Be a round peg in a round hole Author Mark Simmonds explains how important it is to find the right fit in your career
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F YOU WANT to give yourself the best possible chance of en oying a rewarding career, able to fulfil the loftiest of ambitions, it s important that you re able to choose a path where you are able to minimise bad stress as much as possible. ne way of doing this is to treat your ob in the same way you would treat a personal relationship. In other words, look for employment where there is close alignment between your own needs and values and those of the company you are working for. f there is misalignment between the two for too long, the pressure will mount and it will more than likely end in tears. Fit is everything. had ust started working for nilever, one of the largest companies in the world. ts household brands, like Dove, A e, nor, Magnum and Domestos are available in over 0 countries. nilever also has one of the most respected management trainee programmes for young people who want to forge a career in marketing. oined when was 2 , working for irds ye Wall s and was pretty proud of my achievement. My career was now neatly laid out in front of me and the future seemed bright. Twelve months later found myself pacing up and down in the basement of the irds ye Wall s building liked a caged animal. was alone, surrounded only by freezers full of frozen peas, beef burgers and fish fingers and my own confused thoughts. was trying to work out why I was suddenly feeling so anxious and was incapable of completing the most basic of tasks at my desk upstairs. needed a bit of head space, away from people, to think clearly and
work out what on earth was going on in my frazzled mind. At the time, I was only a trainee, the lowest of the low. Admittedly, I had now been handed a little more responsibility and people in the team were relying on me to get things done, but I was still a relatively insignificant cog in the wheel. When I was writing my book, Beat Stress at Work, many years later, used the Matchmaker framework to help me pinpoint what the root problem had been back then. This identifies a number of characteristics that define the D A of both the company and the individual. The goal is to try and ensure that there are as many matches as possible, because the more matches there are, the more aligned the needs of both parties will be. And the less likely that ‘bad’ stress will rear its ugly head. n the Matchmaker table for irds ye Wall s and me it was only team orientation where alignment existed between both parties. For really crucial pairings like focus on people development versus focus on task completion, bias toward introverts versus bias toward e troverts, the company and were misaligned. And over a period of time, this misalignment began to cause me more and more bad stress. The cracks soon started to appear. Like any relationship, the less you have in common with one another, the more pressure it will put on both of you to survive together let alone thrive together. Stress levels will start to rise. Round pegs are meant for round holes. Mark Simmonds runs a creativity agency called G S and is the author of Beat Stress at Work.
48 May 2022 / the activemag.com
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