Transcript
Speaker: Made on Zencastr. Welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Nillward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. Today, i am joined by Dr. Benjamin Ritter, a leadership and career coach who focuses on helping people create sustainable careers that they will love.
Speaker: Hello, Ben. How is it going, sir? It's going very well. Thank you very much. And thank you for joining us from the United States. I know there's quite a time difference between us, but I do appreciate you making the time to have a conversation with me today.
Speaker: Of course. And if anyone is ever doubting themselves, i highly recommend you go on some podcasts or record some podcasts with your friends and make them read your bio because you're just going to be sitting there being like, yeah, that's me.
Speaker: Good advice. Good advice. Please could we start by you telling us a bit about the work that you do Of course. Yeah. So I operate in two main spaces. I help organizations become places that people can fall in love with.
Speaker: And I help people figure out how to fall in love with their work. Now, in between there, that also involves how do leaders help other people fall in love with the organizations and their work, too?
Speaker: everything that really relates to job satisfaction, career empowerment, and accountability, and ultimately, values, congruence. And this all came about because I was a very unhappy healthcare care executive, that is an understatement.
Speaker: I was promoted from a position that I enjoyed working in performance and in quality, which, by the way, this was kind of i found a felon to this job. And that's a longer story. But ultimately, I was promoted into an executive level role, did not feel like I had control over my career. I felt like I was still reacting to it. and that negativity and that resentment bled into my personal life. I was going into work, trying not to work.
Speaker: I felt completely underutilized at the same time, overworked. And luckily, was walking to work one day. And I like to look people in the eyes, like I've focused a lot on developing confidence and learning how to be social. And a lot of lot of what you learn is eye contact.
Speaker: And I was making eye contact with the people around me. And it seems like they all felt the same sense of dread that I felt. And it just kind of light bulb went off and went, o you know, who's responsible for this, Ben, not your leader, who is causing people to cry each and every single day, you know, not, not ah the work that you're doing, not, that's not the organization.
Speaker: It's you. And so that started the journey of figuring out, well, how do I get involved in talent development? How do I learn about organizational leadership? And how do I apply my coaching skills at the time into the space? So I back got my doctorate in the field. And lo and behold, you know, that was 2015. So I built a business and grew from there. and here we are today where have a lovely career in talent and organizational leadership and development.
Speaker: And I get to impact people each and every single day and get to help organizations become places that those people can thrive in. Great. Great. So out of your own dissatisfaction, it was like a reflection on why am I unhappy?
Speaker: And then that led to a voyage of discovery for point of a better expression and then learning about it and then using that knowledge to help other people. I think we all have things that we're interested in or care about. And if we don't, well, I'm sure you do. Just you need to sit back and do a little bit reflection.
Speaker: But then taking those grandiose goals, these ideas, and breaking them out down into small to-dos and steps. And so it's do you have clarity of actually how you're going to achieve the thing that you care about?
Speaker: And do you know what you care about? That's really the foundation of anything that we do. And at that point in my career, my first step wasn't to leave my job. It wasn't to quit. That would have been silly at the time. My first step was to go try to do that type of work at the organization I was in.
Speaker: So there's a field of research called job crafting, where you can actually mold your job to be best fit for you or better fit for you. Can I get into your career sweet spot, which is an overlap of a couple different areas of work we can discuss.
Speaker: And my boss said, yeah, Like that boss that I was really angry at and thought was the worst leader I've ever had said yes to me asking if I could craft my job to be related in talent development.
Speaker: And I started some of those projects. And, you know, if if if that worked out, I would probably be in a very different place right now. But it didn't because we got acquired for the second time and everyone that I was working with lost their jobs.
Speaker: And all the work that I was doing was getting centralized. And so I would have had to leave where I was currently working and go work at corporate, which I didn't want to do. So my next step was to try to go get a job in the space. But I think it's really important. Very often we try to run away from our situation when we actually can fix it.
