Advice on Keeping Your Corporate Job Without Losing Your Soul

Can you be true to yourself, stick up for what you think is right, and keep a corporate job?

A recent Business Week column answers affirmatively — if cautiously.

The problems of conscience it considers include those involving the impact of corporate decisionmaking on people, often other employees:

That layoff last month — did we handle that right? How do I feel about the big bonus I got, in light of the fact that we just outsourced customer support and eliminated 32 jobs in New York?

The author suggests you can suppress such thoughts in pursuit of your own success for years, but:

[O]ne day you may be hit in the gut with the idea that you’re a very small piece in someone else’s chess game, and that the price you’ve already paid — in your own view of yourself, and the distance you’ve traveled from your once-mighty ideals — is too high.
Then you may wonder why you went along, for so long, with a lot of things that never felt right to you.

When that happens, the experience can be terribly unsettling, as you look back over your career and wonder, like the old Talking Heads song says: How did I get here?

You don’t have to be Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap to have some disturbing entries in your business biography. That’s when you wonder, is it possible to prosper in business and still hang on to your soul?

The part of that Talking Heads lyric I find most on point is this:

And you may ask yourself
Am I right? …am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
My god!…what have I done?

The author suggests that, at least for someone who has been around long enough to have proven their value to the organization, there’s a middle ground worth staking out — “heeding your gut” and expressing your misgivings:

[It] takes a major effort, and may startle the people around you. If you’ve been a compliant sort for most of your career, you may stun your colleagues, if not your boss, when you stand up for things you’ve never bothered with before. But it will be worth it. . . . It may . . . really frustrate some people around you. That’s not always a bad thing. . .

It takes a lot to say in a meeting, “You know what? I’m not comfortable with that idea,” because people will respond: “Based on what? What data?” You won’t have the data, not at that moment when your gut is protesting. Too bad. They’ll have to wait for it. . .

You’ll say, “I need 48 hours to process it, but I’m not feeling good about this plan. It doesn’t feel right to me.” Watch their jaws drop. Two days is plenty long enough for the rationale that your gut knew instantly, to bubble up to your brain. . .

You can change the tide, slowly. . . . When you see that no one’s going to say the thing that needs to be said, you can say it — everyone is waiting for you to say it, in fact. It isn’t that big a risk. It’s much riskier to sit there in silence and wonder, “What am I doing with my life?” Don’t you agree?

The author concludes with a good illustration involving an HR decision — layoffs.

The article is: businessweek.com: “Taking a Stand on Ethics” (by Liz Ryan).