2
WHAT DO YOU
ENJOY DOING?
The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this—with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need—this life is hell.
—W. E. B. DU BOIS
Your opportunities for success will be brighter if you pursue a career that makes the best use of your talents and provides you with personal satisfaction.
That’s where the second question comes into play: What do you enjoy doing? Answering that question will help you identify:
- your congenial competencies
- your compatible careers
- your congenial roles
Let me explain what I mean. A congenial competency is an activity that allows you to use your best talents in an enjoyable and satisfying way. A compatible career is a line of work that allows you to use your congenial competencies in a profitable way. A congenial role is a position within a compatible career that lets you follow your preferred behavior pattern and disposition most of the time.
To illustrate: You may have a talent for drawing things, and you enjoy making sketches and filling in the details. This is a congenial competency. Your talents can be profitably applied in fields such as architecture, commercial graphics, and cartooning. These are compatible careers. You enjoy interacting with people and being a part of the commercial process, so you decide to become a commercial artist. This is a congenial role.
IDENTIFYING YOUR CONGENIAL COMPETENCIES
At the end of Chapter 1 you listed your strongest talents, based on the seven basic intelligences. Now think about the ways you enjoy applying those talents. Use Figure 2–2 at the end of this chapter to list them.
To determine what activities give you the most satisfaction, ask yourself these questions:
- What do I do that gives me the greatest sense of accomplishment?
- What do I do that gives me the greatest feeling of pride?
- What do I do that gives me the greatest feeling of confidence?
- If I had a year to spend doing anything I wanted, what would I do?
Usually the things you enjoy doing are the things you do well. When you have identified the activities that meet these criteria, you will have identified your congenial competencies.
IDENTIFYING YOUR COMPATIBLE CAREERS
Each basic intelligence can be the doorway to a variety of compatible careers. To use a couple of famous examples, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Michael Jordan both excel in bodily/kinesthetic intelligence. Baryshnikov achieved his greatest satisfaction on the ballet stage. Jordan achieved his on the basketball court. Both rode their congenial competencies to stardom in compatible careers.
Use Figure 2–3 at the end of the chapter to list the careers in which you can apply your congenial competencies. Start with the company you now work for. Think of the career tracks it offers. You may find opportunities in sales, marketing, design, finance, engineering, public relations, research and development, computer technology, human-resource development, and other fields within your organization. Your human-resource department can help you develop a list, and management is always alert for people who are looking for ways to apply their talents more effectively.
T. J. Walker is an example of a young man who found a compatible career after joining a small company, and he enriched himself and the company. Walker’s congenial competency was drawing. At the age of twenty-four, he left the family farm in Mississippi, borrowed his brother’s old Honda Civic, and headed for Los Angeles.
There he went to work for Carl Jones, an entrepreneur from Watts. Jones had a profitable enterprise printing designs on clothing. One day they heard some friends discussing the possibility of opening stores that specialized in ethnic clothing. Walker and Jones liked the sound of the idea.
They took a trip to New York, where Walker took his sketch pad into the streets of the inner city to see what the young people were wearing. From these sketches, they designed a line of clothing aimed specifically toward the African American community. They called their enterprise Threads 4 Life, and it caught on rapidly, soon growing into a $70-million-a-year business.
In Woburn, Massachusetts, a twenty-two-year-old man took a job as a forklift repairman at a warehouse. But his real love was computer programming. One day he approached management with a program he designed for a computer-controlled warehousing system. Management liked what it saw—in the warehousing system and in the employee. Soon the young man was prospering in a congenial role in a compatible career—as a full-time software designer.
Your company probably offers opportunities in a variety of careers that would allow you to practice your congenial competencies in stimulating, exciting ways. If the career doesn’t excite you, you won’t approach it with enthusiasm—and enthusiasm is necessary to success in any endeavor.
Don’t overlook the possibility of “inventing” your own career. We are living in an age of innovation. New technology and new economic and social conditions are creating needs that never before existed. Satisfying those needs may call for enterprises that never before existed.
A New Englander named Preston Smith used innovative thinking to follow his congenial competency to success and wealth. He studied agricultural science in college and drifted into a job at a screen-printing plant, but that wasn’t what he really liked. What Smith really liked was skiing.
For most people, skiing is a pastime for winter weekends, but Smith decided that it would make a great compatible career. So he decided to open a ski resort on Killington Peak in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
Smith acquired the financial backing, leased some state forest land, then persuaded the state to build a road to his property, based on the potential economic benefits for the area. Then he added a technological innovation: Until that time, ski resorts had relied on nature to provide the snow, and nature was notoriously undependable. Smith became the first person to make large-scale use of artificial snow.
