Is it them...or are you the alien?

A client of mine joined his organization several years ago as a contractor.  He never intended to stay past the completion of the project and kept others at a distance.  He said he didn't want to lose his edge and he didn't want to fall into the thinking patterns of those he worked with because their views and work ethic were so different from his.

Yet a few years into his contract he was offered a permanent position and because he believed he could influence and drive changes, he accepted the offer and gave up his independent status.

He quickly learned that in order to survive as an employee he needed to adopt some of the rules and norms that others seemed to accept even though they didn't make sense to him.  It didn't happen all at once, but the longer he stayed at this organization, the more embedded he became and the more he began to think and act like everyone else.  The thing he feared most had happened - he had assumed the thinking patterns and work ethic of his environment.

While somewhere in the depth of his soul he never quite released the hope that he could change things, the required adoption of beliefs and actions that were contrary to who he knew he was had worn him down.  He made a plan to escape the environment that had numbed his senses and find a way to reignite his passion for his work.

The opportunity soon arrived - new organizational leadership lit the fire in his belly like the way E.T.'s heart glowed when he'd say, "phone home".  Aligning himself with the new leaders he finally felt free to share his gifts and was amazed at how far down into the depths of the old organizational culture he had sunk.

His new role was to lobby for all the things he believed in and to excite others in creating the next generation organization.  Yet he was surprised to recognize the emotional roller coaster he was riding.  Snippets of what could be tamped down by what had been.  The current culture absorbing and neutralizing the changes he was so passionate about making.  The slow and painful realization that what was innovative and exciting to him never even hit the radar screen of his colleagues.

He wondered spent a lot of time trying to figure out why his colleagues couldn't see the possibilities and engage in the wonder of creating something new and building for the future.  He wondered why his vision of innovation and creativity sounded so foreign to others.  All along he he thought it was them - that they had it wrong.  What he learned was that he was the alien and it was time to go home.