Got tired of your job?
Not really an enthusiast of anything in your job?
Fed up with your employer?
Afraid to resign because of no alternative job offer?
Fear that you might not up to par with other company's requirements?
Extremely happy when Friday and very Anxious on Sunday night that you have to go to work on Monday?
Can't see any positive points from what you are doing right now?

Mr. A, 37 years old, worked for XYZ enterprise for 15 years, being a manager for 10 years. If we see that profile, surely in nowadays work environment, a Talent Management/Human Resource Management can consider that a great loyalty. Really?

Some says, loyalty is devotion and faithfulness to a cause, country, group, or person. In this case, a company / enterprise. Then, what is a devotion? Merriam-Webster define devotion as "the use of time, money, energy, etc., for a particular purpose", and faithfulness will defined as "steadfast in affection or allegiance (loyalty)".

When we see someone worked for a longest time ever for a company, it doesn't automatically translate into a loyalty. That's what've been bugging me for long time. Well, we often see that a company give rewards for those with great loyalty towards them based on the employee's service period, and it's interesting to see why do they decide on that.

If a devotion is translated into using their time, money, energy, etc., do working 15 years in a company can be automatically considered into using their time? I don't think so. Some of those who are categorized as a loyal employee jsut being there because they don't know where to go, or too engulfed with their comfort zone, with no one disturbing their inner peace. Have you notice that? No creativity, no challenge, no risk taking, no exploration, and no more passion to achieve something higher. Just working for annual targets, with the same approach, with the same routinity, and with the same excuse when things are going wrong.

In my opinion, loyalty can't be evaluate based on service period only. Surely that is some basis for that, but long service period only not enough to prove a loyalty. When you stop challenging a new limit for the company, then you lost your loyalty to the company, along with your faith for yourself that you can do much better and elevate to the next level.

Being a manager for 10 years or more doesn't sound any good for me. Unless your portfolio increase and varied to some extent, I can say that you are stagnated. How can someone achieve a different achievement when all one's do is "business as usual"?

Even someone who only work for a year, can be considered to have a great loyalty if one's do really dedicated all of one's might, resource, and intellectual to do something meaningful to the company, as the company reward him well, the loyalty can turned into a great asset definitely.

Of course, you can argue that loyalty should be tested over time, like a good sword has to be tempered a lot to be strong enough. I agree, the point I'm making here is, don't consider a sword that have been tempered half-baked for a long time in a same category with other that have been tempered with all perfection in slightly shorter time. Even a mass produced knife would perform better than the former one.

It might unjust to observe a loyalty just from an employee side, we must not forget that a loyalty is created by employers, not something that you take for granted. If employer took a good care for their employees, they will reap the benefits of loyalty. I know that some might try to take advantage over that and switch over to competitor for another small payrise, but if you able to plant a loyalty seed in the right employee, why should you worried over those small fry?

Nevertheless, loyalty is something that is getting harder and harder to find in this gen-x and soon to be in optimum productivity ~ millenial generation. As a gen-x, I too faced with lots of peer pressure when it comes to loyalty. Those millenials are even more likely to job-hop than our gen-x generations. It surely will become a great challenge for any companies in the next 5 years on how to retain your best employees. That's where a loyalty factor become super important, for company and employees altogether.

Can you find your company's loyalty factor? (CBA)

In most cases, everyone will tell you, "Don't reinvent the wheel!" to avoid pointless effort on doing something from scratch. It might be true for most cases, but not always.

Sometimes, no, usually, people tend to fall into a routine, doing the same thing over and over in a play called standard operating procedures. Great SOP, of course. Inline with ISO standardizations, acknowledged as a Key Success Indicators for your business and it feels stupid to "Reinvent the Wheel", right?

Some of you might already guess what I want to talk about. I think most of you will be smarter than me actually. But no, I won't talk about innovation, enhancing creativity, think outside the box or something like that. What I want to point is something simpler than that, which some of you might think it's not worth to think about.

