One of the main costs of big ambition is that there are no guarantees that you will succeed.  Hard as you try, hard as you dream, no one can ensure the desired outcome and pay your mortgage until it happens.  Big ambition, can be very hard on the pocket in the short term, unless you find a way to continue to make some money from an old enterprise or a new one.  Many a person I have come across on their way to their success has worked hard at their nine to five job until they were able to let go of their old working life and begin their new one ‘officially’.  Bankers have launched magazines, HR professionals have scribbled, solicitors have converted farms to holiday homes and all in their own time, often funding these projects out of their own pocket.  It is sheer determination and ingenuity that has seen the obstacles be overcome by these individuals and it is a testament to their determination and relentless approach that they succeeded where others have failed.

Some people dream of fame, but most people dream about doing a job to which they feel suited.  It may not seem particularly challenging to go from the role of Project Manager to that of Teacher since both are jobs that require specific skills (some overlapping admittedly) and a certain level of academic achievement, but when you have a young family and are used to a certain income and are faced with losing that for atleast a year while you retrain and submit to a lower salary for a number of years can and has put many people off.   Going through the rigorous training while bringing up your family and maintaining some level of your lifestyle, can make the whole enterprise seem as likely as becoming a pop star at the age of 70 for others and yet those who decide that it is worth the risk can find a way of minimizing the impacts of these obstacles.

Another cost of big ambition is that you have to learn to believe in yourself and in your ability to succeed in your chosen goal almost exclusively.  It is very unusual that you will have an army of supporters among your significant others, including your bank manager and lenders.  Ambition requires you to develop a shield against those who will tell you almost continually that you will not succeed. Being doubted and doubting yourself is often too much for most people who never try enough for fear they may fail.  This is of course the surest way to fail possible.  It is important to be honest and have a firm grasp of things that are not working so that you can change your path and not cling onto a failing approach like a modern day Captain Ahab being tasked by your ambition whale.  However, the fear of loss can stop you from taking a risk and making a loss, but it will also stop you making any gains.  There are always risks to be measured and challenges to overcome.  The difference between those who make their career dreams come true and those who do not, is not being paralysed by the fear of failure.

Failure is the result for some enterprises.  We do not always get what we set out to.  Not everyone’s ambition leads them to the kind of success that they would have wanted, that is accepted, or that is immediately understood.  There are times when effort, face and money is lost.  The ultimate cost of big ambition is failure and disappointment and with it financial fall outs.  There is also the impact on personal standing and on one’s family.  This is indeed a chilling future for any person to even consider navigating towards.  There are very many reasons why career dreams flounder and there can be no guarantees of success.  All there ever can be is the promise that doing a job you love will never feel like work.  Everyone of us has to work out if this is worth us taking such risks.

Disappointments may appear like hurdles on the horizon of your ambition.  People who trailblaze and work outside of the experience of their families, their community, or beyond their means do so despite the obvious challenges.  They accept that some disappointment is inevitable on the way to success.  Their faces, or stories are unlikely to ever be recognised by a mass audience or reach the news.  They generally report great learning along with their great success.  Their ambition fuels them to make it and they become determined and creative in finding ways to make their dreams come true.  Surely the greatest cost of big ambition is not trying at all?  You may not succeed, but in the words of Dr Seuss, you may move mountains.

As the picture of the effects of recession in Greece becomes clearer, so does increasing evidence that there is a shifting morality within Hellenic workplaces. Gone are bonuses and stakes in companies. Gone are the perks of status and flexibility. Anecdotal evidence of workers being dismissed for single occasions of tardiness or minor dressing infringements, such as forgetting to shave are becoming more and more prevalent. Employees are expected to work harder for less than half of their previous salaries while employers are being backed up in dissolving contracts, both legal and psychological, by a government struggling to meet the demands of its lenders and a critical international community. Some of these practices are also happening in the UK with longer hours being expected within the Public Sector according to new research by recruiters Badenock and Clark.

Even in the bleakest economic climates the trade of one’s time and labour should be based on respect and the appreciation for employer and employee equality. While discussions about talent is waning within the human resource community, it is still people that make the difference in organisations. Treating them badly is counterproductive and impractical. Even in 1935, when the United States was still under the shadow of the Great Depression, Dale Carnegie (grand-daddy of personal development and author of the now infamous How To Win Friends and Influence People) outlined how business benefited from treating employees with respect, even when letting them go.

