Handling Being Employed

An Employee's Interests

Remember: Each of these Centres contains a lot! To remind you what is inside them, review review the introduction &/or the originating framework.

Ready? Start now with the way employees view the 7Groupings/Levels (shown in the diagram). The internal duality This internal duality needs further examination once both frameworks are completed. is proposed as yourself v your work.

Personal Subordination
CG7-Select Incentives ↔CG6-Adjust to Developments
This is about energizing and controlling yourself in accord with the compact you have explicitly and implicitly agreed. These two levels mean that you unequivocally subordinate yourself to the organization and its goals.
Detail:

Having chosen the incentives offered, you have struck a deal with the organization to work for it. Your feelings become irrelevant. You are putting body (i.e. energizing yourself) and soul (i.e. controlling yourself) at the disposal of the organization with its changing goals and policies, whatever they may be. If your heart sinks at the thought, then the job is probably not right for you. If subordination is not in your nature, then employment work is probably not for you.

Personal Conduct
CG6-Adjust to Developments↔CG5-Create a Presence 
The organization is continually altering in response both to its choices and to external events. So this is about handling yourself flexibly on a day-to-day basis in a way that is adaptive and supportive. This conduct reveals both your loyalty (via your self-control) and your involvement (via orienting yourself).
Detail:

Your commitment and overall attitude must now be manifested in daily interactions. This means becoming immersed in the activities and pressures of work: being fully engaged, sensitive to what is occurring and responding intelligently and promptly in interactions with managers and co-workers.

Personal Protection
CG5-Create a Presence↔CG4-Track Your Position
This is about focusing on your appraisal, noticing what is going on around you, being alert and flexible, joining in generally and recognizing your vulnerability. These two levels allow you to orient yourself and review your work, and so provide for necessary self-protection within the employment situation.
Detail:

Interaction that flows from presence brings numerous dangers:  e.g. you may be misinterpreted or misunderstood; your useful new idea may upset others; a co-worker may be jealous or envious; power-centred superiors may feel threatened or enjoy humiliating. That is why presence is so often avoided. However, presence is essential for tracking your position. Presence allows you to learn what other employees are like, discover prevailing attitudes, sense unspoken tensions, generally avoid dangers and prevent yourself doing something foolish that blots your record.

Personal Validation
CG4-Track Your Position↔CG3-Be Resourceful 
This is about energizing and reviewing work in a way that ensures others validate your efforts. Your performance must fit with your situation and with the organization's too. You should be proud of your work. But what counts in the end within employment is the perception of your managers and co-workers.
Detail:

You deserve to benefit from being resourceful. However, you won't unless you sense the state of the organization and where you stand within it. People will have different views of your output, what the organization needs and how you work. It is not much use turning in superb achievements during which many people were rubbed up the wrong way. You must find a way to deliver results, both directly and indirectly, in a way that attracts approval, wins recognition and improves your position.

Personal Credibility
CG3-Be Resourceful↔CG2-Influence Others
This is about being able to work effectively with others: in part because your performance is satisfactory, and in part because you have the necessary social skills to get their interest and cooperation. These two levels, energizing and controlling your work, provide you with credibility amongst your co-workers.
Detail: 

Being resourceful and performing in role affects others and makes them, in principle, amenable to your influence. Others know they can rely on you to play an effective part as a team-worker or colleague. Credibility is part technical, about proficiency and knowledge; and part psychological, about dependability and temperament.

Personal Determination  
CG2-Influence Others↔CG1-See Challenges
This is about involving others so you can deal with your challenges. These two levels orient and energize your work and relationships, and manifest as the determination essential to get anything worthwhile done. If determination deteriorates under overload, it becomes experienced as external pressure rather than an internal drive.
Detail: 

Credibility (CG3↔CG2) allows challenges to be identified and successfully pursued with the cooperation of others. The final step, however, is for all to experience your deep determination. Others are most likely to help you clarify a challenge, and work with you to tackle it, if they perceive that you are determined. This link (unlike the above links) is actually a Channel between Centres.
It is provisionally named in terms of its function: Determination.

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Knowing what being employed is about, we can construct the framework step by step.

• So now apply the dynamic duality of Self v Organizationto each of the Centres.
  

  OR:
  

• Skip this systematic development of Centres and Channels and continue to the end result and what it reveals.
• See the equivalent to this page for management handling employment.
• Compare the Management and Employee frameworks.

Originally posted: 17-Dec-2011