Your virtual career team

Over the last several decades, the focus for executive management has been to maximize earnings and cut costs. Yes, companies have always done that, but the relentless focus on quarterly earnings and quarterly performance has cost the people — managers and employees — that work for corporations.

In short, today a corporation exists simply to use its labor force, both managers and individual contributors, to maximize profits from their customers. A corporation is short-term oriented in its decisions because quarterly performance is all that counts.

Now, quarterly performance is an old song sung too many times to justify longing for the old days. The old days are not coming back, so longing for them won’t do anyone much good.

Corporations force separation of managers and employees

But one area ignored in all the “quarterly driven companies” is that corporations have separated their managers from their employees. Executive managers can talk all they want about long term strategies; the truth of the matter is that most people can’t keep their SMART Goals for a full year to work on them because management changes their mind on what’s important. Or even six months.

Employees quickly figure out that whatever they say or do doesn’t make much difference when the goals they have constantly shift and change. And managers who want to develop teams — because great teams can handle great challenges — are left tilting at windmills while executive management shuffles the organization chart yet again to adopt to yet another change in tactics.

Business becomes transactional instead of relational. What do I need to accomplish in this job role? How long will this role last before I need to start finding another? Should I try and follow this management team to the next department they work in or stay here? I’d like to develop relationships with my team, but my team gets broken up every eighteen months, so I’ll just focus on my work. Or I’ll just give up hope of making a difference and just do my job sitting in my cubicle.

Managers look at the ever-changing directives, get overwhelmed by the amount of changes or underwhelmed at the politics of it all and start to focus on the little that they can control right now. That makes short term stuff even worse; I can control what I work on the next hour so that’s what I’ll do. If you don’t pay attention to your most important customer — your manager — you won’t be long for the company anyway.

Corporations lost their role in satisfying careers

All of this sounds depressing, but I don’t think it needs to be. We can lament the loss of the role of corporations in fulfilling careers, but we need to replace what satisfies us in working. Companies are not going to help us find new job skills; we need to do that. We can help our managers complete transactional tasks and do it well; it doesn’t guarantee a job or a promotion. Managers can try and develop individuals, but individuals need to accept the coaching and act on the advice given.

Your virtual career team

If corporations are not the source of job satisfaction and only use our job skills for their own benefit, where do we get our satisfaction from work? Well, I’d suggest that it comes from the people we work with every day, managers and employees. Near and far, in many different companies and continents, each of us have a group of people — our virtual career team — that we can be our best and provide our best work.

Instead of defining our career as the companies we keep, we need to define our work by the people we keep. Companies come and go, but working with people that engage us, make us better, support our work and make work fun means if we work with those people it doesn’t matter what company is paying us our salary.

Yet too often, we let those great people slip away. They change jobs, we don’t talk to them any more. They go to a different company and they might as well have gone to a different planet. Taking time to network with people? Don’t have the time!

But the answer to job satisfaction and engagement in the work comes from these very people who, together, make everyone better. Instead of looking at job boards, Twitter and LinkedIn for jobs, I’d be calling people that I loved working with and asking, “How can I work with you again?”

Think about your virtual career team. Think about the people that you make great and the people that make you great. Then ask yourself if you’d feel great about working at Microsoft or Google or Toyota or United Health or Monsters, Inc.(!)

Or would you rather work with John, Mary and George who you worked with and made work easy, got each other through tough times, and kicked butt on goals despite the obstacles?

I’d take the people over a company every time, wouldn’t you?