Our environment matters
Have you ever been in a job where you feel like you were able to do productive work, truly make an impact, or perform at a level way beyond your expectations? If so, it probably felt even more spectacular when you realized that you did it all without even trying.
How about a job where it didn't matter how hard you tried, things just don't work out? It takes months to take one little step. There are roadblocks everywhere you turn. You can't get people you work with to understand what you're trying to accomplish. You wonder if anyone actually cares about the work they do. And you are haunted by the nagging doubt of "Am I good enough?"
I felt this stark contrast in two jobs that I had back to back:
I was only at that first job for a year. Within a month, I felt like I had made a season's worth of progress with the orchestra. At the end of the year, it felt like 5 years had passed. The culture changed, the morale flourished, and the artistic quality improved. In my next job, I was there for three years, and at the end I felt like I had barely made the kind of progress I experienced in that first month of the previous job.
I feel like I was still the same conductor from the first to the second job. I didn't suddenly get worse or become less effective. I was so frustrated and confused. I didn't know what was wrong.
My initial instinct was to blame myself. Then, I became curious - what if it wasn't me???
***
It occurred to me that our environment matters. At work, this means the people we work with (above and below us) and the beliefs, attitudes, and expectations they hold. It also includes things like the organization's policies, workflow, habits, rituals, chain of command, brand marketing, communication styles, and mechanisms for making decisions.
I heard Marshall Goldsmith say this once about our environment, "It either helps us be the person we want to be or it prevents us."
His thought prompted me to ask these questions about our musical workplaces:
What's encouraging us to do the wrong thing?
What's discouraging us from doing the right thing?
This is basically two ways to ask the same question. These are some responses that immediately comes to mind based on my own experience:
Bad scheduling
Ineffective logistics
Lack of common sense
Office politics
"Just the way things are" attitude - fear of change
Fear of failure
Fear of negative consequences
Lack of empathy in communication - we may talk, but we don't really feel heard
No precedent - you've never seen the "right" thing happen before
Absent leadership - lack of acknowledgement and support
Micromanaging leadership
I'm sure you can think of more.
The challenge is that we don't know if doing the right thing is going to work, so we feel discouraged especially without explicit support. At the same time, we are easily encouraged to do the wrong thing because it is quicker to hide problems or hide from them.
I think that's what happened in my second job from earlier. I was encouraged to do the wrong thing because I felt like it was the way it must be. I saw it all around me. At the same time, I was discouraged from doing what I knew was right for progress. I wasn't being encouraged by my environment to be the effective conductor I knew I could be.
Now, this was not due to malicious intent from the leaders of that second job. Perhaps it was simply the absence of intent. Work culture was not built, designed, nor nurtured. When we are not intentional about building culture, we can risk so much to chance - my job satisfaction is only one of those!
I'll leave you with perhaps a helpful way to reframe the previous questions I posed:
What could encourage us to do the right thing?
What could discourage us from doing the wrong thing?
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