Speaker: and we can We can put out the fires or we can walk to a different room or we can change how we perceive what's happening around us. And lot of times when we run away and we haven't learned that we can do those things, we just create the same situation where we were because we're allowing the organization, we're allowing our manager, we're allowing our peers to dictate how we feel and how we work.
Speaker: i I think I understand what you mean. In a corporate environment, whether it's large or small, There are lots of things that require us as individuals to fit into a box that is defined by the organization before the organization knows who we are.
Speaker: When recruitment happens, you design a job, create the job description, write the advertisement, and try and find the person who's going to fit into the job that you have to created.
Speaker: The person that you appoint is the best fit for that job on the day that you appoint them. But people change, people develop, people evolve and develop new skills, new areas of interest, their lives change.
Speaker: and And can see what you mean. You have to take what you've got as a job, but also learn about yourself as an individual and what you want your job to be like, and then craft it so that it enables you to to do more of the things that you want to do. And as a consequence, more of the things that you will actually shine at, the things that you will be better at because you're more interested in those areas.
Speaker: and There's an infinite amount of ways to do a job. And very often we think the only way to do it is the way that we've been taught or the way that we've learned before.
Speaker: And just by doing something differently, we can change how it makes us feel, how we feel about it. even just by the fact that you understand that you can impact how something is done, gives us just a sense of control, which builds more confidence as well as helps us feel more safe, which then leads to greater feelings of job satisfaction.
Speaker: And by the way, you were saying, you know, when someone's hired their best fit for that role, and that's not always the case either because they could have lied. They might not have had a full understanding of what the job was. 100% you don't, by the way, just in like three to maybe 12 interviews, depending on where you're interviewing.
Speaker: And the leader that you're working with, you have no idea how they work, how they manage, especially and based on how people tend to ask questions during interviews. And so you're starting a new job and it is, it is really a blank slate.
Speaker: And if you don't take some semblance of a lead in how you are going to create that job now that it is yours, it's nobody else's, you are left at the decisions of what someone else thinks, um, how you should work, uh, what you should work on, what you, how you need to be communicated to,
Speaker: And so these these are all things that we can raise our hand and and say, Hey, hold on a second. And these are things we do in other areas of our life. By the way, we do this with our relationships or like a successful long term relationship.
Speaker: Usually the person goes, this is how I manage conflict. This is how I communicate. This is how I like to go on a date. This is what I need for, this is what I want. This is how I want my birthday to be celebrated. That's pretty granular.
Speaker: This is what I like to eat. And so we raise our hands in those situations, but don't realize that our job is actually a relationship as well. Yeah. A relationship with our, with our employing organization, a relationship with our managers, relationship with our colleagues,
Speaker: with our subordinates. When you talk about a life relationship though, many of the things that we learn about our partners, we don't actually learn in a sit down type situation. There is there isn't an onboarding or an an induction or orientation that we go through It's, it evolves. We, we learn over time as that person also adapts and changes to us.
Speaker: Um, it's a little bit more structured at work though, isn't it? But I think it's also a little bit one way. It's the organization telling the individual how things will be rather than the individual talking up, standing up, saying something about actually, I would prefer that to be something different.
Speaker: I mean, I think that relationships need to be more structured or successful relationships are. And at work, it needs to be very much a two way street, especially during those onboarding those first six months.
Speaker: The leader isn't telling the person how to work. The the leader is learning how to create an environment around the employee so that they can work in a way that is efficient and production productive.
Speaker: Now, as an employee, because a lot of leaders don't do this, It's your job to make that happen. So you go into one ones, and you ask questions such as, you know, what is your what are your career goals for me?
Speaker: How do you see me developing in the organization? How do you like to communicate? Because this is how I like to communicate. What's the best way to reach you when there's an urgent matter?
