The inner game of work

In my recent 1-on-1 with team members, two worries keep popping up:

1. Am I getting laid off

2. Am I missing out on my promotion

I suspect these fears are related our most basic instincts as human beings: trying to survive and the longing to get ahead. It's like we're a species cursed to keep moving. And here's something you might not know: managers get these worries too, often more than you'd think.

But the big question is, should we let these fears rule us? I'm guessing no one would say yes. So, how can we stop worrying? Here's a couple of ideas:

1. Try to tag each negative thought as either "something I can control" or "something I can't control". Questions like "Will there be more layoffs? Am I next?" are usually out of our hands. Fretting about them only drains our energy and does no good to anyone. Instead, we could focus on getting better at our jobs, learning more, networking more, and really killing it in our current roles. Then, we just gotta trust in this bigger game of Life and know that whatever happens is just part of the ride. Here's a trick that helped me: don't let a downer thought hang around for more than 30 seconds. Take a deep breath, let the thought sit for a moment, watch it as if you are watching a show in your mind, then wave it goodbye.

2. Use what you're doing right now as a springboard to dive deeper and branch out. A common worry about promotions is, "Is my current project big enough to score me that promotion?" The answer could be yes or no. Promotions aren't just about the result - the quantity; it's about seeing how your work links together, and how you get things done - the quality. It is the whole package that gets you promoted. Assuming your job involves some truely meaningful work and not just a bunch of people scrambling over the same tasks to get ahead, every little thing you do is a stepping stone towards that 'promotion' project. Maybe you're tweaking something small like your service's alarm threshold. You might wonder, "How can this boring job help my promotion chances?" Here's the twist: get to know the whole process - how your service's logs are collected and aggregated into metrics. Understand what the alarms mean, what they measure, and what user experiences they relate to. Use past data to set the new threshold. Will a set threshold work? Keep asking these questions, dig deeper and wider. Before you know it, you'll be a guru in Observability and Anomaly Detection. When you're that good, the big, juicy projects will find you and promotions will just come naturally. Trust me, you company, and the industry we are in, don't have enough experts like you, if you are that good!

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-inner-game-of-work-building-capability-in-the-workplace/