Organisations who expect to succeed need to elicit effort and esteem from the people within them. This is the only way to weather the many tempests of our current economy. By treating people with respect they earn it back in kind and in graft. Such organisations build resilience within themselves and encourage it within the individuals making up their workforce. Furthermore, people are more likely to comply with increasing demands when they feel valued and that they are working towards a common cause.

The key ways of ensuring that balance is maintained in the workplace is by individuals understanding their own value and embracing the effort that must be made in maintaining and enriching their skills and flexibility. For organisations, balance and success need to be seen as equal with managers empowered to treat employees respectfully and work together to find opportunities for development and innovation. When this approach is adopted good results follow as is seen in a recent survey conducted by Orange.

As unemployment figures continue to rise it is natural to be concerned about the economy and the security of one’s job. Many of us are already responding to the job market by working more flexibly, applying ourselves more and striving that bit harder. What we need to guard against is that our fears do not make us lose sight of our own value in the workplace. There are many reasons why we need to do more, encourage business to grow and endeavour to overcome this recession, but these reasons are not excuses for poor working practices nor will they solve the problems we are facing. We are currently not experiencing the depth of recession that our Greek counterparts are dealing with, but let us take from their experience more than the cautionary tale our highly politicised media is perpetrating. Let us understand the real lesson of an economy in deep economic crisis and fight for the growth of organisations, our jobs and our employment rights. These are all hard won; let us not squander them.

There are laws that offer us all a degree of protection from use of personal information in an inappropriate way.  In the United Kingdom the Data Protection Act covers this area of law and although it may be a little cumbersome, it is a useful to be aware of its contents, while in the USA there is not such ‘umbrella’ law as this author understands it, with personal data protection being covered in other pieces of legislation and taken very seriously as a constitutional matter. No amount of law making, however, can stop individuals from usurping themselves.  There is actually a page on Facebook filled by tales of how people have been sacked for using the social networking site at work, or as a result of posting information about their workplace and their feelings about it and you do not need to look too far further to uncover your virtual footprint even if you have taken a degree of care when on the web.

Reed has recently published research findings that attest the undecided nature of the use of social media issue within the British workplace. Although the USA boasts the highest use of the medium with Latin America being heralded as the largest emerging market for sites such as LinkedIn, we at the UK do not wish to be outdone in our enjoyment of online networks.  While this trend continues to thrive and more and more networking, recruitment and information sharing takes place online, there is also a considerable degree of venting about work, use of inappropriate language and the expression of questionable views that can have considerable affects on your employment status as well as your social standing. Of course, this is something that you have complete control of and can manage appropriately, or can you?

There are a number of steps that you can take to ensure your privacy is protected online.  The first of these is to set the relevant privacy settings on the sites you visit for social networking. Each site will have directions on how your privacy settings can be altered and LinkedIn has a very useful User Guide. There are even training courses you can go on to learn to get the best out of the site although the quality of these has not been tested. There is also the element of deciding what you are going to share with your network and what not.  A sense of any consequences should you choose to use expletives in relation to a work colleague is sufficient to curtail even the most enraged, so think before you press SHARE.

The flip side of the online privacy coin is that organisations are also using social networking sites with few of the policies and procedures in place that you may expect from them on their own websites.  The data management and privacy report recently published in the US highlights some of these issues.  On a more practical level it is very possible that even though you have applied the highest levels of security on Facebook, that your liking The Simpson FB Group, for example, means that comments you make to that can identify you and can also appear on Google if you conduct a search for your name. This is a seemingly benign by product of these sites, but it appears to be out of your control and can affect your employment if your choice of entertainment or your sharing of it are deemed inappropriate.

Aside from concern about your activity on social networking sites, there is also some need to consider your footprint on Google.  Google has the technology to identify the themes you might generate from a marketing point of view, in a similar way to Amazon (Google has conducted work to ensure that this does not become intrusive and has worked with Privacy International in the past) and software has been available to ‘mine’ for data online unveiling information about you may not wish to share. In a job market so tight when goalposts keep shifting and success depends on the seemingly arbitrary, managing information about yourself has never been more necessary.