For me, sometimes organizations, even individuals need to reinvent the wheel once in a certain amount of time. When you have been using the perfect wheel over and over and over and forever,  there is a huge risk of forgetting why it has to be done in the first place. Example.

"Good morning, thank you for calling Halo XYZ, this is Carter speaking, may I help you?"

That is an example of a standardize phone call answering line. It has been taught to all of XYZ's customer service team and call center team. It is good, polite and clear, and everyone likes it, so why should we reinvent the wheel?

This line is spoken for thousands of time for a month, nothing goes wrong, except one. Some of the call center attendants begin to think of this as a routine, they lost the essence of the line. Which is to exercise empathy towards the customer, and an eagerness to make the customer feel better from their service. They forgot to smile when receiving calls, they only focused on their target, how many calls do they have to answer, how much sales they have to make, etc.

If that happens, please, reinvent the wheel for them. Reinvent the reason why we need the wheel? What is the purpose of the wheel? How a wheel should be? Why there are certain parts inside the wheel? Is this wheel is still contextually relevant with today's requirements?

When we practice certain things over and over, we tend to act ignorant about that particular thing. We forgot to ask why should I do this, and start doing an "auto-pilot" just because it should have been done in the first place. For me, doing something without a cause is worse than not doing anything. I can compare a business that doing something without a cause with someone who doesn't know why he/she has been born all this time. Pointless. From what I've learned and experienced, this applies to everything that we do, in every aspect of our life, business, and relationships.

Don't feel stupid with reinventing the wheel when it has to be done, being ignorant is the true stupidity in one's life. Keep asking, what is the purpose of doing certain things before start doing that. If we proved to be smart enough, we might find one or more ways to innovate on how it should be done in regards to efficiency, effectivity, or even just for creativity's sake.

This might be small parts, but small things like this can make us face a wall that can't be jumped, stagnant in the peak with nowhere else to aim, or even worse, trigger a snowball effect that crushes us down unconsciously. Back to basic, reinvent the wheel when it has to be done, shall we? (CBA)

Have you ever been sitting the whole day at your working desk, staring at your computer, doing nothing and hoping that you won't receive anything to do?

Tired of working, no motivations, no vision, but entrapped to a phrase, "those unwilling to work will not get to eat" thing. Spending day by day achieving nothing, do not know any directions to move, and yet refusing to resign from work.

I will not ask whether you are like that or not, but I know some who are like that and suffers from that.

Usually, people will judge that this occurrence is based on your laziness, but I want to try to see from another viewpoint, why are you so unmotivated? For the sake of this thought, let's exclude those who are born lazy.

Needless to say, those who are unmotivated (I prefer to use this word over 'lazy') are underperformed, underachieving, and dragging down the others. What's more? They will get the same monthly salary as those who work diligently (at least until the next pay rise). It's easy to condemn that kind of people, do we?

If a corporate want to try to understand how did this happen, it might prevent these kinds of things to happen. So, why did this happen? In my experience and viewpoint, there are three reasons why employees are unmotivated:

#1 - No Goals
To be honest, corporations, businesses, either small or big ventures, some of them (actually many of them in my opinion) fails to define a goal for their actions or fail to communicate their goals. I know that everyone wants to make a profit in their business, but is that all for it? If a business owner really thinks like that, then he/she certainly has forgotten that those employees have their own life too. Obviously, the majority of human being wants to accomplish something big, something meaningful in their life, and mostly is not related to how much money you make or earn.

#2 - No Care
Those who lead without looking back at their followers bound to have no followers at all. Some of your employees want to take care of, they want to be seen, to be involved, or at least to be asked, "how are you today? anything I could help with?." Just imagine when you have a relationship with someone, and you've been totally ignored, or worse only getting yelled at the things you failed to do, but no praise on what you achieve (no matter how small it is). Pathetic isn't it?

