Career Changes in the Covid Era — Kelly’s Dilemma
These stories are collected from real people facing current challenges. For privacy and confidentiality, personal details have been changed.
Kelly feels very overwhelmed. She works for a multinational consumer goods company. It’s a fast-paced, high-achieving environment dedicated to providing top quality products to literally millions of customers. Kelly used to really enjoy her job, mainly because she was working in the industry she was trained in as a chemist. As a woman scoring high in the Luminary Role, she sought out coworkers who had an “extroverted” leaning and found a bosom buddy in one of her colleagues. She also had an exceptional manager and mentor in whom she respected and confided. It was the fast-paced environment, her mentor, and her coworkers which drew her deeper into this company.
Sadly, due to the pandemic and the demanding nature of the industry, Kelly began to lose some joy at work. Even though she still felt respected by her colleagues, her boss and her immediate team, she started to become really exhausted. As the pandemic crept on, she started losing coworkers who found other positions or opportunities. Their departure only added a heavier workload to the other team members. Kelly felt a little trapped. Should she stay or should she leave?
Never one to run from a fight, she decided to stick it out and see if she could last a year. A high achiever herself and easily an individual with either the or in the top IQs in the room, she was not opposed to hard work and finding solutions. Due to her deep care for others (high Team Builder score), Kelly threw herself into helping her team by advocating for change. She wanted to improve the process at her company so she strategized ways her team could speed up production as they were so behind from people leaving. Unfortunately, she began to realize she was fighting an uphill battle as upper management continued to encourage production and new innovation without providing sufficient staff to achieve success.
Kelly now found herself in a dilemma. She was a well-paid chemist who was learning a lot in her field. But she was becoming overwhelmed.
As you can see from Kelly’s story, she has a decision to make. She seems to have three options: do nothing, try to find ways to communicate the need for hiring more trained chemists, or leave in order for her wellbeing to improve.
The Seven Roles Applied
From our framework at Lumiere, we would suggest Kelly do the following things. First, she could harness her superpower of making easy connections as a Luminary to gain the support of higher ups. She could then utilize the role of Organizer to advocate for an overhaul of their current processes so that there was adequate work support to complete the task load. As Luminary and Organizer are in her top three on her Roleset, she fortunately would not have a hard time accomplishing both tasks. However, she might also want to consider implementing one of her weakest roles, the Investor, to think about the long term implications of current business practices. For example, if her organization keeps demanding more work from its employees but they don’t staff to their needs, they will undoubtedly lose employees sooner or later. By using the Investor role, she could discuss the detrimental implications of low staffing to the higher-ups and demonstrate to them that the financial success of the company will be affected if these needs aren’t met. There are multiple other roles she could pull from, but the point is that to often get what you need, you have to venture outside your comfort zone and play other Roles to accomplish goals.
Stay tuned for more stories taken from real life people learning how to grow during this crazy thing we call life
(If you’re interested in taking the assessment or your team taking it to see your collective Roleset, go to this link here).
See you next week!
Disclaimer — There are problems in every company. Therefore, learning how you operate on your team or how to deal with conflict now will help you become a more well rounded person and professional. Leaving might be necessary, but it is never a bad idea to attempt to change the chaos in order to create something successful. And remember, change always starts with you.