Killington Peak became a huge success, and Smith was able to enjoy his favorite activity while making lots of money.
IDENTIFYING YOUR CONGENIAL ROLES
To be completely happy in your work, you have to look beyond your talents and your likes. You also have to consider the type of behavior the role will require of you.
It stands to reason that you will be happiest and most successful in roles that allow you to be yourself. This means responding to people, events, and circumstances in a way that is most natural and most comfortable for you.
Even when you’ve found a congenial competency in a compatible career, you may find roles that require you to behave in ways that make you uncomfortable. For instance, if you enjoy writing, you may thrive in a role that allows you to work in solitude, alone with your creative thoughts. A busy newspaper office, full of jangling telephones, clacking keyboards, and loud conversation might be stressful and unpleasant for you. But some writers thrive in the hurly-burly atmosphere of a newsroom and get writer’s block when they’re alone with their thoughts.
If your congenial competency is business management, you may be in your element when you’re plotting sales and marketing strategy, but you may be uncomfortable when you have to discipline subordinates and miserable when you have to fire them. Others may find it stimulating to deal with human-relations problems and may take hiring and firing decisions in stride as part of the normal routine of management.
Therefore, in choosing your roles in life, it’s helpful to look at the normal way you respond to people and events.
IDENTIFYING YOUR PREFERRED BEHAVIORAL MODE
We generally divide people into four broad behavioral categories. I call them:
Top gun
Engaging
Accommodating
Meticulous
It’s no accident that these descriptions form the acronym TEAM, because a good organization should be a team consisting of people from each category. Each behavioral mode can make positive contributions toward organizational success. Individuals, too, need to call on each behavioral mode at appropriate times. Fortunately, each of us is capable of functioning in any of the modes, though we usually have one that we prefer most of the time. That’s the one I refer to as your preferred behavioral mode.
Here is a brief description of each mode:
Top Gun
People who prefer the top-gun mode are extroverted, action-oriented, and motivated to win. They are more comfortable when giving orders than they are receiving them.
Their greatest fear is losing. For them, it is a painful experience, and they will go to great lengths to avoid it, often ignoring the feelings of those who stand between them and their objectives.
In conversation, top guns like to skip the preliminaries and cut to the chase. They are impatient with details. They prefer to plot grand strategy and let others worry about tactics.
Top guns work best in jobs that allow them considerable latitude for decision making. They want their bosses to give them their assignments, then stand aside while they get the job done—their way.
Engaging
Engaging people are also extroverted and action-oriented, but they are more relaxed and playful than top-gun people are. Winning is important to them, but being liked and admired is even more important.
Engaging people are often social leaders, and on the job they excel at tasks that involve working with other people. Their bright, enthusiastic personalities usually promote high morale and encourage team-work. They are usually miserable when forced to work alone. They relish friendly competition, and will exert themselves to be the best at what they do.
Engagers like to warm up with small talk before getting down to the business at hand. Whereas top guns might frown on chitchat around the water cooler as a waste of time, engaging people see it as an opportunity to forge relationships. Engaging people use their socializing skills to create networks of people they can call upon when needed.
Engagers usually are self-confident, and sometimes they overestimate their competence. They may accept challenges before they have acquired the skills to meet them, and may implement new ideas before they have been adequately tested. Their greatest fear is public embarrassment. A visible mistake committed in the presence of others, or criticism delivered in front of workmates, can be devastating to their morale.
Engaging people, like top guns, are more interested in the big picture than they are in the details. They are good at organizing group efforts, setting the overall objective, and assigning the details to others.
They often are unaware of time and tend to let deadlines sneak up on them. But they are also good at getting things done at the last minute.
Accommodating
Accommodating persons are friendly introverts. Being an introvert doesn’t mean that you dislike the company of others. It means that when your emotional batteries are running low, you prefer to recharge them by seeking some quiet time to yourself where you can relax and meditate. Extroverts recharge their emotional batteries by interacting with others.
Accommodating persons are motivated by a desire to be liked. This need to be liked may lead them to subordinate their own interests to the interests of others.
Accommodators are diplomatic. They work smoothly with people who follow all three of the other behavioral modes. They make good teachers and counselors because they are highly empathetic. They can “feel” what other people are feeling. But they also have to guard against shouldering the burdens that others should carry for themselves.
