As you think about your assets and liabilities, bear in mind that both are context sensitive; that is, a characteristic or preference that is a liability in one context can be an asset in another. For example, on a trading floor in an investment bank, insisting on complete and documented in formation before committing to a position would be a serious liability. But if you were a scholar doing research in a university setting, the same insistence could contribute substantially to your success and enhance your reputation among colleagues.
Thus, one way you can use your list of liabilities is to determine what kinds of work and which kinds of settings would make best use of your personal characteristics and preferences, even those that may have seemed like liabilities in previous jobs. You should also use your liabilities to evaluate yourself for particular positions and to prepare for particular interviews.
Suppose, for example, that you suspect your age will be a liability in the eyes of an interviewer for a given position because younger candidates will probably apply for the position and may be both cheaper and more malleable. If you have anticipated a negative response to your age that it will be seen as a liability in a given context you can be prepared to offer evidence of compensating characteristics.
In this example, compensating characteristics might include an ability to work well with people of all ages, as evidenced by the fact that you have gotten along well with superiors who were your chronological juniors. You might also emphasize the fact that your experience has demonstrated your ability to learn quickly and adjust quickly to new challenges. As well, you might mention that you could contribute more sooner than a less experienced candidate and that hiring you would involve less risk than hiring someone with little or no track record. Being able to anticipate which aspects of your background and which of your characteristics may be seen as liabilities by potential employers will save you from being caught off guard in interviews and will prepare you to make a much stronger case for yourself.
As you analyze your accomplishments and failures to identify your assets and liabilities, you will probably find the same skills, characteristics, and preferences coming up again and again. This repetition in itself represents important information because it may reveal vocational themes that you have never before fully recognized or articulated.
Joanna, for example, who thought of herself as a "quant jock," discovered that over half of her major accomplishments involved preparing reports for professors or higher levels of management. Never before had it occurred to her that her ability to present quantitative analyses clearly in writing was one of her major assets or that it was an activity that she enjoyed immensely. As a result of her discovery, she began exploring positions in which her writing ability could play a primary role, rather than taking a back seat to quantitative analysis. She switched from seeking re employment as a financial analyst to pursuing jobs with producers of technical and business books. She now heads a staff of technical editors and illustrators for a major publisher.
Clarifying Your Values
Much unhappiness in the workplace stems from internal conflicts involving values. Employees from the lowest levels to the highest of the corporate hierarchy may experience conflict between personal values and corporate practices. Mid-level managers and professionals are particularly prone to feeling squeezed between the demands of people in higher levels and the desires of people in lower levels. A manager who enjoys his or her role as mentor and coach to subordinates may, for example, have a hard time reconciling this role with directives from above to cut training costs or limit merit raises.
Not infrequently, managers complain of feeling dissatisfied with their work either because they feel far removed from the actual products and services the organization creates or because they see little of real value in those products and services. A financial analyst for one of the major networks recently explained his desire to change careers this way to me:
TV is exciting and important, right? It's a rapidly changing industry, and it's the major source of current information and entertainment for many Americans. But I spend my days sitting in front of a computer crunching numbers for reports I never see for readers I don't know. Sometimes, I don't really even know what the numbers I'm crunching represent. I have no sense of how my work contributes to the programs I watch. Frankly, I suspect that most of the work I do helps executives win corporate political battles and advance their careers.
Or, as one successful and still employed advertising executive said of her job, "How good can you really feel about your work when what you ultimately do is to push junk food to kids?"
Sometimes value conflicts arise because the requirements for climbing career ladders leave little time or energy for home, partner, or children. Many people in professional and management positions value family life, personal relationships, and community participation highly but feel forced to shortchange them in order to advance their careers or, increasingly, simply to hold on to their positions amid mergers, down sizings, and organizational restructuring.
An increasing number of managers and professionals with whom I speak on the topic of vocational satisfaction complain of feeling forced to compromise their senses of themselves in insidious ways on a daily basis.
Said one, It's like being ground down little by little. From one day to the next, you don't notice any change, but one morning you wake up and realize half of you is gone. And for me, it seems like the better half the part that was inquisitive, imaginative, idealistic, witty, open, and spontaneous. What's left is cynical, manipulative, and boring.
At the same time, our daily papers feature stories of widespread corruption and mismanagement in large organizations. In these stories, we can sometimes catch a glimpse of managers or professionals who tried to resist or question wrong doing only to be fired, demoted, threatened, or subjected to the corporate equivalent of KP duty. Corruption and mismanagement are not restricted to profit seeking corporations, either: government agencies, universities, and religious organizations have all been implicated in their share of scandals recently. Workers who remain after scandals surface often feel demoralized, guilty, and angry. Frequently, they begin to question the value of their work and feel used by their employers at the same time as feeling abused by the public or regulatory agencies.
According to Douglas La Bier, author of Modem Madness and a psychiatrist, conflicts of the sort described in the above paragraphs and the compromises people make within themselves to cope with the demands of work life can lead to psychiatric symptoms in normal people. Psychosomatic disorders, compulsive behavior, crippling anxiety, severe depression, and sexual perversions are among the symptoms that he has found resulting from self abandonment in the name of career success.
To make the most of your termination, you should make it an opportunity to re examine your values and priorities. Termination is often called "a blessing in disguise" by people who have drifted into chronic unhappiness because of value conflicts generated by their former jobs. A clearer sense of your current values will enable you to make a career move that is truly a winner for you one that brings you closer to happiness. View the value clarifying exercises at as one of the most important aspects of yourself exploratory efforts.
