the flower, step 3

The next flower petal is all about working conditions or your work environment.  The exercise focuses on answering: What working conditions do you like best, because they enable you to do your most effective work?

The author suggests that you start with listing out distasteful working conditions.  From there, you can translate those into your ideal working conditions.

Here is my list of distasteful working conditions in order of priority, starting with the most distasteful:

• Angry clients angry about things beyond my control
• Not believing in the mission of the organization
• Having no defined goals in my role/work
• An environment with a lack of/or poor communication
• A rigid, inflexible work schedule
• No opportunity for growth
• Ineffective colleagues
• Poor management/leadership
• No accountability framework
• No mechanism for regular feedback on job performance

I was able to translate these into a list of ideal working conditions:

• Strong belief in organization's mission
• Set of defined goals to work towards
• Open and transparent communication within organization
• Flexible schedule
• Opportunity for growth
• Effective colleagues
• Strong leadership/management
• Employees are held accountable for their work
• Regular feedback loop on performance and career growth possiblities

I have added the first five to my third flower petal as my ideal working conditions. I now know I need to look for work in organizations that would foster these types of working conditions.  Although, I can certainly ask about this during the interview process, how do you really know you are walking into an organization with these types of conditions?  I also wonder how much of an impact an individual employee can have on creating these types of conditions if they don't already exist?