Overall some presence online is considered healthy, but depending on your line of work, your position and your job status at the moment it is wise always to remember that you may have a wider audience than you intended.  Each of us will have a different level of sensitivity with regards to what we consider private and public.  Decide where your line in the sand is before you find it has been breached and take steps to defend it today.

Having started my career as a teacher I feel a natural affinity for the work that teachers are asked to do.  They are given the most precious people of our society and asked to help mould and educate them.  While you and I can go to work and have bad days hiding behind our computers, teachers have marking, classroom management, increasing levels of paperwork and typically thirty plus hours of ‘contact’ time, which means that during that time they are actively engaged with teaching our children.  Contact time is not a time when they can switch off and let their minds wonder lest Jamie starts whacking Jodie over the head with a folder, or Tommy and Charlie insist on using their rulers as swords fueled by  one view too many of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Previous recruitment adverts for posts have positioned teaching as a challenging job and it is.  It is also rewarding and like all the jobs we as a society want done well and consider necessary, it should be financially viable for those involved in it.  All this though is besides the point, because what commentators have been talking of here is about the teachers right to strike and I for one feel that it should not be a privilege for them just because they are more important to you and me.

One of my favourite proverbs is that good understandings make good friends and nowhere is this more relevant and helpful than in business.  Of the many issues in this very complex  topic is that teachers have been contracted to certain pay and benefits in exchange for their skills and time.   We are asking them to change that and expect them to acquiesce, but should not the onus be on us to negotiate and find an equitable solution in collaboration?  A good employer would attempt no less.

Whatever your political view and the inconvenience of having to change or accommodate the army of working parents, the implications here are extremely far reaching.  The repercussions on our economy and what we are to expect from our teachers are obviously going to change.  What is also changing and perhaps in a way that we cannot yet be clear about is what we are to expect from our employers when a lot more than our currency can be at the whim of forces we barely understand or can impact.

There are a number of issues surrounding parenthood and work.  Those relating to the rights you have as a parent require information and are better dealt with on www.direct.gov, although it is wise to remember that these are subject to changes and legislation as a previous post highlights.  How you feel about your new role and how you begin to cope with your new life, however, can vary greatly and is not static.

You may find yourself perfectly comfortable as a stay at home parent when the weather affords you lots of time in the park, feel you can navigate the part-time working conundrum beautifully and miserable while scouring the net for jobs the next because you have had your fill of nappy changes and being treated like a part-timer when you always do overtime.  Worst of all everybody else seems to be managing it like a breeze. Like Ulysses trying to navigate your way to safer waters you cannot help but hear the siren song of full time earnings, status and a nominal return to normality that is jousting with the parent within you.  This is only one ever present reminder that for now at least, your priorities have shifted.

One of the first myths that should be dispelled is that managing parenthood and work is easy. In today’s workplace and for the last thirty years at least, parents have been given little choice but to work and source childcare at great expense.  While people most often recount how wonderfully they were able to handle some of the challenges parenthood presented them, take from the telling that you are not alone in finding this hard at times.  Knowing this becomes the first step to becoming a happier working parent as you can let go of some of the pressure that has been building up and embrace the challenges with the conviction they deserve.

Your problems are not isolated to you, but the best way to handle them invariably is.  It is easy to look upon others and see the positives in their situation, but there is a lot disguised in people’s lives and the result of aping someone’s solutions could be the equivalent as poorly fitting shoes; they may look nice, but it is painful to wear them.  The second step then to becoming a happy working parent is to look for ways of managing your life that suit you and not everybody else.  Look at what your employer is offering and what you should be able to claim for and make the time to apply.  Speak with your manager about flexible working and ensure you have access to the type of support you need.  Having the support you need to make both of the important roles you have work is perfectly legitimate.  If you find that it is not forthcoming then cast your net wider and look for employers that will support you in a way that suits you better.  Organisations such as Women Like Us exclusively advertise part time jobs for women and regrettably I have yet to find the equivalent for working fathers.

