How Does Your Job and Company Shape You?
You spend almost 2,000 hours per year doing a full-time job. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It feels impossible for your job to not shape you. Which then raises the question: How is your job shaping you?
Two obvious places to look are your manager and the senior leadership.
Your manager is the most obvious influence on you. They’re both higher status and a frequent social link. Your social brain can’t help but noting and most likely moulding you towards them.
You may not have much direct personal time with the senior leadership. But the CEO affects the C-suite, who affect the GMs, and that chain of influence eventually trickles down to you.
Do you like your manager and senior leadership? Do you want to be more like them?
I wonder how this works for people resentful of their jobs. I could imagine it still moulds them towards it. Like people who say they will “never be like their parents” only to yell at their child for the exact thing their parents would. For example, I think some people complain about a fickle leadership who constantly change direction. But they themselves enjoy and seek out a freedom to follow their own whims and interests in a work context.
Or it could make them allergic to this culture, moulded towards a kind of antithesis: The workaholic company breeds the spiritual-seeking worker; the capitalist company breeds the social justice worker; the slow bureaucracy breeds the Randian individualist.
Question Prompts
It might be interesting to think about what your current company’s work culture is regarding the following topics, compared to the average person in your country.
Some dimensions of culture:
- Patterns of thought
- Approaches to work
- Values
- Risk tolerance
- Behaviours
- Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (power distance; individualism vs collectivism; masculinity vs femininity; uncertainty avoidance; long- vs short-term orientation; indulgence vs restraint)
Even a few words is probably fine. To avoid being blind to how your company’s culture is not “typical” of other companies, you could compare it to the average person in your country; or someone you knew at high school.
And then you could:
- Compare this to others
- Compare this in a year’s time
- Compare this to your past self
- Reflect whether you want to be like this
- Develop in this way more, if you want to be successful at your company
Actuarial Consulting
Here are three ways my first job shaped me.
1. Strong work ethic and care about quality
I already had this prior to Finity, but the company really lives its “Clients Come First” value. Nearly everyone was an academically excellent student. People across the company would stay at work late, wanting to do it properly. And the bonuses rewarded those who did.
2. The ability to justify a range of perspectives
Most consulting companies probably require their staff to be willing to change their views. Actuarial probably even more so, given we’re predicting the future.
Positively, I would say we see the limitations of our data. Negatively, I could say this reflects a consultant’s awareness of who is paying their bill.
3. Explaining things as Context → Limitations → Analysis → Recommendation
To qualify as an actuary, we were all required to sit the exam Commercial Actuarial Practice. Over an eight-hour exam, you would write report giving your actuarial advice. And every report must follow the same structure said above. Most people brought a template with the opening and linking sentences pre-drafted, so they could just replace the gaps.
I see this same structure in my current job, in presentations, emails, conversations. Even when I think a shorter answer might do, we like to give the long wind-up, the explanation of what we’re seeing, bringing people along the journey.
I suspect these are common across people in consulting and actuaries.
Corporate Actuary
What prompted this post was two things I am currently trying to learn at QBE.
1. Brevity: Say it concisely (then shut up).
Senior leaders don’t have a lot of spare bandwidth1. I’m trying to practise saying the answer in a sentence, or few words, and providing the minimum level of reasoning or analysis.
This is difficult because I often don’t know what I want to say, and starting with the context or reasoning helps me get there.
But it’s also hard because I sometimes talk as a way to put people at ease – which also helps me feel at ease! But that’s a social move, not a professional move.
2. Buzzwords: Reference something else people understand (then shut up).
Most corporations have a lot of buzzwords, slogans, themes, or values. I’ve recently realised they communicate a key idea, briefly, in a way which everyone understands. You could say:
“The benefit is consistency.”
Or you could say:
“We could do this, but it’s a big change in one direction. And if the market doesn’t respond, we would need to change in the other direction. Which is disruptive internally, and not a great experience for our customers.”
And if your company has been hammering on about consistency for the past year, the first will communicate enough of the idea in half the time.
I struggle with this because I want to say something original. And repeating what the CEO says every time she presents feels incredibly derivative. But I think people respect the conformity to the senior leadership.
Questions for the reader
I’m curious if anyone has gone from being a rambler to a short, incisive respondent.
I also wonder how people would have found this if the order were swapped. It really does go Context → Analysis → Responses → Next Steps. It makes sense for a reflective blog post, but I am curious.
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Noting, of course, that Jeremy Irons’ character - nor my wonderful employers - are at all a metaphorical young child or golden retriever. ↩