Not all of us choose to be business owners and that's okay

Not all of us choose to be business owners and that's great! Leaders need to better understand their employees, but first... employees need to be self-leaders. 

Follow on Linkedin: Olivier Egli 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm your host, Olivier, and this is the Do Happy Work Podcast, where we look at work in a different, more natural, and more peaceful way. Hello and welcome back to the Do Happy Work Podcast. Every two weeks we answer a question that one of our audience members asked us about work.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello everyone. Again, this is Vera. If you it's your first time listening to this episode or this podcast, rather, I'm Olivia's wife and love, you know, participating in these because we get some awesome questions. And this week's question is what if I work for a big company? Can I still do happy work? It was a long, it was a two-parter. This person's invested in it.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

But this is a question we know very well because we come from big uh companies, big corporations that we worked for. This is a very valid question because yes, there is the tendency that we think that the only way to be happy in your work is when you are the master of your work. So when you own your work, which leads a lot of people to thinking that as an as an employee, you don't own your work.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

That's a really good point. I think a lot of folks um might feel like you have to become an entrepreneur in order to to find fulfillment, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Yeah. And this notion is is very understandable in a day and age where we're surrounded by NDAs and and and where uh there is a clear claim of the companies we work for that they own the outcome of our work and the tools that we use. However, energetically and truly, it's not that's not the case. We always own our work because we are the contributor of energy.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

I don't want to go into a rabbit hole, but I need you to kind of I I really enjoyed what you said about energetically. What does that mean for our audience?

SPEAKER_01 1:49

As a member of society, we have two kinds of energies to contribute. We have our labor and we have our money, right? And the two are obviously connected. We get paid for our labor. But our labor, that is something that we contribute that comes from us. So when a company hires us, they hire us for something that is unique to us. So we should always be very careful what happens in the process of us joining a company. Are we joining a company to become a part of a company? Because then we factually we, you know, we submit our work to a company, or are we still people who have their very own work but who use the work to contribute to something bigger? And and I say this, I'm not trying to split hair, but the difference is one of mindset. A lot of people go into big companies because they kind of want to park themselves. They park themselves in a place that's supposed to take care of them. But the idea is actually the opposite. We as employees take care of a mission that lives inside of the company. So we have to be much more careful. When we define work as us being a part of a company, a cog, right? And the wheel, yeah, the wheel, then of course, happy work is not possible because now we are just a function of that machine. So now our happiness is dependent on whatever the system is doing with us, with our work, what it's telling us to do. But the problem there is really, it's not really the company's fault. It is a mindset that we don't have in the interview process or even in the process of looking for work. We're fearful in the search for work. We want someone to take care of us. That's why we lose happy work. If we are able to turn this around and say that I have something of value to contribute, and I need to find the right place where that value is valued from where the term value comes, and where my value is uplifted and brought in conjunction with other people's value to support the mission I believe in. Well, now you own your work, and that is energetically, it's the opposite. But if you factually looked at it, you would think it's still the same thing. But it's a very important distinction because, in one case, in the case where you show up with your value and say, like, I have something unique to contribute, and you need me, and this mission, I want to contribute to this mission, you're able to do happy work. Why? Because you own your work, because your work is a reflection of who you are.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

I feel like there's so many layers in there. I I kind of went silent because uh it really hit when you said that there is an expectation that the work is supposed to take care of you versus you're supposed to take care of the mission.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

And um I like that you also said it it it really isn't any I don't know why you didn't really say it's not anyone's fault, but at the same time, I would add that if leadership doesn't understand that it's their fault that they do create cogs in the wheel. But I absolutely love that you said that you can bring your value, your energetic self into um your work and actually find that fulfillment that you're craving.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

You used a word that was on my mind right at the beginning when you phrased the question, and now we come full circle leadership. This is a big one because the world talks about leadership without like with no end. But this is about one thing we think that leadership is just managing people, right? But it's not. Leadership are leaders who lead other leaders, and it means that if you as an employee you join a company, but you don't have a spine, you submit to the company, you need a manager to take care of you. And we all know what kind of work that is. That's what I call sad work, it's the work that has nothing to do with you. You're good at it because of experience, because of talent, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Well, it's repetition, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Yeah, but it's not connected to anything that's true about you, it's not connected to your curiosity. However, when you are able to lead yourself, which is the prerequisite for happy work, you are in full leadership of yourself, which means that you believe in what you have to give, and you now join a company that has a true leader, that leader will recognize your leadership and lead your leadership towards the expansion of it. I know this might sound a little convoluted, but the fact is that if you don't know who you are and you join a company, that company will not know what to do with you. And it's nice that we have these pieces of wisdom where, like, oh, a leader takes care of their people first, leaders eat last, and all these things. Sure. But it still requires for people to have self-leadership. You cannot expect of a leader to teach their people how to lead themselves. That's that's kind of like that's your own responsibility. And and happy work is only possible for employees in businesses where people claim self-responsibility but then open up to true leadership inside of their business because leadership inside of a business allows for self-leadership to bloom. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 7:26

