Work Soul

I'm fresh off of a trip to Boston to interview for a position with one of the multitude of small to medium pharma companies that call Boston/Cambridge home. I have to confess that my motivation wasn't so much to get a job, but to see how a company would react to my personal sales pitch. I answered their questions with the best answer that I could come up with (as opposed to the answer that I thought they wanted to hear). What one word would I use to describe myself? Complex. What is my biggest strength? I'm comfortable, and tend to thrive, in ambiguous situations. To illustrate how I think about what I offer a company, I told two of my interviewers that I don't think of myself as an infantry grunt ready to take orders. I'm Special Forces, the person you call when the situation is really dire and the standard approach just won't get the job done (recent events have given that metaphor a bit more umph than when I came up with it a couple of weeks ago).

I also had plenty of opportunities to discuss why I'm looking for something new. These answers revealed a bit of my work soul. Even I was a little surprised by some of the answers that I gave. Post-interview, I have actually refined one of my biggest beefs with my current group. In today's conversations, I discovered that I'm frustrated with our choice to just stick with our status quo rather than trying to figure out how to get better. The seminar that I presented (to three people, I was really expecting a bigger crowd) was all about how I've been trying to expand my skills and get better, while making the group better in the process. I now recognize that my growing frustration is in part due to the failure of these efforts to initiate any meaningful change.

My management will be content to leave things as they are as long as we keep getting things done. Why mess with something when our masters are not looking for an effort to change things for the better? My would be manager asked me how I defined a good job. I told her that I feel I've done a good job when I go beyond the expectations of the person requesting the work. I consider the expectations for an assignment the minimum that needs to be done. I'm not satisfied unless I can show a manager something else about an assignment that they overlooked, didn't think about, or weren't aware of. This is clearly a point on which my current leadership and I disagree.

I went on this interview to see how other companies might view attitudes like that. This company seemed very receptive to these elements of my work soul. I'm starting to wonder how receptive I am to these aspects of my personality. I've never really longed for a "career." I've never really made decision based on what's best for my "career." If I felt like my skills and work soul were valued by my current employer, I don't think I would be taking trips to Boston for job interviews. Going on a job interview probably wasn't the most product way to cope with my career crisis, but taking action is the only way that I know to dig into a problem. I get too into my head to make any progress on finding a solution to something like my current career crisis.

The interview has given me plenty of food for thought. Interviews usually do that, but rather than wondering how I did and whether or not I'll get the job (for the record, I would be surprised if I don't get a call to continue on to the next stage of the hiring process), I've spent the hours since the interview thinking about my relationship to work and what that means for other far more important relationships in my life. I stated that I'm starting to wonder how receptive I am to my ambition to do more and better things because this interview made me realize that to get to that point, I may have to sacrifice significant parts of my life that I had always assumed I would never consider sacrificing. Finding a balance in my life between my career and the other parts of my life will be how I resolve my current career crisis. I'm not so sure taking a job in Boston would be the best way to achieve that...