When the People, not the Work, Burn You Out
Last week, we had a new volunteer come to our urban farm. After a brief tour of the greenery, it was time for work. Our twice-a-week morning routine is to turn our piles at our compost stations. After about a month of regular turning, the piles become the black gold we use to boost the soil on our site. Until then, they are just a hot mess of dead leaves, grass, maggots and oh-so fragrant manure.
It wasn’t the easiest initiation for the volunteer but he was up for it. The turning takes a hour, not quite back-breaking but under the Malaysian sun, it’s a decent workout. Midway through, he told his story. He left his finance job last August in a state of dissatisfaction, and was looking for things to occupy his time before he jumps back in the rat race. When I asked how this experience of shoveling cow dung compared with his former workplace, he replied with these pithy words of inadvertent wisdom:
“Well, you guys have to smell sh*t, at least you don’t have to deal with sh*t”.
Dealing with the Drag
Often, the reason we reach a breaking point in our job has less to do with the work and more the work culture. We are all familiar with the classic coworker tropes: the micromanaging supervisor who barely hides his or her glee in spotting your typos, the hyper-competitive colleague who will kneecap you at the most public opportunity, or the chatty staff member from the nearby department who chews your time sharing the latest gossip which is his or her oxygen. Most of us are lucky to only have one or two such individuals who derail our day, any more and the prospect of work becomes a challenge indeed.
There is a lot of self-help literature out there encouraging people to remove ‘toxic personalities’ from their lives but in work you do not have the luxury to decide who you can and cannot interact with. For those enjoying a long stint in an organization, you may end up spending as much time with your colleagues as with your family members.
As a coach, I try and help my professionals clients to demarcate those areas of their work place which are sources of dissatisfaction into zones which they have influence on and zones which are beyond their control. The quality of our coworkers often ends up in the latter. The goal then becomes finding strategies for resisting their downward pull in their forward progression. In certain cases, it becomes clear rather than pouring this effort into resistance, it makes more sense to make a dash to the exit.
Grow with those around you
Our professional and personal growth doesn’t normally happen in isolation. It is a microcosm of the larger environment we operate in. We tend to absorb the energy and match the vibrations of the people we collaborate with. Organizations can spend a lot of time and resources to ensure their staff sync to each other in a seamless way. So the question we should ask is whether the team and culture we choose to immerse ourselves in is actually contributing to our own development or well-being.
Determining that can be tricky. We may want to write off a supercharged workplace as being too corporate or demanding, but you are usually best placed to know whether that particular kick in the butt is exactly what you need at your stage of your career. On the flipside, a congenial group of thoroughly decent and relatively laidback employees may seem on the surface to be the ideal work buddies. Yet that same group may be in their collective comfort bubble, keen on keeping the status quo and shy of making needed and overdue changes for professional upliftment. So there is no special formula except for ‘context matters’.
A completely conflict-free workplace isn’t really a reflection of life. Butting heads with our manager or confronting your junior staff can be necessary exchanges that add to your own personal journey. But there is a point, which you can only know, when the daily grind of conflict eats at you internally till the time when you can take no more.
Any job, like most worthwhile endeavors in life, should be a struggle. But that doesn’t have to mean it should be suffering. A struggle can take you somewhere without the cost that suffering takes. So perhaps this is the question we can ask to ourselves when considering a new position in the future: will the people around me where I work help to lift me up or sink me down?
