Personal Work Ethic

Personal Work Ethic

I can’t imagine not working! I love to work. For me, it goes way beyond just getting a paycheck, which I consider to be more like “icing on the cake” rather than compensation. This doesn’t mean I “live” to work, I have many interests outside of work and enjoy an occasional trip to the beach. The benefit of compensation simply allows me a degree of freedom to have more interests outside of work.

I enjoy working with people and accomplishing tasks and projects. I enjoy thinking outside the box when solving problems and I get a great amount of satisfaction bringing a project to fruition.

I believe an individual’s work ethic is passed from parent to child. Growing up, I saw my father’s sense of dedication and commitment to the task at hand and how he sometimes had to deal with the reality that not everyone would appreciate his efforts.

I have been fortunate in my career to have had a number of great supervisors, people who over time, I developed a trust relationship with, people for whom I would have crawled over crushed glass for, in an effort to not let down. They trusted me enough to allow me to do the job without micro-managing.

I have been known to stay in the “trenches” too long, fighting my way through obstacles until there were no more obstacles to go through.  I have taken some “heat” at times from co-workers, who see my motives as something less than honorable.  Their thinking was, “Who in their right mind would stay beyond the appointed time without getting something for it?”

It is a hard thing to explain to people. Sometimes, you simply work for the pure joy of working and accomplishing something that has a greater benefit and purpose than self satisfaction.

I do not like “busy work.” I separate “real” work from “busy’ work by asking one basic question, “is what I’m doing going to benefit the organization by contributing to the bottom line?” If there is no value in the “work”, it is not work, but instead, a display of poor stewardship over time and effort.

Now, before you accuse me of being a “workaholic”, understand that I too like to be a “couch potato” on occasion, but I’m rarely more than an arm’s length away from my phone, just in case you have something for me to do.