The Great Regret?

First we had the Great Resignation, which I reframed as The Great Realization, and now we are in a period that some are calling The Great Regret.

I'm not here to make an argument for or against this supposed new cultural period, but as a professor in psychology and doctoral student in cultural studies (as well as being the Chief People Officer for an incredible independent B2B marketing services agency) I am keenly interested in the ways that human behavior changes and evolves in response to shifts in the global economic landscape and, vice versa, how the global economic landscape changes and evolves in response to shifts in human behavior (each has an impact on, and is impacted by, the other).

With that said, as I pondered on the so-called Great Regret, it made me think about an article I wrote back in 2016 entitled, 6 Things I've Learned About Green Grass. Despite some incorrect citations (to my graduate students reading this, I am sorry, please do not follow my example. I expect your APA citations to be perfect in your final papers), the article lays out some important lessons I learned about the grass not necessarily being greener on the other side. Lessons that I would like to reprise and reshare, here:

Lesson 1 | A place where you can be yourself is better than a place where you can't

I did not know in 2016 that this lesson would lead to the publishing of my first book some six years later: You Can Be Yourself Here: your pocket guide to creating inclusive workplaces using the psychology of belonging (currently free to download on Audible). Needless to say, in competitive times and moments of economic uncertainty, workers can often be lured by the offer of salary hikes and promises of short- and long-term incentive plans. I don't want to offer a pie-in-the-sky statement that overlooks the reality that most people come to work in order to pay the bills to live the life they want to live. That is true.

But do you know what else is true? The salary hikes and promotion possibilities of a new workplace are often experienced as a sugar-rush. The buzz wears off. Sometimes quickly. And what you are left with is the working environment.

I would implore that before you consider jumping ship or moving employer that you ask yourself some deep questions about whether you are made to feel like you belong - at a deep emotional level - at your current workplace. Further, I would encourage you to make an assessment of how much that experience of belonging would be worth if you had to pay hard cash for it.

Lesson 2 | A place where you can develop and grow is better than a place where you don't

Before deciding to make a move, take a moment to reflect on the growth opportunities that you know are available to you at your current employer. And I don't just mean off-the-job learning in workshops, I mean the stuff of career-making-paradigm-shifting growth, such as the opportunity to get involved in projects that will stretch you, work that you haven't done before that will require you to learn new skills and gather novel experiences, or to work across regions and new cultural contexts.

Lesson 3 | A place with a purpose that you can truly connect with is better than a place where you can't

Simon Sinek advises us to?Start With Why. Hard work with a purpose is often experienced as motivation and joy and hard work without one is often experienced as stress, overwhelm, and burn-out. This is really, really important stuff and oftentimes we don't know how important it is until we don't have it.

Ask yourself, to what extent is my current workplace mission-driven? How committed is my leadership team to the vision and values it has articulated? And then consider whether that is worth giving up. Over my twenty-five-year career in HR, I have seen hundreds of people boomerang to a previous company solely because they realized what. they had when they no longer had it.

Lesson 4 | A place that is growing is better than a place that isn't

Everyone likes to be part of something successful. It’s good to feel attractive, wanted, special. But it does come with some growing pains. Rapid expansion often leads to confusion, blurred lines of accountability, multiple plates spinning, and balls to be juggled. It can lead to resourcing constraints. It gets increasingly challenging to find the right talent quickly enough. Not to mention the difficulties of keeping an ever-expanding workforce equipped with the right hard skills in the art and science of their craft. On top of this, there are the people skills they need to be great managers, develop deep and successful relationships with their clients, and navigate work-life in an emotionally intelligent way.

With all of that said, I’d always take the problems of growth over the problems of retrenchment. At the beginning of my career, I worked at a great British retailer which experienced a significant decline in the 1990s. What was once the Queen of the British High Street quickly became a beleaguered old lady struggling to make the impact she once did. It was not a pleasant experience to be part of a company making mass redundancies and a company that was in receipt of [almost daily] negative press bemoaning once-quality products and previously superior customer service.

I recall getting in a black cab outside HQ in London one rainy November evening and being asked by the cabbie where I worked and how my day was. I told the cabbie that I was a receptionist. At a dentist. On Harley Street. Seriously.

The last cabbie to whom I had told the truth about my employer spent the entire journey from Baker Street to my home in Elephant & Castle recounting stories of the time his aunt found a foreign object in her ready meal and that time he bought a pair of pajamas for his son which came apart at the seams after one wash. Were these stories true? Who knows? But I didn’t enjoy listening to them after a long, hard day at work

Growing pains hurt. But the opposite hurts worse.