I absolutely do, and I think that I would say makes it all the more important to find your own self-leadership so that you can recognize leadership in a company that you're working for or that you want to work for.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

And be grateful for it. Yeah. Most people are not grateful for leadership. External leadership can go one of two ways. Either you reject it as offensive, uh, you oppose it because you feel like people tell you what to do. Well, yeah, since you don't know what to do, since you don't know yourself, since you don't know the work that you carved out for, you expect someone else to do it. Now that other person is trying to lead you, that of course will upset you because you feel like they're not telling me, they're not giving me proper instructions, they're not really guiding me. The other way it could go is that you completely submit to it without spying. That because you're so externally motivated, you're so you're looking for straws to grasp, that whatever leadership comes your way, and I think that's almost the bigger problem, you just cling on to it. And you do this because you lack self-leadership, you attach to external leadership. Well, now you become so attached that you factually become, you you become a minion. You be you become you become the embodiment of sad work, a person that does exactly what is asked of them, but then goes home to with an empty heart and asks themselves what went wrong. And then what does this person do? Either looks for another job where they will do the same thing again, or they will educate themselves. That's a thing I see all the time. Things are not going well for me professionally, so I will learn something new, I will read more books, I will go to another school. But that's not the problem. The problem is not knowledge, the problem is self-permission. That's where happy work begins. You hire people who have not given themselves permission for happy work, they are useless to the company and to themselves, other than you know, labor.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

But they're useless in terms of supporting the mission. They're useless in terms of like creating value, they're useless in advancing themselves and the business.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

It's almost like I can picture the person that lacks the self-leadership forcing themselves to fit a job description because they think it would be cool to work for that company and they like the money that it could potentially give. But then a year in they're like, this sucks.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

He always wears off. Yeah, in in and two both sides are to blame. We don't find happy working businesses for one, because people are not leading themselves, because people don't know themselves, because people have not discovered themselves, but then also because of the terrible marketing that the businesses do in hiring people. Businesses present themselves as these shiny ivory towers that will uh what once you join them, they will take care of you, and it's gonna be a great place to work, a great uh great pay, great benefits, great whatever have you. And so, of course, people who lack the spine, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but people who lack the self-knowledge, they get attracted by shiny objects. Sure. I was I was for the longest time I was guilty of that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you you see the great promise of being associated with a great brand, having that name in your CV, and then they say yes to you, of course you go. But the problem is that now it's an ego thing, it's not an actual contribution thing which opposes happy work. Happy work is not about an inflated ego. Happy work is about I know exactly what I'm worth and what I have in me to give. And this is the optimal business where I can do this, and that leader will really crack me open. That is what happy work in a business looks like. And there are a lot of examples where this happens, but people don't even realize it. They just stick around. Businesses that have great team loyalty, where they have low fluctuation, where for whatever reason they need far less effort, far less effort in hiring people, where the interview process is effortless, where they always get the right people, not the best, the right people, and then they keep those people for a long time without having to leverage them into staying. These are the businesses that actually recognize them. And I I actually think that this is also a wake-up call for businesses, for the interviewing process. Stop looking for the best people, stop looking for people who bend to your rules, stop looking for people who will just willingly follow exactly what the company says. What we need are the playful people who have done the work of understanding themselves and who say, Look, I know what I have to give, but I don't have all the tools. I know there's more in me that wants to grow. That's the people you want. Because those people, for one, they will bring exactly who they are into the game, but have the flexibility and the willingness to align with the business to be of actual value. That's where a leader, a business leader, has the most leverage. Not in not in overshadowing them, but in shaping them and then letting them go. Because every business, and it's not a popular opinion, but every business is just a transition. It's just a place of transition for people who are self-leaders to pass through and then move on. Sad workplaces are the ones that try to hold on to their people. That's not leadership. Leadership is never about holding on. But also the people who do happy work in a business, you have to let them go. You have to. You never want to poison your own pond by holding on to people who finally have reached the stage of happy work. You have to let them fly away. To do happy work in a business is really this two-folded approach of having the self-knowledge, but also finding the place that values your level of self-discovery, your level of self-leadership.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

