When Good Jobs Go Bad

I spoke to an audience of B-school alums who had graduated with their MBAs six or seven years before. One woman stopped to talk after the presentation.

"I could use some advice," she said. "I'm in a really bad situation at work."

"We can walk to the elevator together," I said. "What's going on?"

"I took a great job two and a half years ago," she said. "I would have said it was my dream job. I loved the work - creating online catalogs and working with our vendor partners and resellers. It was heaven. My boss was amazing. She hired me and trained me, and we worked wonderfully together."

"Then she left?" I guessed.

"It's worse than that," said my walking partner, Allie. "She's still there, and she's still my boss. She's become a different person."

"She's a different person only with you, or with everyone?" I wondered.

"With everyone," said Allie. "And it's not just her. I don't know what's going on, but for the past nine months it's been hell at my workplace. It's a struggle to go there every day."

"How so?" I asked her.

"The top leaders are short with one another, from the CEO on down," she said. "Bitterness. In-fighting. The numbers still look good, but I have to guess there are political rifts high up in the company. My boss is mixed up in it somehow. She's turned into a zombie. She hardly replies when you talk to her, and when she talks to me or anyone it's to pick a fight or blow up over something small. I went from loving my job to actively hating it. I'm getting sick just describing it to you, right now."

"I'm sorry to hear it," I said. "That is really stressful for you."

"It's unbelievable," said Allie. "My job was so great, I bragged about it to my friends. I loved this job a year ago. I was learning something new every day. My husband and I were starting to think about becoming parents. Not now. We're both stress cases. I have to do something."

"How can I help you?" I asked. The elevator bank was twenty feet away.

"Do I leave, or do I stay and try to ride it out?" Allie asked me. "It's gruesome at work. Do horrible situations improve by themselves?"

"Not likely," I said. "You already knew that. The problem isn't that there are issues at your workplace. There are problems in every organization. The problem is that nobody's talking about them, and the energy is getting worse and worse. Surely you and the other employees talk about the dirty water in the fishbowl...?"

"Incessantly," said Allie. "It's just that there's no one higher up to talk to about it. There's no HR person. Our Division VP, the head guy in our office, is in a foul mood almost all the time and we avoid him."

:"What does that tell us?" I said. "Something is very broken. The numbers look okay to you, but maybe not to whomever at headquarters makes decisions about numbers. Or maybe the numbers are secondary -- maybe the alternatives that are under discussion have dire implications for the VP and your boss and who knows who else.

It doesn't really matter what the cause is. You've seen that under pressure, the leaders in your shop turn into pod people and stop behaving like humans. They won't talk about the bad air in the place. Nothing is going to get better unless people start telling the truth about what's happening."

"And I could get old waiting for that to happen," said Allie, "not to mention that I'd go crazy in the process."

"So what do you see as your alternatives?" I asked her.

"I could start job-hunting," she said, "but I'm so de-mojofied that I can't imagine I'd be at my best. And starting a stealth job search now, with so much pressure at work - it just sounds awful. I'd be better off quitting outright. I think about it every day. But my husband is in grad school."

"What else could you do?" I asked her.

"I could try to hang in there," she said. "This is how bad it is. A girl burst out crying at our staff meeting the other day, and my boss didn't even miss a beat. She didn't even comment, and neither did anyone else. We're all petrified. We're all turning into zombies."

"Your boss is lost," I said. "She's not herself. She's so overwhelmed that she can't be present with you guys. One day, you'll look back and feel sorry for her, and for your VP too. I don't expect you to feel sorry for them now."

"I could grit my teeth and deal with it, but I'm doing that now and I'm not sleeping," said Allie. "My lower back hurts. My jaw aches."

"There is another way to think about this dilemma," I said. "Nelson Mandela spent over twenty years in prison. How did he do it?"

"I guess he went to a different place in his mind," she said.

"That's it," I said. "You can shift your view of this place. You're not going to retire from this company. You're probably not going to be there one year from now. You had a great time for nearly two years, tried a lot of things and learned a ton. That's a huge piece of what you'll take with you when you go. What else is there in this company that you could learn? Can you make a list of things to get out of the place before you make your next leap?"

"That's interesting," said Allie. "Like data mining. What can I mine from this job, before I move on?"

"Precisely!" I said.

"Remember Tim Robbins in 'The Shawshank Redemption?' He had his own plan to keep him going. Forget anybody else's plan. Day by day, you'll be working Allie's plan."

"I like it!" said Allie, brightening a little."There are things I could learn. I can craft my own Allie-flame-growing project."

"You're going to use the rest of your time in that place to grow your flame like crazy," I said. "Try lots of new things. Volunteer for projects to get the learning and the resume fodder. Get the bragging rights and the stories out of that joint before you bail. Wring it out like a wet rag!"

We cracked up together in the elevator bank. "Honestly," said Allie as the elevator doors opened, "I do feel sorry for my boss, when I don't want to break her arm."

"Could you ever say that to her?" I asked. "Could you say 'It must be really hard for you, with so much pressure from up above?'"

"Wow," said Allie. "Now you're asking me to be Mother Teresa."

"You'd be surprised," I said. "Show your boss some human empathy and see how she responds. When your point of view shifts so that you don't feel like a victim of this situation, your life at work may get a lot better."

And so it did. Allie wrote me to say that after a prickly first conversation, her boss invited her to dinner and went so deep in the Vault that Allie's ears were burning. Things got better as Allie took her hurt and anger out of the picture and focused on her path. Six months later, she got a great job offer, and wrote to our office.

"Now I'm conflicted!" Allie wrote. "The new job seems amazing, and this place isn't fixed yet, but it's so much better than it was."

"Great problem to have!" we wrote back.

Energy is real, and it moves in waves. Good situations turn ugly, and bad ones improve. Our job is to ride the waves and stay mindful of our own reactions. We don't choose our circumstances, but we choose our responses to them.

Allie will thrive in her career because she's figured out that when bad things happen, it's not because someone hates her or is trying to make her life miserable. Most of the time, the waves crashing to shore around her have nothing to do with her at all.

Allie can't change the political turmoil that is causing so much stress in her office. She can change her response to it, though. She will always have control over that.

Here in Colorado, we say "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes and it'll change." Work is stressful enough without taking the daily drama personally. Our flames will grow as long as we stay in our bodies and on our path and remember that we make our own Human Workplaces, every day.

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our mission is to reinvent work for people.

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