I met two of my former coworkers after a long time. C told me that she loves her job, the team and her manager. While she did not get the raise she was expecting, everything else was so amazing that she wanted to stay where she was. It was energizing for me to see how happy she was with what she was doing. L on the other hand is on a promotion track, has newly expanded scope of responsibilities and may even come into a decent raise. And yet she is unsure if she will stay through the end of the year. She is actively in the market. The things that keeps C in her job are exactly the things that L is missing in hers - she does not particularly like what she does, her manager is completely disengaged and the team is not high-performance. The two conversations remined me of an article I had read about the cost of disengaged employees such as L.
Both of these woman are highly talented one is so motivated that she is willing to be undercompensated because the job gives her just about everything else she desires and the other cannot be incentivized by all the things that would generally be considered desirable. I have experienced situations where bad organization structure creates winners and losers in the same team. The later do not have any goals they can latch on to and do not have the intrinsic motivation to create their own. The winners are able to make opportunities for themselves amidst chaos and mismanagement and forge their own way. That is turn makes those who are going about their working days aimlessly struggle even harder and feel more lost. I found myself thinking about my own circumstances - where I was and how I was responding to the environment and if there were ways for me to create a small but sustaining ecosystem that resembled what C had.
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