Stop Playing a Game you Can’t Win
I love work. I’m not a workaholic; I just love making stuff. I love solving problems. I love making the world a little better today than it was yesterday.
We’re all like that, aren’t we? Leave a child on a beach and she’ll build castles*. It’s human nature to see something and want to make it into something better. We do it for ourselves and we do it for each other. Rinse and repeat and, before you know it, you’ve got farms, roads, railways, schools and hospitals. The children of our ancestry have grown up and built civilisations.
And yet, work. I mean work. I mean:
You know?
What is it about work that makes it so unpleasant? With some jobs, it’s pretty obvious. Difficult, uncomfortable, hard labour is self-evidently not a bed of roses. Unless you’re a gardener, I guess. In that case, it may well be a bed of roses. It’s a metaphor; can we please just focus here? But so many jobs aren’t like that. These days, many of us work in offices, and these roles are nothing if not comfortable—certainly on paper, anyway (I’m on fire today!). So what is it that makes some working lives so miserable?
OK, let’s be a little more serious now.
Very generally speaking, the workplace is a dictatorship. Especially in the private sector, pretty much everything we do at work is quite literally dictated from above. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it’s not quite so simple.
In his Republic, Plato had Socrates describing the ideal leader as someone who is wise, virtuous and unambitious. And therein lies the rub. How do you become a leader if you’re not ambitious? Indeed, it doesn’t happen very often but, perhaps surprisingly, it does happen. Plato was really describing personal ambition, the quest for power and domination, and no matter how you slice it, a world run by a personally ambitious leader is not going to be a nice place to live in. Sure, he’ll dish out some power to you if you increase his, but you’ll always be subjugated and brutalised if it benefits him. There is another type of ambition, though.
You know a good leader when you see her. She wants you to work hard according to her will, and she may be demanding. And yes, she is ambitious. Her ambition, though, is not for personal power. She is the decision maker who employs the resources at her disposal to the benefit of everyone. As a company leader, she thinks in terms of win-win-win. She wants the organisation to produce products of real value to the world, and she wants her employees to be remunerated fairly in reasonable working conditions; she wants shareholders to get a good return on their investment. She may have to make unpopular decisions, or hurt feelings, if she sees that as a necessary means to further her noble aims. She may have a vision that is not shared by anyone else yet and, in fact, that is probably a requirement of great leadership. This leader has an extremely difficult job but she will make the world, and the lives of everyone around her, better, if she holds enough power to do so. She still runs a dictatorship, but she is a benevolent dictator.
If you work for someone like this; stay with her for as long as you can because, with her, you will be part of something great, beautiful and noble. If you don’t recognise these traits in the leader of your organisation, leave. It may not be easy. It may take time and planning, but leave you must.
In a company run by a power-hungry leader, there is only ever one winner. As I described earlier, he will dish out the spoils when it keeps you on his side, but he will also crush you if he has to. In today’s civilised society, where gaslighting is often the only way to do it, he might crush you subtly and slowly, so that nobody else can see, but he will do it. And while you are in his domain, there is nothing you can do.
He will have minions at his beck-and-call, those who believe that they are his favourite and that he truly has their interests at heart. They will do his bidding and kill you with a thousand paper cuts. They will use pettiness and bureaucracy to undermine you. And because they are doing it under the banner of the leader in the hope for the crumbs from his table, they will win each petty little battle; though in the end, they will lose too. You don’t stand a chance.
So get out. Start with a goal, then make a plan, and get out. Look for jobs that appeal to you and that you think you can do. Remember, though, that your confidence may have taken a battering; don’t let that limit you. You may be far more capable than you have been led to believe. Start looking for companies that seem to have wise and virtuous leaders. LinkedIn is a great way to do that. Connect with the leaders of these organisations. Have a conversation. Take your time and find something better.
You don’t deserve to be treated like shit. You have skills and experience. You are a human who deserves to be respected. If you’re working for a bad leader, make a plan and hand in your notice; your dignity depends on it.
Matt Shewbridge
I am the owner of Shewbridge Coaching, and I help people get better jobs. My main services are CV Writing and Interview Coaching, and they make it easy, rewarding and even fun to get the job you deserve.
*ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE RATHER THAN ACTUAL SUGGESTION. CHILDREN MUST NOT BE LEFT ON BEACHES UNATTENDED. AND, ANYWAY, ALL YOU’LL GET IS A SANDCASTLE.