Lesson 5 | A place where you put effort in is better than a place where you don’t

The advertising industry is renowned for long hours. Although I didn’t fully appreciate it when I joined it does come with the territory; a 40-hour working week is not something to expect. That might be a bitter pill to swallow in a world where the topic of the work-life equation is never far from the mindfulness thoughts of workers everywhere.

For me, it’s a case of six-and-two-threes. I have been employed at places in which I worked a 40-hour week and got five weeks of paid time off a year, plus public/state holidays! It was wonderful to be able to get to the office at 9am and leave at 5pm. To not pick up my Blackberry (my what?) at the weekend. To not have work periodically consume my dreams. But what didn’t happen was excitement, high-energy, or progression. For all the long hours I work in advertising I also get all of the positive energy, change, and movement that comes with it. There’s never a dull, or predictable, day.

Before you focus on all the 'bad' stuff that is feeding your desire to look elsewhere, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What is important to you? I mean really important. For what purpose is it important? What does it get for you? To what extent are you getting that where you are currently? If you are not getting it, in what ways could you speak to your manager (or their manager) about ways to get more of what you do want and less of what you don't want, before you make the decision to head off into the unknown (sorry, couldn't resist getting a little rerun of The Voice into this post somehow).

Lesson 6 | A place where you are invested in, engaged with, and cared for is better than a place where you aren't

Back in the 1950s, Peter Drucker, the author said “Culture will eat strategy for breakfast” and in doing so articulated the critical role culture plays in business success.

But there can often be a significant difference between the culture an organization wants and the lived experience its workers have. This lived experience (aka the climate of the organization). You will never hear me talk about company cultures (or climates) in terms of being ‘good/bad’ or ‘strong/weak’ because I think it misses the point about culture and climate being central to the success, or not, of a business.

Before I go on, I want to take a moment to explain the difference between culture and climate.

The culture of an organization is often spelled out in a ‘cultural fabric’ — a term I use to describe the statements or intentions which articulate the type of company you are running and the kind of vibe you want to create.

Cultural fabrics often include a mission, a vision, and a set of values and behaviors. Here’s my definition of each:

• Mission: this is the reason why a company exists; it is ongoing in nature
• Vision: this is the long-term goal; it is fixed in nature and has an end date that it will be realized. If you do your mission, you will be your vision
• Values: the criteria you use to judge good or bad and the moral compass the organization uses to make decisions
• Behaviors: the external manifestation of your values; what you expect your people say or do as they pursue the mission

Your culture is not just parties, perks, and posters, your free breakfasts, nor is it your unique events and team experiences. These are the rituals, symbols, and signs of your culture that ultimately contribute to, and influence, the lived experience of the culture, which is your climate. The problem with happy hours, parties, free breakfasts, and unique events is that they very quickly become ‘table stakes’ and move from being a cool perk to an expected part of company life. To that end, you cannot rely on them to differentiate your employee experience from other companies’ employee experiences as a way to attract and keep top talent.

Climate, a much more powerful and psychologically valuable factor, is (as I said above) the lived experience you have of working at your company. It is shaped by the way people act, react, and interact with each other.

The most important factor in shaping climate and differentiating your company climate is behavior. Behavior is contagious. We are wired to copy each other. It’s just one of the ways in which we learn, develop, and grow. In our early years, we copy our primary carers and our immediate family. At school age we model our teachers and our peer group, and as we professionally mature we tend to adopt the behaviors and ways of working of those who are senior to us.

After years of training in human potential and a couple of decades of working in organizational psychology, I believe that the behavior of people who we think of as leaders, or as being senior to us, is likely to have a greater influence on our own behavior than any other person we work with. Why? Positionality. People who are senior to us at work (like our boss, our boss’ boss) hold a similar psychological position to the people who are senior to us in our personal life (like our elders and ancestors). We have a tendency to look up to them, to believe them, and to take their steer. At some level this is to do with survival — as a child, we’re reliant on our elders for food, shelter, nurturance, and protection and as a working professional these survival needs take on a different quality when our boss (i.e. our professional elder) is assessing our performance and making decisions about our pay, promotion, and career path.

Given all of this, any organizational climate will be shaped by the worst behavior you are willing to tolerate in a leader. Hence the principle that ‘leadership is a behavior and not a title’, and the topic of the second book that I published this year!

To that end, I would encourage you to take stock of the leaders who impact your day-to-day life. Are they worth following? What can you learn from them? To what extent are they creating the conditions for you to be successful? And what is that worth to you?

So that’s it. The 6 (reviewed and reprised) lessons that I continue to learn about green grass. As I finish this piece I’m left with the words of a wise person/meme ringing around my head, “If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, water your own lawn”.

Before you decide to experience The Great Regret, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to undertake a similar exercise. Water your own lawn. See how green your grass is.