A change in perspective leads to a dramatic reevaluation of a tech company’s treatment of employees.
Frustrated with the constant turmoil at a huge technology company and the stark contrast with previous jobs that had provided stability and a family-like atmosphere, an employee thought deeply about connection and belonging. She surprised herself by concluding that actually she loved where she worked.
What happened? She opened her mind and looked afresh at her situation. While she had been focused on the absence of things she had expected, she realized that she’d accepted new riches without much thought. Just like the Rubin vase optical illusion (image above), what you see depends on what you choose to focus on.
Meg’s Frustration: Struggling with Change at TechCo
When I first told Meg (as I’ll call her) about my interest in connection & belonging in organizations, she told me that she had just been assigned to her sixth manager in two and a half years at her TechCo (as I’ll call her company). TechCo is held in high regard as a good place to work. While she enjoyed the work itself, and the caliber of her colleagues, the organizational turmoil was a big negative.
With all these changes in bosses and assignments, she felt no sense of belonging in her group. She did not feel safe; she was unsure if her boss had her back. After all, except for her very first boss at TechCo, who had recruited her, the rest had not chosen her. Instead, she had been assigned to them through corporate reorgs. She found it exhausting to impress and build connection with each new boss and to regain self-confidence.
The Turning Point: A Shift in Perspective
And yet, only two days later in our interview, I learned that she had changed her mind, saying “TechCo is a great company!”
My interview invitation had led Meg to think deeply about her sense of non-belonging and non-connection at TechCo. While Meg was certain that belonging mattered a great deal, both for personal satisfaction and for doing a good job, she wondered how she could view her situation differently. She thought of this as a self-experiment: How might things change if she adopted a different perspective?
What if she accepted the idea that constant changes in corporate direction were necessary for TechCo to thrive in a turbulent market environment? What if such changes necessitated reorgs and layoffs? If so, how could she still have a sense of belonging? What could the company do to help employees cope with the changes? And how was this different from her past experiences?
Finding Belonging Amidst Turbulence
Meg grew more impressed as she looked carefully at how TechCo supported employees. She noted the wide range of very good resources. There was so much more than just great, free food. There were many classes and workshops for self-improvement, and free one-on-one advisors. In fact, she had found both a coach and a mentor (two different people) with whom she had formed ongoing relationships. In addition there were many opportunities to interact with interesting, high-caliber people from all over the company. All of this empowered her to better manage through the turbulence.
She realized that while she did not yet have stability with her new group and boss, she did feel a strong sense of connection, belonging and even stability with the company. She and her friends identify with TechCo (the overall company and its mission), and not with their specific groups.
As Meg explained, she should not expect a long-term job. Instead people should enjoy the work and make full use of the resources in the moment, and build relationships with their inspiring colleagues.
The reevaluation of her experiences led her to conclude that, despite the turmoil, TechCo had been “an amazing experience”.
While six managers in two and half years is awful, plain and simple, even in a turbulent environment, Meg is willing to believe that her experience was extraordinarily bad luck. Given her otherwise very positive perception of TechCo leadership, she expects to find more stability going forward.
In Retrospect: Luck Rather Than Intention
Meg told me how very different her previous work experiences had been. She had spent nearly a decade at a major entertainment company, and before that almost as long at a major professional services firm. In both cases she had worked for the same people throughout her time at those firms. The environment was stable, with a strong sense of family amongst the employees, and a sense of safety that allowed risk-taking. She had been seeking and not finding that same serenity in her life at TechCo.
But now, when Meg looks back at her time with the previous companies, she is aware of the lack of corporate-level effort. Those companies had done very little to formally and actively cultivate employee wellbeing. Any such efforts had been little more than “check the box” offerings from HR. She had been lucky. The connection and belonging she had enjoyed was a consequence of stability and nice bosses, rather than from intentional efforts by those companies’ leaders. By contrast, TechCo’s leaders were intentionally doing so much more.
Key Lesson: First You Have To See
For me, the most important lesson from Meg’s experience is that especially when a situation feels discordant, one should first look closely, with fresh eyes. You might make unexpected discoveries.
As Zen poet Gary Snyder encourages, “First, don’t move; and second, find out what that teaches you.”
