Personal Autonomy > Ping-Pong + Swag
Now and always, you're the boss of taking care of you.
A daily column about freedom, exploration, life in general, and creating work and a life you actually like. There are stories.
A friend recently switched jobs and loves the new employee benefits company he’s working for. Curious, I checked out their website and saw messaging like, “We help companies take care of their people.”
It’s lovely that some companies want to “take care” of their people. And some employees love it: ”They have a great culture, great benefits. They really take care of us.”
But in 49 states, employment is at-will. This means companies take care of their employees until they don’t or can’t—downsizing, rightsizing, reorgs, that sort of thing.
Given this, and the fact that it’s all a business transaction, I wonder: Am I the only one who doesn’t actually want a company to take care of me? Pay me fairly, yes. Try to be a good place to work, yes. Take care of me? Naw—that’s my job.
The standard arrangement is pretty simple: I provide work, you provide a paycheck (and typically benefits). I choose how I use said financial remunerations to take care of me.
Somewhere along the lines and in tech especially, though, we seem to have lost our way. I’d wager my pickleball paddle that the best employees want leaders they can respect, a non-dysfunctional place to work, and autonomy—way more than they want swag, forced company culture, ping-pong tables, and a stocked kitchen.
I’d wager my pickleball paddle that the best employees want leaders they can respect, a non-dysfunctional place to work, and autonomy—way more than they want swag, forced company culture, ping-pong tables, and a stocked kitchen.
Forgive me, but there were times in corporate when it felt like a summer camp program for grown-ups—complete with rah-rah, snacks, and forced bonding. I remember an hour-long team meeting where our new C-suite leader asked a dozen very capable, mid-career adults to argue “important questions” such as “Is a taco a sandwich?”
I get it—this leader was trying to build rapport. But he would’ve landed a lot better with his new team by learning about our work, the problems we were currently solving, how we worked together. You know, that kind of grown-up stuff.
For those of you already building your own thing, you know firsthand that taking care of you is always your job.
For those still in traditional employment, though, this shift is a big deal. It’s the kind of thinking that gets you maximizing your personal autonomy and, now and always, betting on you to take care of you. I’m betting on you, too.
P.S. For MTYL Insiders, scroll down to listen to an audio embed of the 2-minute storified version ChatGPT rendered. I very much wrote it, then out of idle curiosity, asked ChatGPT to turn it into a story. Not bad, eh? Also, my audio embeds will only improve in quality as I go—apologies for a few blips in this one.
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