Call the Ball - Career aspirations start with being authentic

Managing your career is based on a combination of aspiration, inspiration and attitude.  You are charged with manifesting your own destiny.  All our lives are products of the many small decisions we make. How you spend a minute can dictate how you spend an hour and eventually how you spend your hours determines whether you will reach your goals. An opportunity lost is lost forever and ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.

 

More and more people are looking for their purpose in the world and in the workplace looking for validation as a sign of life. People want to be heard, but more importantly they want to know that their contributions are being noticed and not taken for granted.  Not for the sake of attention, but more so because they want to know that their skill sets are still relevant and useful and that they are making a difference to advance the organizations they serve.   With training and professional development budget cut-backs in recent years, people have had to start investing in themselves as concerns grow about where their capabilities best fit in their organizations and what their futures hold.

 

At the same time, leaders are trying to make their people feel more secure in order to maintain consistency, conscious that if too much disruption leaks out into the workplace, there is risk of losing high-performers which is challenging to replace from the impact of time, lost intellectual capital and cost. In this ever changing “war on talent”, landscape, leaders need to think differently about how to keep their teams on track. 

 

They must become more intuitive, diverting from the traditional ways of leading that have become too predictable and uninspiring. Many leaders are out of touch and disconnected from their employees, focusing solely on their own personal agendas.  

 

Where it becomes most apparent, are when leaders try to use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to earn trust, build loyalty and inspire team and individual performance. Leaders must understand that in today’s new workplace, there does not exist a single formula to inspire employees to perform better.   Rather, it’s about how to maximize all the components in order to create hundreds of formulas that provide long-term value, continuity and impact, but are most importantly authentic.    Organizations have a responsibility, but so do the people who comprise  the organization.  The mutually beneficially relationship between employer and employee has gone by the wayside like work life balance.  These are semantics and you need to be authentic and true to yourself, leading your own career, in order to realize your full potential in any organization.