I go back to that. Do the work on the self. This is not a cliche. We're not trying to be like, oh, self-help. No, you actually have to understand what it is that you want, who you are first, what you have to give, because it should be a responsibility. It should be hard in the best of ways to find a place where, and I love that you said align. You didn't say adapt.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Yeah, but what does self-work mean? You said a line. What what what does it mean?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

What does self-leadership mean, you mean?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Well, no, but you said like if you want to do that, you have to know yourself.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

And we know that this is a it's a loaded thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

So here's the thing: when you first get into the workforce, you know, age, I don't know, somewhere between 19 and 23. Have you done self-work? Have you? No. No, in most cases you have not.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

No, you've been programmed in a whole different way to do whatever it is that's the shiny object, as you say.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

But but then, you know, you get kicked around. It's a little bit, I think it's a little bit like with uh romantic relationships. You have to have your heart broken a couple times, but then you have to make a choice. Am I gonna continue this path and having my heart trampled on just because I don't respect myself enough? Or I think that I have to submit to foreign love, I have to submit to foreign management, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

And when you say foreign, you mean external.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

External, something that gives me no, my point is that self-leadership is synonymous with self-love. It's really all we're talking about here. I'm just not using that word because usually it spooks people away. And when we talk about work and now this guy's talking about self-love, it's all the same thing. Self-love means self-leadership. You love yourself enough to know that you have all you need in you, and that it is about cracking yourself open and bringing the light that is already in you out into the world. That is the path of self-understanding. What is my innate curiosity? What is that thing that drives me and has always driven me? What are my innate talents? What is the real character that I house inside of me? What is my inner mission? Before you haven't asked these questions, you have not answered your own self-leadership. Now imagine you hire somebody who knows these answers versus somebody who just has a lot of fancy degrees. Conventionally, the popular lie is to hire the second person, the one that has all these things in their CVs. I would always hire the first person because degrees, let's be honest, degrees is a function of time. It's time invested. But the first one, that's the heart invested, that's self-introspection. That's what you can build on. You want to lead a person that has that answer these first questions, not just degrees in the bag. So this is really what comes first, but you cannot expect that of a 22, 21, 20-year-old, of course. But you can very much expect that once they reach 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, whatever, that they start looking into these questions. And then I think, and I've seen it or I see it on the daily, you have these beautiful fruit, these people at the age of 35, 36 and up, who have done that work or who are about to do this work. The self-work. To self-work, and then start to recognize what that light is that they have to give and how they can use skills they have acquired over the past decade or so, and knowledge that they have acquired to bring that light out. That's who you want to lead. Those are the people who are capable of happy work in the context of a business. They will do it after their trials and tribulations. When people make the decision, okay, I don't just want to be trampled on, I want to lead myself. That's when they become capable of doing happy work inside of a business.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

And I think that's where that the truth comes in with all those um numbers that say really your mid-40s when you're 50 or 55, you're you're now starting to really push that happy work through. It's only then that you're like really flourishing.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Oh, yeah. You also know that with increasing age, it seems like uh you you become less prone to the bullshit.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

And that's that's a natural biological evolution that we have in our brain that we don't fold to the bullshit anymore when we get older. But when we're younger, we have to. We have to fold to it because we have to learn. But you don't want to live your professional life until you retire eventually just being beaten down and chewed up. At some point, you gotta say, like, no, stop, everybody stop. I am someone, I have something very specific to give. I will only apply where that light is valued, and that's where your happy work lives. Again, remember, happy work is not work you love, it's bringing what you love is into work. I think this is the most crucial piece of wisdom I have I have acquired over the last in my entire life to realize that happy is not in a job, it's not inside of a business, but that's where your happiness can flourish, where it can spread, become that company's light and then spread outward to the people it serves.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

And I imagine you work for such a company, your light is valued, your light is turned into products, applications, and services that touch people, and these people pay you for it, you get paid for it to do more of that, you're now in the cyclical reality of happy work. That's it. Whereas traditionally we think it's just pay. There's no happiness in just pay. There's only happiness in getting paid for doing our happy work, which begins with self-leadership.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

If you like what you heard, once again, please leave us a review. Let us know what else do you want to hear about. Um, we really love to hear from you. Olivier, do you want to add anything else?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

I'm just very curious and excited to hear the next question.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Thanks, everyone.