I began my career in a fast-paced, always advancing corporate culture.  I was taught that you always had to have a short term and long range vision of your career and of your advancement in the company.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  However, the implicit implication was always that your long range vision must include relocations, greater responsibility, and a never ending assent up the organizational charts.  Remember the Atari video game Q*bert?  That’s what my career looked like.  I just kept jumping around on the squares trying to hit the right ones so I could go to the next level.

 

 

 

Our culture seems to believe that if you’re not advancing, then you are faltering.  If someone holds the same position for 10 years, we tend to label that person as complacent.  For years I held to this misguided belief, but while I was writing my book, I discovered that there is a difference between complacency and contentment. 

 

I can sum it up by saying that complacency occurs when you ignore those aspects of your life related to your mission, while contentment is the conscious realization that you could have more of something, but chose not dedicate your resources toward acquiring it.  I realize that is a cumbersome summary, so let’s look at what happens at work.

 

With my previous company, we did succession planning.  We would look at all of our direct reports and score them based on their ability to move into roles of greater responsibility.  We grouped people into two general categories, high-potential employees (hi-po) and core employees.  Hi-po employees had to meet educational requirements, be willing to relocate, and have good job performance.  The lack of any of these characteristics automatically labeled an employee as a core employee.  When you consider all of the variables and nuances of each employee, I know it sounds ridiculous to have only two categories but that’s how it was.  That was one of the problems I had with Corporate America – in order to treat people “fairly” we had to make hard and fast rules so that everyone could be neatly packaged into their respective category.  This legalistic approach completely ignored the human element.  To paraphrase a speaker I heard last week, sometimes we have to treat people differently in order to treat them the same. 

 

Here is the danger with this hi-po/core employee strategy.  Those who meet the criteria of core employees are often thought of as complacent – they aren’t advancing and they aren’t willing to do the things required for advancement.  However, it has been my experience that many of those core employees were anything but complacent.  They had a passion for their work that their hi-potential counterparts lacked because the hi-potential employees were always focused on what was next.  Why were the hi-potential employees always focused on what was next?  They lacked contentment.

 

In fact, it could be argued that many hi-potential employees are complacent despite the fact that they charge up the corporate ladder.  How could this be?  Look at what I said at the beginning of this discussion – complacency occurs when you are not pursuing those aspects of your life related to your mission.  Many of you have a mission that you are not pursuing.  Instead of being content with what you have in terms of wealth, status, or ego; you consciously choose to ignore your mission and focus on a career that you already know does not offer fulfillment.  That, my friends, is complacency.