Would you marry a person who you know little about? Of course, that is insane yet people commit to working for Companies; signing open-ended contracts based on pieces of information sourced from peers or a website. That is insane! I don’t care if you plan on spending three years, a year, or ten years.
Ivy an interviewee told me she discovered the importance of the alignment of personal and organisational values when she changed jobs a few years ago. Ivy had worked for one organisation for 5 years but was beginning to get itchy feet and had for a few months been looking around for a new challenge in a similar field but with a bigger organisation.
She found what she thought was a dream job. All the interviews went well and the interviewers said all the right things to give her the impression that she would be joining a progressive firm that would allow her to bring in new ideas and to grow and develop.
She quickly discovered within the first week that the organization’s day work reality was different from the promise. It turned out that the hierarchy was all-powerful and micromanagement led to most of her ideas being refused out of hand in preference to the established norms.
The organisation outwardly gave the impression of innovative, progressive, experimental, and enabling people to work with autonomy using their own initiative but the reality was completely different.
The result of this was that Ivy decided she had made a major career mistake and had to move to rectify this quickly. She learned that it was vital to explore values when considering moving to a new company, so talking to more people who already worked there would have been a good idea rather than relying on simply the interview experience. She stayed for little over a year.
It was not altogether an unhappy time but she’d had to recalibrate her expectations and compromise her values accordingly.
I hear similar stories frequently during coaching and when running development programmes. It is not sector, level, country or role-specific it can happen to anyone at any stage in their career. Additionally, it is not only caused by changing organisations but can also happen with new bosses, mergers, or going to work with say a new start-up where the values of the founders are fundamentally different.
Before anyone signs a contract with Sudesh Int’l Consult I give them an assignment and make sure that he or she meets the team for a week before deciding if they want to work with us. I have had two people say, “I am not signing the contract, I thought your work was all about travel, hotels, and the glamour. It’s a lot of hard work and I wouldn’t love it here” Though we have to go back and recruit someone else, we save ourselves time for both parties. “Dating your prospective employer” should be a necessary step in any recruitment process or at least you should ask for a week at work before signing a contract to give you a feel.
