Recently I have been exploring the reasons behind why so many people have moved away from the corporate career and ventured out into the entrepreneurial world. There are many factors stemming from either redundancy, frustrations of feeling trapped in a culture that is not aligned with them and even a yearning to have a stronger purpose in the world - no, this is not exclusive to the millennium generation.
In my own experience, I was that square peg trying to fit into a round hole, no matter how hard I pushed I always felt like the outsider looking in. This has definitely been the case with Helen Elizabeth Evans, who left the corporate world in 1996 to venture out on her own. Her newest creation is Hands On Business, where she helps entrepreneurs start, change and adapt their businesses so they create a meaningful impact in the world and have a more fulfilling experience of life.
Helen was born to British parents, raised in Swaziland, and educated in South Africa. From a very early age Helen started to identify how people were not always what they seem; her journey has really highlighted her passion for respecting people whether it is customer care or employee engagement.
Having moved to the UK in her early twenties, Helen found herself working in administration behind the scenes in film production and later their cinema theatre company at Metro Goldwyn Mayer in the early 90's. MGM was the early playground in which Helen discovered her talent for sowing the seeds for businesses to be able to think differently.
Restrictive Corporate Culture
Helen found the UK cinema culture at the time to be driven by short-term bottom-line impact rather than service and entertainment led, with employees given no flexibility to support customers, and rigid systems in place designed to prevent staff theft and ensure a heavy top-down authority, creating a culture of undervalued employees, mistrust and disloyalty.
Today we see many more open and flexible corporate cultures, but there are still too many workplaces that do not value their staff, one example being zero hours contracts where staff commits to one organisation without any commitment from the company to pay them a regular minimum wage. The culture that treats it's grass roots staff with so little respect usually has a similar attitude to those further up in the hierarchy, with the knock-on effect of staff feeling undervalued, so lacking loyalty and distrust they usually do the bare minimum to keep their jobs rather than their creative best.
"Most of us will only share the best of ourselves and our talents in environments where we feel valued and appreciated." - Helen Elizabeth Evans
Office Politics
Helen was given a role she was passionate about, that of implementing a new customer service driven team and culture within the MGM International Cinema Group, including training UK front of house employees to provide excellent customer service to everyone who came through the doors of all 125 cinemas.
The distrustful management culture toward staff under them had a boomerang effect in that as staff rose in the ranks they carried that insecurity with them. The knock on effect was that, as Helen was in a new role where her colleagues didn't understand where she 'fit' and thus what her 'power' was, uncomfortable with the trusted relationships that she seemed to have with senior management, and feeling threatened by the changes she was implementing, the back stabbing was rife all in an effort to 'protect' themselves.
Clearly, our colleagues' behaviour impacts our performance. Helen's vision for the company was big and compelling. Senior staff shared it, however, the undermining and nasty behaviour of colleagues was difficult to deal with, and affected her sense of self, encouraging her to play smaller and focus on a narrower impact than she wanted, just to limit the underhanded back biting, causing the company to be negatively affected too.
It really highlights the point that no one ever teaches you the political skills and emotional resilience you need in the workplace, yet there are many people who are subjected to negative office politics in businesses all the time impacting their ability to perform at their best.
"One thing that education does not prepare you for, is developing emotional resilience in the workplace" - Helen Elizabeth Evans
Smoke and Mirrors
When Virgin Cinemas took over MGM Cinemas Helen was excited to be part of an exciting brand that appeared to value women and youth, but all that really changed was the name of the company, the most senior management and the level of insecurity within the company.
The new management had bought the company, mainly because of its massive property assets, and knew little about running a cinema chain. Funds appeared short in terms of salaries, but plentiful in terms of marketing. The management were still learning the business. Given there was no leadership and progress seemed to stagnate, in all but marketing and completing building projects initiated by previous management, leaving employees feeling more insecure than ever while having little to do - a recipe for back biting and divisive behaviour.
Being a straight-shooting action-taker Helen found this frustrating, especially as they'd hinted her current package seemed 'high for her age'. So, following well-intended career advice, rather than following her instincts and passions that had always served her so well before, she made a 'sensible' move to a company supplying computer systems to the cinema industry, where she discovered they were almost the opposite of what they pretended to be, especially ethically. More 'smoke and mirrors'.
Negative Responsibility
Helen's clients often comment on the value they get from her very different perspective. It is a perspective that has come from her work in different organisations, the challenges that compromised her values of integrity, value, respect and decency toward all. Although continually disappointed, she didn't give up in her efforts to bring these values into the organisations she worked for until her physical body started having 'fits'. The stress of working with people whose values didn't align with hers was too much, and she felt enormous gratitude to be 'let go', even if it was yet another ethically challenged act from the company she was working for at the time.
Being 'let go' had been her greatest fear, and yet it turned out to be the key that released her from an oppressiveness she didn't know she was under. During her time of recovery, never being able to sit around doing nothing, she found a self-paced, gentle avenue to earning an income, creating property inventories for estate agents and landlords. The difference was transformative, there was this sense of freedom and the ability to work on her own terms, responsible for herself alone - the mistakes were her responsibility but so were the wins, and she loves those!
She never expected to work for herself, and when she started to, she imagined it as a temporary thing until she was well enough to go back, but the reality of being completely responsible for herself, her life and her work, was intoxicating and she discovered she was really good at it, so twenty years later she is still happily responsible, making her living on her own terms, aligned with her own values, only surrounding herself with those who have similar values.
When working in corporate companies it is so easy to be told what to do, to have the responsubility of deciding what you need to do taken away from you, but when a mistake is made companies can be quick to point it out to an employee..."you didn't take responsibility!" However, when they receive praise, they can easily forget to acknowledge the employees responsibility in it. This is what I refer to as negative responsibility, a core factor that can damage any sense of loyalty, morality and motivation within a corporate culture.
The Future of Corporate Employees
Helen's story has highlighted many of the reasons so many people still move away from a corporate career and venture out into the entrepreneurial world - job loss, divisive or restrictive corporate culture, lack of support (from peers especially), the smoke and mirrors where reality is different from rhetoric, and illness caused by long-term stress caused by negative responsibility and working against personal values.
Although losing her job to ethics-based stress-induced illness was why she took her talents out of the corporate world initially, it wasn't why she stayed out.
She might have gone back if she thought she could find a company with a culture that matched her respect-based values, a place where her creative, problem-solving talents would be valued in an environment that was progressive, willing to adapt to the changes in the market, and where the success of any team member was treated as the success of the team.
But the truth is, working for herself these days gives her the power to choose to work hard, to take time out for family, to travel or to simply rest. She also gets to choose who she works with and for, where and how she works, all while doing work that gives her life purpose, meaning and fulfilment.
With her very bright and talented 16 year old son beginning to consider his future work options, she finds herself encouraging him to study what will support him in pursuing an entrepreneurial career from the beginning, following his passions and purpose right from the start, discouraging him considering a 'job' (just over broke financially, spiritually and in terms of self-worth as she thinks of it).
As Seth Godin shares in We Are All Weird, weird, unique and different is the new normal so it's time corporates started creating different shaped holes for us square and weird shaped pegs to fit in or they may find they'll have to outsource the real talent as we'll all be self-employed.
This article was co-authored by Deap Khambay and Helen Elizabeth Evans