Speaker: um I really value one to ones. So please don't cancel them. Or if you do, let's reschedule them. Yes. These are the types of things we can say. Yeah. When I was, so when I'm interviewing someone to come work for me, one of the key questions I always ask is how do you like to be managed?
Speaker: What is about, what is it I could do that would really annoy you? And what have you not liked about, um, the people that have been your managers in the past? Those are great. I love the question.
Speaker: What do you go home and complain about? Very good question. And just yeah having that dialogue is so crucial, but we don't feel that we're capable. And I say we as general universal we.
Speaker: We aren't taught as employees that we can have these conversations and that how these conversations are important to us actually succeeding in our career. We'll stay at an organization longer. We'll learn more at that organization.
Speaker: We'll make the job easier for the leader that we're around. And I think it's it's really important to note too that the project that you're very stressed out about that maybe is causing you to be unhappy is more than likely, I'd say over 90% is not going to be remembered in a year.
Speaker: And if you leave the organization and it's 100% isn't going to be remembered by anybody out that really is going to be working with you. And I hope this lends a little bit of softness, right?
Speaker: And grace our days. So like, well, what is really important about what we're doing? And maybe it might have some impact, right? Real impact on the world. But no one's really going to call out what you've done at your next job.
Speaker: And so what you're doing on a day-to-day basis is less about your career. And it's more about your satisfaction and the value that you get from your work. I agree with you entirely. I'm so thinking there is an aspect of work which is based historically on the master and servant type relationship, but that is a relationship format which is changing as the way in which we work changes. We're no longer looking necessarily for a manager to tell us what to do.
Speaker: We're looking for someone who's going to lead us and enable us to to be better at what we do. ah think also more people are probably... um looking at what is the lifestyle that I want to have? How do I craft a job, a work, a career around the lifestyle that I want to have rather than simply the accumulation of wealth or the progression of a career?
Speaker: It's what are you going to do when you're not at work is increasingly important to people nowadays than it may have been 20, 30, 40 years ago I'm really curious about the historic, like aspects of work.
Speaker: There's some good books. One's called Do Nothing. think the other one's called The 4000 Weeks. Do Nothing goes more into the how work used to be, how much of ah our lives it took up.
Speaker: um And if you go even really further back to like, trying to think of kind of like the medieval ages, I'm not an expert on work history or not, but
Speaker: there wasn't as much work. There were a lot of holidays. There was the towns. You like did your job that you needed to do. You milked the cows, got the eggs if you needed to. you did And then there was a lot more free time to spend with people in community. like Our entire world has shifted in terms of how we have a community, how we have relationships, what our careers mean for us, the amount of wealth that we need or think we need.
Speaker: But anything that you currently do for work, the reason why you think work is important is only It's only important in that way because you've given it that value. You've created your expenses, right? Most of the time outside of like food and shelter.
Speaker: You've created the expectations that that you have for yourself in terms of status. And all this can be different. I remember I was once in Belize and Placencia, Belize, and I was sitting on like on the beach and I looked over to my left and we were, it was like a school trip or something. I looked over and there was a guy sitting on a log fishing.
Speaker: It's like the middle of the week. I go, ah yeah, the guy could have a day off, but it really looked like that guy just goes and sits on a log and fishes. And I was just like, wonder what life would be like if, if that was my mentality towards work.
Speaker: And I'm very curious if someone comes up to this person and says, okay, you have to work 80 hours a week, can't ever fish, but you're going to make X amount of money.
Speaker: Is that a trade off you want to make? And we've, and I just bring this up because we've all made this trade off for ourselves. We work because we choose to work. and And when we forget that we give our power to the organization, we start hating our leadership.
Speaker: We start hating our job. You can always leave. Yes, you can always leave. we forget, I think, very often that actually everyone who goes to work and accepts a paycheck is actually a volunteer.
Speaker: And it is all you have to do ah say, you know, I no longer want to volunteer. I no longer want to spend my time here. I'm going to go and do it somewhere else.
