The Enduring Power of Career Contentment Over Job Satisfaction
By Jeff Garton
Jeff Garton Bio Jeff was born and raised in West Virginia where he obtained his Bachelor’s Degree from Glenville State College, and a Masters in Organizational Communication and Public Personnel Administration from the University of New Mexico. He has focused his career on showing employers how to help their employees to overcome their job dissatisfactions to achieve career contentment. He now resides on Chicago’s North Shore with his wife Heli and his two sons Brian and Michael. His daughter Sarah lives and works in California. In 2001, after 23 years inside corporate HR, it dawned on Jeff that he would be unfulfilled if he didn’t leave to pursue his dream of owning a business. It also occurred to Jeff that it was his fear of leaving that was holding him back, not the sophisticated programs that were keeping him comfortably retained. He reasoned that it didn’t matter that he would be leaving behind a fantastic package because his career was not behind him, but ahead of him. And he preferred not to make an important decision about his life and career based on a package that was good today, but could just as easily be reduced or taken away tomorrow. He left. |
What does career contentment feel like? Imagine catapulting out of bed and rushing to work. Feeling self-motivated and naturally engaged by what you’re doing. Losing track of time and believing that you would almost do your work for free, as if being there was meaningful or meant to be.
This isn’t career contentment. This is a mental state referred to as flow or being in the zone. It’s an energized state caused when fully immersed in what you’re doing. This feeling can become addictive, except for one thing: Work isn’t performed in a vacuum. It’s performed with and for other people who can potentially block or destroy your flow.
Employers try to replicate flow by offering job satisfactions and implementing employee engagement and strength programs. However, by offering job satisfactions, employers inadvertently shift an employee’s focus onto the rewards and off of their work, which is the principle ingredient of flow. And the expected outcomes of engagement and strength programs are often compromised by the effects of day-to-day realities, including: unclear goals, poor supervision, difficult coworkers, unrealistic demands, conflicting priorities, shrinking resources, unwanted job changes, reorganizations, layoffs, etc. Flow is a desirable mental state, but impossible to replicate or maintain from the outside-in.
Between flow and the outside realities there exists an agreeable middle ground that can be recognized from the inside as career contentment. By reasoning alone, employees can choose to be content even if not entirely satisfied. The fruits of an employee’s contented mind are, first, the resilience to persist toward the fulfillment of one’s purposes, despite the dissatisfactions; and second, the improved performance that comes from not wasting time and emotional energy by complaining. Career contentment is an emotion or mental zone that employees control from within to keep their career as close to flow as possible, and without depending on employers to make them satisfied. Genuine career contentment is from within.
So what does genuine career contentment feel like? It’s however you choose to feel, not how you allow your circumstances to make you feel. Imagine catapulting out of bed and rushing to work. Feeling self-motivated and naturally engaged by what you’re doing. Losing track of time and believing that you would almost do your work for free, as if being there was meaningful or meant to be. Feeling this way is feasible every day when you learn how to recognize your contentment and stop expecting that employers should make you satisfied. Complete satisfaction is never possible.
Employers overlook career contentment and assume that outside-in satisfactions are the ticket to motivating and retaining employees. However, any efforts by employers to influence the will and self-motivation of employees are secondary or subject to an employee’s control over their emotion of career contentment. Not unless employees decide first that they’re content to be somewhere and stay there can employers ply them with satisfactions. But try as they might, those satisfactions are powerless to control the minds of employees. Employees will take all they’re given, ask for more and still complain, and then leave anytime they think they’ll be more content elsewhere. Period!
So the question an employer might ask is, “If employees can’t be made satisfied, and I can control their decision to be content, what can I do to help them to recognize their career contentment?”
The answer to that question involves demonstrating how employers are worthy of an employee’s decision to be content. For instance:
What employers should do for employees is:
- Teach them how to stop complaining and recognize their career contentment.
- Establish and communicate clear goals and purposes for the organization.
- Give them a sense of control over what they do and how they do it.
- Give them work that they decide is meaningful to the fulfillment of their purposes.
- Give them direction and support to fulfill their own purposes.
- Give them resources necessary to complete their work.
- Show interest in what they do and how they do it.
- Provide constructive criticism that enhances their self-esteem and performance.
- Recognize and reward their contributions.
- Recognize and reward their decisions to be content and not complain.
- Observe and be attentive to how their purposes continue to evolve,
- Accommodate their evolving purposes if possible, and when relevant to the organization.