A very important step to being a happy working parent is to perform a function at work that actually fulfills you appropriately.  Only you can decide what that is and this goes a long way to silencing both internal and external critics of your career choices.  You will feel less conflicted if you believe that your work contributes to your family in the way you want it to, feeds your ambition, or chimes with your values.  These factors, together or in combination, can help in making the return to work after starting a family smoother.

Perhaps the most important step when working and raising a family is not to judge yourself too harshly.  Not every day will run smoothly, but as Frederick Douglass eloquently put it: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.  Those who profess to favour freedom and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning”.

Few questions in life can cause as much turmoil as this one.  It affects us all and can reccur throughout a life time.  In truth, understanding what the right job for you is a question of many parts and most of us know the answers to some of those questions while others can find the experience overwhelming.  If you take a step back and think about it many component questions present themselves: What might be the best job for you?   Can you describe what you would do?  Can you visualise where you are and what you like about it?  Do you know what your job title would be and how it will feel like to introduce yourself this way?  Who would you work for?  Are you with many people or grafting by yourself?  How much money will you earn and how will you and your significant others be affected?  The answers may seem shapeless and impossible to piece together, but within them they reveal, a framework for the kind of work that can make you happy.  If you have spent a lifetime waiting to discover the answer to your personal vocational riddle this may not feel particularly confidence inspiring to you.  You may feel that you cannot answer these questions, or that when you do the answers are not to your satisfaction.

Anna, a recent client of mine, wanted to talk about every type of career except teaching.  She told me from the start that she had thought about it and had ruled out teaching as a profession.  Very soon it became clear that Anna had a passion for teaching.  All other jobs did not measure up.  She had sound reasons for hesitating, but the longer she did, the more she was gripped by fear and despair.   The fear of taking such a leap, the impact of the training on her family time and the cost of the initial transition were all valid concerns, but as she talked through them it also became clear that her dream of teaching was not something she could let go easily, would always return to it and deeply regret its absence from her life.  She is now qualified and tremendously happy wishing she had made the decision earlier and this is not an unusual story if like Anna you have an idea of what you want to do, but are initially afraid of doing it.

Some of us need more help and do not appear to have any deep interests in one job or field.  We may need to have our research backed up with a gut instinct that does not come.  For those in this position it is vitally important that you consider the questions above and others you can think of in order to define as many puzzle pieces as possible for yourself.  It may take more time than you may wish to spend, but ultimately one of the most rewarding things you will do for yourself.  It can push you out of your comfort zone and begin to influence they way you feel about yourself, building your confidence to explore avenues and possibilities that you thought were closed to you.  Be wary though that you are not staying in your career ‘no-man’s-land’ on purpose by choice.  You may claim not to like it, but it can get awfully comfortable and get you a lot of attention.

The way to discover what you want to do is believe that there is an answer and apply yourself in finding it.  Do not think that the result will be the end of all your effort or that work from this moment on will come without its challenges, but if you are at least where you want to be, half the battle should be won.  Take a good look at your life and where you see your career fitting in.  What is more important and how can you achieve it.  Obstacles can always be overcome with time and ingenuity and most of us can afford a little bit of both.  Be as honest with yourself as you can and do not ask others for friendly advice about your career; your loved ones will always think you are amazing and everyone else has an agenda.  If your tooth hurt you would go to a dentist; if your locked yourself out of your home you would call a locksmith.  If you are really stuck, speak to a professional and help them unlock the riddle so you can get on with being what you really want to be.

There has been a leadership crisis in the UK for as long as I can remember, traits and competencies identified and developed to within an inch of their lives, management procedures cascaded and rolled out and yet we still have enormous issues with the way talent is being managed and nurtured.  In an earlier post I focused on the human cost of our seeming inability to manage people effectively, but there are substantial business costs in both the short and long term.

That the true capital of an organisation is its staff body has become a cliche.  It is true, however and until we in Britain begin to value it by hiring and developing effective leaders we are unlikely to see different headlines or benefits from our understanding.  Clients of mine who have had substantial experience working abroad are appalled about how managers are permitted to behave within the workplace, with little ability to lead and even less care about the impacts of the behaviour on their team members.  Leaders who have their heart in the right place, seem to become embroiled in short term concerns or firefighting that shift their focus.  Can HRD actually help, can it really be as simple as single approach or is the complexity and cost of positive action simply too great for today’s struggling organisations to bear?

