First: be yourself
21/05/2005
Jo Ouston considers the significance of the relationship between identity and the workplace.
You are not your last job title, you are an individual, whose true worth in the market supersedes your job title. Your value is not in your role but in who you are. Robert Baird, founder of Executive Grapevine Publishing, believes that we all run the risk of hiding ourselves in our past roles. In the process we lose much of what is of real value in ourselves.
“This struck me very forcibly,” Baird says, “when I heard an interview with Sir John Harvey-Jones. He told the interviewer: ‘yesterday I could say, I am Chairman of ICI. Today I am just John Harvey-Jones.’”
Baird, (himself in his late 60s and a vigorous campaigner on behalf of older people) warns against the warm cloak of your previous role. “Why do people sign Letters to the Editor: ‘…Retired solicitor’? Do they feel they need a label to reinforce their identity, to avoid the risk of being ignored?”
In over 20 years of working with managers, executives and professionals (of all ages) one thing is clear – success is not about titles. It is overwhelmingly about an individual’s personal qualities, their sense of their own identity, and their ability to communicate these.
It happens at all ages, the ‘what I am’ rather than the ‘who I am’ syndrome. I have worked with a great many older people facing not just this problem, but the problem of their date of birth too. But although they suffer (more than younger people) from the limiting effects of ‘role definition’, they have the ability ultimately to respond better.
On the negative side, because they listen to the voice in their head they unconsciously stoke the prejudice of the market-place. A life-time of being identified with the job makes it very hard to change focus to being identified as yourself. But that focus, that identity, is where your value lies. The paradox is that when you understand the problem you will be more effective than younger people at making the switch.
With your richer seam of self-knowledge and your deeper awareness of how human relationships work, you can identify your value more accurately, and use it with more conviction, than your younger competitors. All very well in theory I hear you say, but in practical terms I am still seen as the **year-old holder of my last job. Ah yes, but it’s the talent that carried you into that job, not the job itself, that the world values.
Jo is principal of career and management development consultants Jo Ouston & Co. Call 0207 821 8299 or emailinfo@joouston.co.uk or visit www.joouston.co.uk.