Accommodators are loyal, dependable people who can work either alone or in cooperation with others. They like peaceful, predictable environments. Because they dislike conflict, accommodating people will avoid directly challenging others. They will challenge or criticize indirectly, often using hints or coded messages. They are quite sensitive to nuances in speech and manners, and assume that others are similarly attuned. The top gun’s no-nonsense straight talk turns them off.
Accommodators like to find comfortable routines and follow them. They prize security and are uncomfortable with change. Accommodating people don’t like to advertise their virtues. They prefer to let their actions speak for themselves. Yet they expect their work to be recognized and appreciated. If it isn’t, they feel hurt.
Accommodators are good planners, and although they tend to be nonaggressive, their ability to act should not be underestimated. Dwight Eisenhower preferred the accommodating behavioral mode, and he led the planning for the largest military invasion in history. When it came time to fish or cut bait at Normandy, Eisenhower weighed the risks and acted. The Nazi generals learned that they weren’t confronted by a doormat.
Meticulous
Meticulous people, like accommodating people, are introverted. They are highly logical, detail-oriented people. Unlike engaging people, they don’t need the company of others. They can work alone for hours, energized by the challenge of applying logic to a knotty problem. Unlike accommodating people, they don’t need to be liked for their personal qualities. They are content to be judged by the quality of their work. Unlike top guns, their principal motivation is not winning. They often seem indifferent to applause, and to them being correct is more important than being liked.
When Henry Clay, the nineteenth-century American statesman, said, “I’d rather be right than be president,” he was voicing sentiments that meticulous people can readily identify with. Their chief motivation is the achievement of the high standards they set for themselves.
Meticulous people aim for quality and consistency. They are analytical, disciplined, thorough, and precise. They are cautious, and will not take action until they are sure the circumstances are right.
Don’t get into arguments with meticulous persons unless you’re sure of your ground. They know the manuals and rule books. They are comfortable with statistics and absorb information like sponges.
Like top guns, meticulous people dislike small talk. They just want the facts. They see criticism of their work as personal criticism, but they appreciate a constructive approach. Show them or tell them how to do things better, and you’ll get a positive response.
WHICH IS YOUR PREFERRED MODE?
Which of these behavioral modes best fits the way you respond most of the time? Possibly you can discern in yourself some of the qualities of each mode. That’s because, at one time or another, we step into each of the modes. You can get a general idea of the mode you prefer by answering these questions:
- When you want someone to do something for you, do you communicate by asking or telling them directly or by making a suggestion?
- When you’re working on a project with other people, which gets most of your attention: the job you have to do or the people you’re working with?
Figure 2–1 shows how your responses relate to your preferred mode. Top-gun people normally communicate by telling people directly what to do. They focus more on the tasks than on their relationships with the people performing the tasks. Engaging people normally communicate their desires directly, too, but they focus their attention on relationships instead of tasks. Accommodating people are more comfortable making suggestions than giving orders. Their focus is on relationships. Meticulous people also communicate by suggestion rather than by direct order. They focus on tasks over relationships.
To pinpoint your behavioral pattern more definitively, I recommend the use of such instruments as the Performax personal profiles and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. A version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator may be found in the book Please Understand Me by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates (Del Mar, California: Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, 1984). The book People Smart by Tony Ales-sandra and Michael J. O’Connor (La Jolla, California: Keynote Publishing Company, 1990) is devoted to a discussion of Perfonnax behavioral styles.
Figure 2–1
Find Your Preferred Mode
PINPOINTING YOUR BEST ROLE
Knowing your preferred behavioral mode will help you identify your congenial roles in the career of your choice.
Suppose you enjoy sports and have a high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. You also enjoy working with young people. Based on these factors, you think you might enjoy a career as an athletic coach. Your preferred behavioral mode is accommodating. This means that you value security, dislike personal conflict, and prefer to influence others through suggestion rather than direct instructions. Think about how these preferences would affect your performance as a coach.
A coach’s job security often depends upon the ability to turn out winning teams year after year. But your principal motivation is not winning, but being liked. Can you stretch beyond your preferred mode and take on the top gun’s winning instincts when necessary? Can you live with the insecurity of knowing that one mediocre season could send you back into the job market? Will you be able to tell an athlete who has worked her heart out for a position on the squad that she didn’t make the cut? Will you be able to discipline the top-gun player who thinks he knows better than you how to run the team? These are situations you may face that will require you to step outside your preferred mode.