The characteristics of good managers and good leaders have been identified many times, but The Harvard Business Review shares an usually insightful take on the subject.   The common response to leadership and management development, however, is not dissimilar to a child having all the jigsaw pieces to a puzzle beyond its age range.  Business is always attracted to neat answers to all sorts of business issues, but people development involves people and therefore is inevitably messier than that.  Add to the mix the fact that organisations often behave as though they have personalities, rarely concluding that the (cheaper) ‘one-size-fits-all’ answer even close to being the right one.

In my experience, when there is an effective leader at the helm, things can still be tough, but they are substantially easier than any other alternative; think of Churchill and his affect on the entire country.  He enabled the country to cope and imbued the people with a sense of purpose.  Enabling managers and fellow leaders to do the best they can is not as easy as it sounds.  Being comfortable with a high degree of ambiguity is increasingly necessary in our fast-forward world.

We can identify what our leaders and managers need to do and train and nurture them accordingly, but in many cases we still fail to value the very skills that would help us the most in business.  Sitting among some of the soon to be displaced top talent from a public sector organisation recently it became clear very quickly that, while they had the education, experience and abilities to lead and manage, they did not themselves have the confidence to recognise those competencies as important, nor were they particularly valued by the greater recruitment market.  It seems that they even if they were encouraged to be good leaders within their current organisations, the businesses did not want to pay for their skill sets. There are issues of perception with public to private sector transition, but clearly the soft skills required to be an effective leader or good manager are still considered secondary to harder skills. In the UK this we are counting the cost of this in staff morale and productivity, looming skills deficits and leadership crises in various fields, but most worrying of all our education sector.

There is no single approach or method that good managers and leaders apply, but there are skills that can be analysed and developed in others.  There are excellent leaders and managers out there  working with integrity and humility.  They share many traits and a passion for doing a good job.  How they do this may not fit a PowerPoint slide neatly, or be translated into an equation, but it is not impossible to do, or that hard to grasp.  They need to be allowed to do it and we all need to accept how important it is for all of us that they to do it well.

For many of us a steady income is the foundation to affording a home and a lifestyle.  Without that security we cannot see far down the horizon of our lives.  Applying for work when we are faced with the prospect of being made redundant or needing a new source of income can be slow and find us investing long hours preparing CV’s, completing application forms, attending interviews with recruitment consultants and eventually employers, operating at a level close to fight or flight and urgently filling as much of our day in a process that most times takes a great deal longer than we would wish.  When we are in the midst of this hiatus it is hard to find time for ourselves, or allow time and space to relax, forgo worrying about the future and truly recharge our batteries.

Taking time for yourself  is vital to maintaining your well being, sense of perspective and self during this challenging time.  It not only enables you to respond appropriately to the job adverts that you see, deal with the challenges in interviews and assessment centres and all the people you may meet along the way, but it also allows you to continue to exist wholly within your home environment.  It also helps remind you why you are making all this effort and hopefully maintain your clarity around your values and what you want out of a job other than the money.

There are few decisions the impact of which are felt throughout your life that you can control to the degree that work allows you too.  When job searching the need for money, lifestyle or status may persuade you to go for jobs that are far from what you want or need.  These often are more subtle than you imagine and you need to be on the ball to avoid them.  Taking care of yourself is the most professional thing you can do, if you consider it from this standpoint.

Commitment and graft are important to secure a new job and feeling the excitement that comes along with the uncertainty can be thrilling, however it is important that you give yourself time to relax when you are looking for work.  When you are employed it is easy to find reasons to go out for a nice meal or indulge in one of your hobbies, or even buy good food and take time for a long bath.  You feel you deserve these things for the effort that you have made.  When looking for work no one pays you for the effort but you have even more reasons to have a bit of fun.  So use this long weekend as an excuse to relax.  You can get back on the hunt when it is over.  The next week is not far behind, nor is your new career.

So many of us have been confronted by people we want to help, who have spent numerous years trying to work out what the right job is for them have the expectation that a single meeting with a career professional will unravel the mystery for them.  Or the number of clients who believe that by listing what they are good at and what interests them in as brief a time as possible will, in the telling to expert ears, result in what effectively is the kind of trait and factor response (you like maths, ergo be a mathematician) that they would have got had they completed one of the variety of questionnaires to do just that.  These instruments can help you understand more about yourself and therefore about what kind of work you may enjoy, but that is one possible step in a process that has many layers.

