilities. Don’t be surprised when you encounter chaos in your company – instead, recognize it for what it is – an opportunity for you to shine!

Where you sit matters. Who you go to lunch with matters. Don’t be lured into sitting with the mercenaries in meetings, before meetings, after meetings or in group events. You will know them right away – they talk in quiet tones under their breath, naysaying everything leadership is communicating. They gossip. They spend significant amounts of time doing unproductive activities at their desks. If you sit with mercenaries, your boss will assume you are a mercenary. Sit at the head of the table, where there is no place to hide. Mercenaries usually sit in the back in large groups. Don’t check your phone under the table or multitask while your boss is talking. If you do teleconference meetings, stay on video, so attendees can see you are paying attention and not surfing the web. Be present. Take notes. Seek out information on subjects you hear in meetings and don’t understand. Volunteer for tasks, both trivial and meaningful.

Dad once told me, “All organizations have pillars and caterpillars. Do you know the difference?” When I shook my head, indicating that I did not know the difference, he continued, “Pillars hold the roof up and keep out bad weather; caterpillars crawl in and out.?You want to be a pillar.” In his way, he was describing the difference between warriors and mercenaries.

Historians hypothesize that the beginning of end of the Roman Empire was when the Senators and Roman citizens stopped going to battle. Eventually, they started hiring mercenaries to do the dirty work of battle. Not only did the owners of the empire lose touch with the problems on the outskirts, but the mercenaries didn’t have the will to succeed. They weren’t fighting for home and family. They were half-hearted.

Battling everyday gets tiring, so pace yourself. When you go home, be present at home (especially if you have family that need your attention). Separate work from home if possible. This is getting increasing difficult with at-home work on the rise, so if you work at home, try to set space and time aside for focusing on your work to produce results. You can only be ready to do battle if you are properly rested and well fed.

Even though you are pacing yourself, this isn’t a flat race around a track. This is more like trail running, full of obstacles with lots of peaks and valleys. Accept that there will be periods of intense effort. A project startup, a serious safety incident, a new product launch, a merger or buyout, bringing in a significant new client, a change in company leadership – these are just a few examples of when extra work is required. When you are at the starting line of such an event, commit upfront that you will do what it takes to get the work done. You are going to cross that finish line. It might mean late nights and weekends. It might mean doing pushups in the office instead of going to the gym. It might mean sack lunches at the desk instead of long lunches offsite.

The sacrifice won’t go un-noticed or un-rewarded. When the dust settles, you want the tribal chiefs to mark you with war paint.

Warriors Work When Nobody is Watching

At the time of the writing of this book, the COVID pandemic is accelerating shifts in remote work. I was recently in a large corporate office in Houston with a thousand empty desks and less than 50 people showing up to work on a daily basis. Future employees may never pass their executives in the halls or sit around a large table together. In general, the workforce is finding remote work increasingly desirable. Sometimes this is because employees can be more productive in less time, but often it is because the employee intends to use work time for personal time.

The older generation of “digital immigrant” business leaders sometimes voice distrust of remote work arrangements. The younger, “digital native” work generation uses online team management tools designed for collaboration, file sharing, chat communications, and to assign / schedule / and follow up on work tasks. If your new career has a high degree of unsupervised time, it is important not only to put in a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, but also to consider it an opportunity to shine amongst your peers by producing more when you are not being monitored by your boss.

If your work is routine “piece work” and can be easily counted – such as buyers issuing purchase orders – the amount of work from home vs from the office can be easily measured and compared. Several studies point to improvements in at-home work productivity due to saving commute time, fewer interruptions at home than at the office, and making more time to work around a personalized schedule.

However an interesting article in the Washington Post found that while employees get more transactional work done from home, they are more creative in the office: “long-distance employment can’t deliver key benefits — including learning and new friendships — that come from face-to-face contact. In-person work fosters innovation, the effects of which on productivity almost certainly exceed the gains from working harder at home for possibly unsustainable stretches.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/24/working-home-productivity-pandemic-remote/ )

Collaboration provides the best results for creative and complex work.

When working from home, I have a simple routine I follow that helps me to stay on task throughout the day, especially when my work is not task oriented. At the beginning of the day, I schedule and prioritize my activities, then I get about doing my work. At the end of the day, I mark whether my effort goes into a WIN, LOSS or TIE column. I mark a day as a WIN even if I didn’t accomplish all I set out to – especially if the interruptions I pursued were value-added activities, promoted learning, or helped a colleague.?The day is a LOSS if my delays and distractions took me off the playing field, and a TIE goes to something in between. Knowing I will rate my daily work effort keeps me motivated to press on, even in isolation.

Self-governance is the highest form of maturity. Employees who are mature continue to provide quality work, even (and especially) when no one is watching.

Come ready to do battle every day.