Speaker: You talk about the history of work. Work changed when the Industrial Revolution happened. which started in the United Kingdom. But before that, people worked where they lived. They did what they needed in order to survive so that they could have the free time. It's like there was wasn't the same amount of pressure to progress a career. You learned a skill and you were valued for your skill.
Speaker: When the individual became part of the machine and had to go to a specific place at a specific time to function as part of that industrial machine,
Speaker: We then started to see work completely change and the control of people's time and energies became a ah key part of the success of the industrial revolution.
Speaker: The picture that you have just painted with the fisherman reminds me of a story I was told about a management consultant who goes on holiday to a really idyllic island. you could be in Belize, it could be in in the Mediterranean, it could be anywhere in the world. But basically, he sees a man who is fishing.
Speaker: And he says to him, oh, you know, I'm a management consultant. What I could do is actually craft a business plan for you, which would enable you to increase the amount of fish that you caught, increase the number of people that you employed, set up a business, all this sort of thing, and then we'll eventually sell it and make you lots and lots of money.
Speaker: And the fisherman says, yes, that would be very interesting, wouldn't it? said, once we've got built this company and you've sold it and you've got lots and lots of money, what is it you would most like to do with it? And the fisherman says, I think I'd sit in the harbor and go fishing.
Speaker: It's such a powerful story. What are we working for? It's like, regardless of how much money that fisherman had, what he was interested in doing was going fishing, catching enough fish to eat.
Speaker: There wasn't the same pressure that people have to fit into a career to. ah Sometimes I think people's careers are based around what families or friends are have as expectations of them, rather than what people really want to do?
Speaker: I often so I will dabble in the corporate world, And so I will have a ah recently had a consulting client reach out to me and asked me to come on board a little bit ago. And so I'm building their talent development departments from the ground up.
Speaker: And I'm known for in the organization, I was known for this before too. And I coach my clients in this that I have very strong boundaries.
Speaker: When Ben isn't available for a meeting, Ben is not available for a meeting. Now he does does the work, he does what he needs to do, but he also understands what's critical and what's not critical, at least in how he perceives it.
Speaker: And this all comes down to the fact that I have multiple income streams. I never give anyone full control over my livelihood. And so I'm safe to say no to things.
Speaker: I'm safe in a negotiation to walk away.
Speaker: And if we can feel that, oh, it is so freeing when it comes to work. I agree with you. It is a great situation to be in.
Speaker: And to not to be reliant upon one source of income to have the freedom to say, i will not be treated like that. I will not do that type of work. I will not do that work at that time.
Speaker: That is great. But I think a lot of people either are or perceive themselves to be in a different situation. They live in a particular location where the opportunities for employment are not as broad as they might be in other areas.
Speaker: They have family commitments, extended family commitments, and it is very difficult when you have one source of income to find those, the confidence to have the sort of conversations which you are outlining and and set the boundaries that you are outlining. What sort of advice would you give to that person in that situation?
Speaker: Yeah, first off, understand what you need to survive, whatever that is. And so this is like a number. And then figure out ways to build up a cushion towards that number over the next, it could be a year, two years.
Speaker: Usually it takes about six months, six months to a year. So that you if you did have to walk away, And this is just important for anyone in any economic situation because you are at will employed. You you know, in certain certain labor markets have more protection than others, but um at least in, you know, in certain geographies, you could be just let go without any sort of cause.
Speaker: And so you should have that just overall in general. And if you can't have that, you say, I have no way i can have that. I am at the slim pickings of my budget. I have no room to save. i have nothing to cut. I am eating rice and drinking from the water fountain from the local store.
Speaker: then how are you building skills or relationships um or career clout in your current job to make more money or to start a potential side business to earn an extra income?
Speaker: If you're listening to this, I imagine you have the internet. There are a lot of things that you can do online from data entry to folks to surveys that can start earning a little bit more money outside of what you're currently doing for your income and that can add up over time to build that cushion when you have that cushion you then will create a little bit more freedom um too often we don't think about planning ahead you know Yeah, it makes an awful lot of sense that, you know, we do go into employment and we forget that we're volunteers.
