Several readers have shared challenges with surviving and thriving in a corporate career this year. A recent conversation began with a direct message on Twitter asking how I’d survived in corporate world for so long.
The Corporate World Is a Game
My advice was that a corporate career is like a multi-player, OFFline game. When you’re able to detach enough to view the corporate world as a game, your challenge becomes aligning with the right players, trying to stop as many bad guys as you can, and scoring as many points as possible for the organization and its customers.
The most important advice, though, is to do all that without losing yourself in the game. You need to be able to walk in the door each morning and leave each night as the same person you’ve always been. Over time, as you advance levels, you’ll start to see many of the same behaviors repeated, which is when things really get fun: you can use the repetitiveness to know where to take short cuts, increase your level of experimentation, and deliver stronger results.
Another thing to remember in a corporation is that anytime you throw that many people together, you’re going to have big pockets of really smart, cool people to work with and learn from – along with a healthy dose of co-workers who are incompetent, mean-spirited, checked out, and/or just in it for themselves. While the bad people are clearly a drag, there are ways to minimize their negative impacts as well.
Don't Think Your Corporation Is Unique
As the conversation continued, I assured the reader his situation wasn’t unique. In fact, for nearly every issue he raised with corporate life, I recalled Brainzooming blog posts with advice and ideas on how to deal with it successfully. Going back through the Brainzooming blog, there were more than 40 posts addressing personal leadership, not losing your personal guiding principles, working successfully with others, confronting a negative environment, and actively managing your career success in a corporate environment.
There were so many articles on surviving and thriving in a corporate career, in fact, look for an eBook on the topic from Brainzooming in 2012.
In the meantime, do you have questions you want answered about thriving and surviving in a corporate career? - Mike Brown
Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” for help in better using creative thinking exercises! For an organizational boost toward Taking the NO Out of Innovation, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.
