Welcome to the Inner Work of Work
You have in your hands a guidebook for dealing with some of the most common issues you will face in the workplace. As you explore these issues you will embark on a journey that will expand and deepen your relationship to the realities of work and, most assuredly, give you an advantage in a changing and competitive job market.
In each guidebook I present prevailing human resource development, training, and organizational development ideas in a simple and direct manner. The intent is to give you access to and an enhanced personal understanding of the factors executives and managers encounter in trying to improve a company's performance through the efforts of the people, like yourself, who work in that company.
The material is written in a format that will enable you to think about, reflect on, and come up with your own perspectives and solutions. This approach is the essence of "inner work".
Though it appears to be simple and direct, doing inner work will require your focus and attention if you are to stretch beyond your current capabilities. With this understanding, I trust you will come to appreciate the value of not only reading but also working through the material. As you use this guidebook, appreciate that you will gain confidence both through the process of developing your own insights as well as from the specific results you achieve by acting on those insights.
Let's look for a moment at the connection between inner work and improved performance. While on-the-job, your focus and attention are, by and large, on creating tangible bottom-line results, products, services, revenue, and profit. You strive to produce something of value or get things done in a timely and cost-effective manner. You attend meetings, plan, organize, and perform tasks and activities to achieve results. Of course, all this is what work is externally about, but what is behind or underneath all this activity?
The focus on "inner work" puts the responsibility on you to reflect on, then stretch beyond your usual approach and come up with responses to essential work issues such as: What motivates me to succeed? What do I need to learn to develop and grow? Where I am going in my career? How can I communicate more effectively to be understood? How do I deal with conflicts? Where do I fit into the big picture? How can I take a leadership role? What is the meaning or purpose in what I do? Whom am I serving by the work I do? Am I manifesting my creativity? Am I experiencing joy in what I do?
Some of these questions may seem a bit philosophical for typical work related conversation, but they underlie the essence of what inner work is about. Inner work is about becoming aware of the qualities, capabilities and attributes you bring to what you do and creating a sense of personal meaning and commitment from that awareness.
Ask yourself where you are on the following continuum in your relationship to your work:
1. Are you just showing up in order to survive?
2. Are you interested and engaged in what you do?
3. Are you willing and able to push beyond your limits and boundaries?
4. Are you fully committed to achieving and succeeding with purpose, meaning and a clear sense of inner direction and personal satisfaction?
By doing inner work you can shift your perceptions and working relationships to improve your performance by coming to terms with what serves or does not serve you, those you work with and the company you work for and then deciding what to do about it.
You may ask yourself why is it so important to take the time to think about and reflect on workplace issues? Consider what has been going on in the workplace over the past few years. There is a wide-spread and deep transition concerning expectations about work and the social contract between employers and employees. To compete in the global marketplace, employers are restructuring their businesses, reorganizing departments and functions, reengineering work processes, and re-deploying people. There is also an emerging perspective that employees are no longer simply "human resources", but rather "human capital" whose value is a function of the productivity they create for the organization that employs them. These dynamics are neither good nor bad, they are just the way it currently is.
Although any guarantee for life-long employment in any one company is nearly gone in all industries, including in the government sector, there is also an emerging expectation on the part of employers that employees be accountable for their performance and that employees be stakeholders in the results they produce. Employers are looking to recruit and retain the best employees who are able to take responsibility for their own job development and performance improvement.
From an employee's point of view there is another set of expectations is emerging about the quality of personal, professional, and spiritual life. You spend a large portion of daily life in the pursuit of and the doing of work, and the workplace can provide you with much of the grist for not only of job and career development but also inner personal development. As the nature of work has evolved from purely industrial to knowledge-based your individual and our collective effectiveness and productivity have come to depend less on the sweat of our physical labor than the essence of our being. Thus, it is also your spirit that may now desire to be nurtured.
As you explore the issues connected to your work-related personal, professional and spiritual growth, I invite you to also consider the following overarching question as you read through each guidebook:
How can I approach my work life as an ongoing quest to maintain awareness of my inner mental , emotional and essential processes while coming to terms with what in my experience nurtures me and what I must move through or beyond to change or improve my on-the-job performance.
The guidebooks provide you with a road map to refer to as you embark on this journey of performance improvement. You are the one in the driver's seat, choosing the milestones you want to reach, how slow or fast to go, and when and where to make a turn or take a rest.