What employers should not do to employees is:
- Think that employees should be happy just to have a job.
- Assume that they should be enthused to fulfill the employer’s purposes.
- Expect them to neglect or forfeit their own purposes.
- Assume that an employee’s purpose can be bought out with transient rewards.
- Offer engagement programs in situations where engagement can’t occur naturally.
- Underestimate how employees control their career despite circumstances.
- Abuse an employee’s decision to be content, with or without job satisfaction.
- Assume that career contentment is a substitute for good wages and benefits.
- Move them or alter work content without their involvement.
- Disrupt flow in situations where they’re passionate, self-motivated and competent.
- Credit yourself or another person for the contributions they make.
- Dismantle the contributions that they can justify as being valuable to the organization.
The following case illustrates the typical problems that can arise when employers fail to realize how career contentment is ultimately more powerful than job satisfaction.
Jennifer is the manager of nursing for a hospital that specializes in caring for the mentally ill. She possesses an advanced degree and takes her work very seriously despite pay and benefits that she realizes are below average in her community. An emerging concern in her industry is the control of patients by means which are non-violent, and which minimize the financial risks to hospitals due to injuries caused to staff by patients, and to patients caused by staff. With the endorsement of her management, Jennifer initiated research into non-violent strategies and began educating her team on new procedures. Undeterred by the doubts expressed by staff members who were conditioned to be rough when dealing with unruly patients, Jennifer was able to affect many positive changes that gained her the respect of doctors, colleagues and patients. Jennifer’s success contributed to her natural engagement and self-motivation, and complaints regarding her low pay and benefits magically disappeared. She was leading an important endeavor that would pay dividends to her employer, and give them state-of-the-art recognition. However, Jennifer’s euphoria would be short lived. The Director of Nursing unilaterally decided to transfer her to a position where her new specialty in non-violent care could not be utilized. Not only had Jennifer’s purpose been taken away, she was given work that she believed was beneath the scope of her purpose. And because no one else was as knowledgeable regarding non-violent patient care, she watched in dismay as all of her ground breaking contributions were dismantled. Hospital staff resumed their practice of man-handling patients who in turn were provoked to higher levels of violence as a result. Despite being given a pay increase and the opportunity to retain her team, Jennifer was heart broken, demoralized, and worried about the patients she once cared for. Her natural engagement and self-motivation were reduced to working the minimum hours required to keep her new job.
Prior to the reorganization, and despite her dissatisfactions with low pay and benefits, Jennifer was benefitting tremendously from her career contentment, and so was her employer. She believed that she was on track to fulfill her most important purposes, but those purposes were changed without her involvement. And her contributions were dismantled, resulting in her disengagement. That Jennifer had a purpose and plan for her career was insignificant. That she had been naturally engaged and self-motivated by what she was doing was neither valued nor nurtured. Jennifer was treated as a human resource for which a pay increase was expected to resolve any concerns that she might have.
Jennifer’s case is not only disheartening it exposed the hospital to several expenses that could have been avoided. For example: costs associated with reorganizing, granting pay increases, retraining transferred workers, decreased productivity, potential turnover and replacement costs, and also law suits, benefit claims, absenteeism, and public relations issues resulting from unnecessary violence and injuries.
Rather than quit or complain, Jennifer found the means to rebound from her unfortunate situation. Not by anything that her management did, but by the control of her middle ground reasoning to recognize her career contentment. She reasoned that she was still a nurse and that her work was conveniently located in close proximity to the home she loved and wanted to keep. She also imagined that her self-motivation and natural engagement could be applied to other purposes. And with this as her motive, Jennifer began compiling her research and started writing an article on the topic of non-violent patient care that she hoped would be published. Her resilience was rejuvenated by her control over this activity, and she threw herself into working which in turn inspired her team to do the same. Ultimately, Jennifer reclaimed her career contentment and leveraged it to persevere despite her lack of job satisfaction.
Imagine Jennifer catapulting out of bed and rushing to work. Feeling self-motivated and naturally engaged by what she’s doing; losing track of time and thinking that she could almost do her work for free, simply because she chose to reason and believe that her work is meaningful and meant to be.
Copyright 2009 by Jeff Garton All Rights Reserved
Jeff Garton is author of Career Contentment: Don’t Settle For Anything Less (ASTD Press, 2008). His company produces innovative learning materials and delivers Coach and Train-The-Trainer certificate programs to employers on the topic of career contentment to improve performance, productivity and retention. For information or to explore training options, visit www.careercontentment-thebook.com.
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