Acknowledging that you need help managing your career is a big step.  If you feel out of step with your career or you are seeking a working life, which offers you more challenge, is closer to your values or more authenticity, you are not alone.  Few of us are fortunate enough in adulthood to be in a position to answer what seems the simplest of questions when we are little and fewer still seem to know with any degree of certainty what we want to be when we grow up.  While I am not completely convinced that this question is more than a red herring at a time when most of us will have at least two or three career changes during our working life, the desire to answer it can be a real driver at best and a paralysing undercurrent at worst.  When it is the latter, it presents itself sucking energy and confidence from life.

If you can take that all important step into finding help for your career you will begin to feel a real sense of momentum, but rarely are the results miraculous or instantaneous and nor should they be.  However unhappy you may be in your current situation getting out of it will teach you much about yourself, your potential and the world and this will set you on your path to greater work fulfilment.  There are no guarantees, but a career professional can help you prepare for a career you are happy with and help you embrace an openness to change and taking action that can begin to make things happen and take shape in the way that you want them.  It is unlikely that they are going to tell you what you should do with the rest of your life, however, or that your relationship will be reminiscent of a friendship even though you will feel listened to and supported.

Working with career professionals often represents the polar opposite of taking the easy option, as most of us are as supportive as we are challenging, seeing both the best in you and what may be holding you back.  We can help you synthesise your career options, but this will be done in partnership with you and requiring your effort and openness to the process.  There is often a swift sense of relief as a result of the collaboration, but no miracle cures.  In the alchemy of partnership you can learn much about yourself and move closer to your career goal, but this is a relationship of equals and though it may propel you to achieve beyond your expectations, it is you who has to act.

Please note that it is important when contracting with a career professional that you check their credentials, ensure you feel comfortable with the boundaries of the relationship and avail yourself of the free initial consultation to get a good sense of what service you will receive.

There is something very understandable about feeling entitled to having employment and resentful about the hoops that are we are now required to go through as job seekers.  After all sometimes there appears little reason behind selection decisions made by employers.  You may have read the job description, felt that you are a perfect fit, relate to the organisation and actually want the job, but your application is rejected at the early stages often with little feedback.  In this regard job searching is like dating: you may need to kiss many frogs before you find the prince, but the two chaps I was eaves dropping on were clearly expressing no interest whatsoever in doing that.  They felt that the demands of today’s jobs market on jobseekers are very unfair.

The effort required today in securing and keeping a job can appear excessive, but when you peel away some of the layers of this effort related to technology (having a CV in MS Word format and a profile on a networking site that is kept up to date), changes in type of employment (moving away from manual to clerical work), the greater focus on work because of the current market and the development of more theory and thinking on the subject, it seems to me that while a degree of greater effort is required, a lot of our gripes are actually a result of having to take our work more seriously and becoming more professional rather than the kind of graft we would have been faced with in decades past.  A job for life may have been ours, but perhaps at the cost of a shorter life, with lesser career choices, a less fluid market, less training and development and challenge, with few perks or holidays and even fewer rights.

It is lovely to think back on how our parents worked and romanticise the security and solid nature of it all, but we did not live that and it is in the past.  Without a doubt there were some benefits to that kind of working for some, but for our effort today we may have less choice about having to work, but more choice in the work we do and more protection in the workplace.  And while it is also enjoyable and easy to feel a sense of entitlement and to poke fun at the political correctness that has produced the volume of employment legislation that aims to stamp out prejudice, sexism, racism, support working parents and protect our health in the work place, these are the entitlements we should be vigilant of loosing, as getting them back will be an even greater effort.

My toddler could have walked steadily and swiftly on the lakeside path, but relished the effort of the challenge of balancing on the ledge.  It was a struggle, but it was fun and it tested and developed his skills and he did not resent it for a moment.  Naturally, he had a choice, which makes a significant difference.  But he also lacks the sense of entitlement completely and therefore threw himself at the task with little thought of anything other than achievement.  I think that this is certainly an approach worth considering for all of us when looking for work.