That doesn’t mean that an accommodating person should forget about being a coach. Many excellent athletic coaches and managers follow the accommodating behavioral mode most of the time. Moreover, people sometimes follow different preferred modes under different circumstances. Casey Stengel, the great baseball manager, could be a talkative, sometimes clownish engager when dealing with the press and the public, then turn into a no-nonsense top gun when dealing with his players.
As you consider your role in life, keep in mind your preferred mode and the extent to which you will have to stretch beyond it to achieve success. Decide whether you can make the stretch without encountering an unacceptable level of stress. Then make your choice.
Good Generals, Different Modes
To see how different behavioral modes can affect individuals who pursue careers in harmony with their congenial competencies, let’s examine the cases of three American generals who gained fame during World War II: George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur.
Patton was an extremely gifted military tactician. He loved the calling. A military career was thoroughly compatible with the values he held. An assertive, dominating leader, he loved victory and hated defeat. He exemplified the top-gun behavioral mode. The military was clearly his natural calling. But not all military roles were compatible with his preferred behavioral mode. On the battlefield, he could give his top-gun mode full rein. He was doing what he did best, and his aggressive, win-at-all-costs style contributed to his success.
But Patton was never placed in charge of an entire theater and never made it to the highest levels of military rank. The top jobs went to men like Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, and Omar N. Bradley—men who could deal with the sensitive egos of world-class statesmen and of other military commanders without stepping outside their behavioral modes.
Eisenhower’s accommodating mode served him well when he was plotting strategy with Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and the top Allied military brains. But he knew when to step outside his preferred mode. Fortunately, he was able to do so on the eve of D day. The success of the Normandy landings depended upon favorable weather. The weather had been bad for some time, and the forecasters were not sure it would clear up in time for the landings. Eisenhower had to decide whether to delay the invasion, and thus give the enemy more time to discover Allied plans and fortify strategic points, or to give the go-ahead and risk disaster on the beaches. If the landings failed, the liberation of Europe would be delayed—perhaps forever.
Every instinct of the accommodating behavioral mode must have urged Ike to take the cautious approach.
But the general weighed the risks and decided to go ahead. Before retiring for the night, he wrote a note, to be released in event the landings failed. In it, he took full responsibility for the failure. Ike had stepped into the top-gun mode to make his decision. He stepped back into the accommodating mode to take the blame for the possible failure.
General MacArthur was another superb commander who could follow his preferred behavioral mode to victory against the Japanese in the Pacific. But when he was put in command of United Nations forces in Korea, he was in a role that conflicted with his behavioral mode. World War II called for an all-out victory effort. In Korea, the military objectives were often subordinated to political objectives, which went against MacArthur’s values and instincts. Unwilling to step outside his behavioral mode to accommodate the political realities, he was eventually relieved of command.
Both Patton and MacArthur had talent in spades, but when they had to step outside their preferred behavioral modes, they were unable to apply their talents with full effect.
Go for the Positive
Each role you contemplate will match up with your preferred behavioral mode in a positive, a negative, or a neutral way.
If the role you want to fill is a negative match with your preferred behavioral mode, it means that you will have to exert extra effort to succeed. You will be tacking into the wind and swimming against the current. Success will come harder. If your role is a neutral match, you will be navigating in calm winds and still water. Resistance may be light, but you’ll have to provide the momentum. If you have a positive match, then you will be sailing with the current and have the wind at your back. Success will be much easier to achieve. You will be in a congenial role.
Look for the career that will be the best fit for your talents and the role that will be the best fit for your disposition. A congenial role within a compatible career offers you the surest route to success.
EXERCISES
These exercises are designed to help you identify the careers that offer you the best opportunities to use your talents, and the roles within those careers that are most compatible with your talents and your behavioral mode.
DETERMINE YOUR CONGENIAL COMPETENCIES
In column 1, list your strongest talents as identified in Figure 1–1. In column 2, list the things you enjoy doing that utilize these talents. These are your congenial competencies. List them in column 1 of Figure 2–3 on the next page.
Figure 2–2
DETERMINE YOUR COMPATIBLE CAREERS
In column 1 list the congenial competencies from column 2 of Figure 2–2. Now think of the careers in which you can use your congenial competencies, starting with the career tracks in your present organization, and list them in column 2.
Figure 2–3
DETERMINE YOUR CONGENIAL ROLES
In column 1, list the compatible careers you identified in Figure 2–3. In column 2, list the roles in which you would feel most comfortable. If your compatible career is business, for instance, your congenial role might be as a manager, an account executive, or a financial officer.
Figure 2–4