Ms Joy is seen as a visionary. She always finds new solutions to processes or functions that have been creating problems at work or at home. At work she is always challenging business processes, systems, organization and products. She is fortunate enough to having worked in a very innovative company and is highly valued for her ideas and that she always is willing to discuss her ideas and explain how she has come to her conclusions. Her family is in most cases also positive to her changes, at least after some discussions. One day she got an offer to change jobs and the offer was too good to resist. So much more salary and some fringe benefits that she really appreciated, free healthcare, an interesting training program and a possible carrier path that could take her abroad which always had been on her vision board.
After a month at the new job Ms Joy had realized that the business processes and systems would not keep the company competitive for very long. She was very interested in networking, reading and listening to lectures in her business area and all other areas that she could have any use of (IT system development, marketing, communication, leadership, sustainability, etc) and considered herself to be well educated and updated. She prepared her presentation of the new suggested plan for new business processes and systems thoroughly. She did not worry at all since she was used to getting support for her ideas and that anyone questioning them would raise their doubts, listen to arguments, perhaps having a second round of fact collection and then get her ideas through. Of course there often was a need of modifications due to limited resources, time or money, but in most cases she had been happy with the decisions and implemented solutions.
She was chocked by the way her ideas were received! The answer was NO! The company had been competitive up until now and did not expect things to change. They were not at all interested in listening to how Ms Joy had come to her conclusions and her efforts to make them listen and understand just made their attitude even more negative.
What should she do? She went home early that day and ran a private workshop.
Stay at the new job and accept that they are not interested in her ideas? Not a very good idea since she was convinced that the company would not stay competitive and therefore her carrier path did suddenly not look very good. Or quit directly? But she just changed jobs! Should she even consider staying at a job where they didn’t even bother to listen to her ideas?
What did she decide? Do you want to give your version of how the story ended?