Speaker: We forget that we can walk away if we want to. That employment is a partnership type relationship where you give somebody your time and hard work in exchange for pay and benefits.
Speaker: But As part of your career management, your career management strategy, what you're saying is you also need to be thinking about, okay, where would you go next? What would be your next option?
Speaker: What skills are you developing? ah Where can you find that alternative source of income? If an employer took your income away, if you were no longer employed by them, what would you do?
Speaker: None of us should be reliant upon somebody else for our complete financial and domestic security. We all need to have some sort of alternative which we can turn on or turn on more than we have, keep it ticking over, but have it something that we can turn on so that if we needed to, we have got an alternative source of income.
Speaker: It makes an awful lot of sense. Yeah. Worst case scenario, right? The world goes into a global pandemic 30% of positions are cut and no one's funding your lifestyle. What do you do?
Speaker: Do you have an agreement with a friend that they'll support you for three months have ah or a month or that you could sleep in their in their home at their guest bed? you have ah an agreement with a family member?
Speaker: you have money saved in a shoebox? Are you purchasing canned goods now and having them so you have food to eat? There is a amazing amount, again, going say it again, freedom that comes from understanding that you're safe.
Speaker: And your current job is not what keeps you safe. Yeah, it is one of those basic human needs from all of the motivation type. Hertzberg, Maslow, all those sorts of things is making sure that you have got that level of security which enables you to make choices rather than simply having decisions made for you.
Speaker: A lot of what causes issues at work is we hold back what we want to say because we don't feel safe. We don't give feedback. We don't ask for the things we need.
Speaker: And that festers, causes resentment. It doesn't strengthen relationships. And so, i mean, overall, the other thing would just be take a look at your career so far.
Speaker: How many jobs have you had? ah you Do you believe that you could get another job if you needed it?
Speaker: Can you have relationships? Can you focus on relationships now? That's ah that's free. So that when, if you do lose a position, you have people that are interested in you and curious about you and maybe potentially have a role for you. You know, I've not always run my own business. I've not always been a senior leader in a leadership position. You know, I bartended nights for ah decade.
Speaker: i you know, worked at a deli. I handed out flyers on street corners. I was that person going to focus groups, you know, to earn extra money.
Speaker: And, you know, everything you do builds upon itself, builds momentum and carries into the next step in your career. So if you have plans for five years from now, 10 years from now, what little steps are you doing today that are going to add up?
Speaker: Yeah. Hearing you talk about that reminds me of stages in, in my career, especially the early career where I was working full time studying ah for my professional qualifications and, um still found the time to work behind a bar so that I could afford to go on holiday and still save for all the things that I wanted to be able to achieve.
Speaker: It's, uh, it's very interesting. type scenario. I know that when we started, we thought we would talk about a lot more things, but this crafting a job that you love from the job that you have, there's a very interesting, um, idea, and very practical, uh, way to make job, make your job, something that you really want to do rather than, um, just a way in which to pay the bills.
Speaker: It's been very interesting, Ben. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me here. And honestly, this is something I have to remind myself about.
Speaker: And the fact that I get to have these conversations, kind of built a life to automatically remind myself, I understand that it puts it top of mind for me. So how are our listeners remembering these topics?
Speaker: So make some post-it notes, listen to this episode, because this isn't something that happens naturally. So thank you again for having me on. it's been a great pleasure and really I've learned a lot.
Speaker: Thank you very much. I am Michael Millward, the managing director of Abucida and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Dr. Benjamin Ritter, who is a leadership and career coach who focuses on helping people and organization create sustainable careers.
Speaker: You can find out more about both of us at abucida.co.uk. There is a link in the description. The Zencaster system has, as always, been very efficient to today.
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Speaker: Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.
