When celebrating my 33rd birthday I had it all. All I dreamt about. Education, family, wealth and finally my dream job of leading a company. So, this was it! And now? The next 33 years I would either keep climbing the ladder or at least increase my income level, right? Well, I felt that ‘something’ was missing, but I wasn’t sure what. All my dreams had come true, though my life wasn’t fulfilled? Actually my dreams now felt rather like duties, increasingly a burden and became stressful. Depleting my energy. Especially at work. So, when talking to my boss he recommended me to take coaching sessions. Coaching? My immediate response was that I don’t need a therapy as I wasn’t sick. He recommended me to take this experience, do something for me and the company would pay for it anyway. So I did.
Initially, during my coaching sessions, I asked myself repeatedly why would somebody place uncomfortable questions about things I didn’t want to put my attention to? Over the time, though, I began to change. I started to learn about ‘me’ and learned to differentiate between my intuition and my ‘misleading’ illusions. When finishing the program my coach told me bluntly that I had been a tough nut to crack as I was shielding my emotions by a type of ‘smart-assed and eloquent executive attitude’. Hence, my personal development path had just begun.
Still, when back at job nothing had changed but myself. I recognised more and more the destructive cultures of being amongst the ‘sharks’ with big egos and the ‘sheep’ keeping their heads down. And this 8 hours a day? When asking my colleagues what their motivation in their actual job was they said either to ‘earn more’ or ‘feed their families’. With manic Mondays and TGI Fridays. Clearly a very unhealthy trend in the detriment of the company and the life of the employees. The non-comformists were chasing other job opportunities for a bigger pay-check and the company was getting rid of the under-performers. Finally I recognised that the human factor was no longer a ‘capital’ as it had become a periodically replaced ‘commodity’.
In parallel, outside the job, I was continuously participating in different personal development courses which helped me to balance myself. But when back at work it frustrated me to see this unhealthy trend amongst my team. Our educational systems don’t teach us anything about ourselves. We don’t know our vocations or don’t dare to implement them in our lives. Instead we do what we are supposed to do in order to be ‘successful’ and comply with the expectations of the economy and society we are living in. At the end many people just go on with their lives and try to find pleasure in other things. Increasingly via compulsive attitudes, depressions and burnouts. All statistics confirm this unhealthy trend.
What if the company is understood as a living culture, instead of a hierarchal structure? What if we learn to listen to our intuition and discover our personal vocation to implement them in our job? What if we create empathy and cohesion amongst our colleagues to improve together the results of the company? What if we foster a professional personal development in a structured way to enhance the corporate culture, to help the team members to learn about themselves and adjust our structure in order to accommodate their passions and vocations within the company?
That moment, I decided to talk to my senior executive team and proposed them to participate all-together in a professional personal development program as a first step called ‘Management Excellence Program’ to ease the resistance of some of them. It was important to understand that this wasn’t an assessment program to select high-potentials and fire loosers. This program was something for them to learn about themselves. The first session was a little tense, but all following ones had a profound and hugely positive effect on the members, the team and even within the company. Other employees became curious about this change in attitudes and asked if they could also participate in such a program. So, we jointly decided to implement the program top-down throughout the company.
Over the years I have worked many teams in different countries witnessing the same transformative personal development effects on team performances and corporate cultures with clearly measurable impacts. Once you learn to deliver your talents you ‘naturally enjoy’ being productive. Et Voilà!
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