#3 - No Life  
Good service, 24/7, will be great news for your customers or business leaders, but not for your employees. They need to see the world, they need to see what others doing, they need to see that there is more to life than only work. They have their families, obviously, matter more than the job or even the salary. It's the spirit of life that keeps them motivated. Believe me, if your employees have more time to play with their child, they are more than willing to work smarter and do father than anyone else for your business. You don't even need to ask about their loyalty.

We don't need to talk about mentoring, people development, and other complex concepts of management to improve their motivation and work quality. People tend to overlook small and simple things just to overcomplicate the problems.

If you are those who fall into the unmotivated category if you are experiencing this moment for more than 1 year and never try anything to improve the conditions. Please. Do a good deed to move on. It will help you and the company altogether. You might be suited to be an entrepreneur? Maybe there's another door that more suited for you? Sometimes taking a break from doing any job for months could be salvation. Maybe it's time to sort out life priorities and get a breather. Nothing wrong to rearrange one's life rather than hitting a wall over and over again forever.

Why? It's an antithesis, but in my experiences, changing an organization altogether is lots more easier than changing a person. And you know, being different is not always a sin. Just my personal opinion though. (CBA)

Boss : "Apa yang akan Anda lakukan terkait masalah penjualan kita?"
A      : "Saya akan melakukan kegiatan aktivasi dan branding Pak agar angka penjualan bisa ditingkatkan lagi"
B      : "Saya sore ini akan melakukan mass promotion di kompleks perumahan XYZ dan DEF Pak, dimulai dari jam 4 sore, selain itu pada tanggal O bulan P kita akan mengadakan exhibition promo di Mall JKL."

Dari percakapan diatas, manakah yang menurut Anda lebih baik? Si Big Picture Thinker (A) atau si Detail Oriented (B)? Setiap dari kita pasti mudah memerankan salah satu dari aktor diatas sesuai dengan kepribadian kita masing-masing.

Big Picture Thinker umumnya adalah orang yang kreatif, berpikir strategis dan visioner, sedangkan counterpart-nya lebih teliti, terencana dan banyak maunya. Oke, lalu kenapa kita harus membahas hal ini? We already know this, so why these things matters?

Kebanyakan orang memang sudah mengetahui, di sisi mana mereka akan berdiri, sebagian kecil orang yang beruntung, memiliki kemampuan untuk berdiri di tengah garis pembatas keduanya, hal ini secara alami sudah menjadi bagian dari kepribadian Anda sejak lahir. Namun ketika kita semakin maju dalam pekerjaan dan karir, kita dituntut untuk bisa mengerti musuh alami kita dan berteman dengannya, either menumbuhkan kemampuan itu dalam diri kita atau jika beruntung kita bisa menemukan partner yang bisa melengkapi kita.

Melengkapi? Memangnya masalahnya apa sampai harus dilengkapi? I'm fine with being me!. Well, it's quite stubborn of you, isn't it? Bisa dikatakan tidak ada yang salah dengan kedua pribadi tersebut, masing-masing punya kelebihannya sendiri, tapi jika kedua kelebihan tersebut bisa digabungkan, what a force it is.

Seorang pembuat kue yang memiliki kepribadian Big Picture yang kuat mungkin bisa membuat sebuah kue yang lezat karena mengerti kompleksitas rasa yang diinginkan oleh semua konsumennya, namun kue yang lezat bisa menjadi kue yang luar biasa jika ada si Detail Oriented yang memikirkan bagaimana kue tersebut bisa dihias dan dipercantik agar calon pembeli semakin tertarik untuk membeli kue tersebut.

The thing is, kita harus menerima bahwa ada orang-orang di luar sana yang menggunakan pendekatan dan sudut pandang yang berbeda dengan kita, dan hal tersebut bukanlah suatu kesalahan. Dalam buku Start with Why Karangan Simon Sinek, saya mengadaptasikan Big Picture sebagai why personality dan Detail Oriented sebagai how personality (this is not necessarily a direct comparison). Orang-orang Big Picture, umumnya berorientasi why, berpusat pada tujuan dan alasan dari semua yang dilakukan atau akan dilakukan, fokus pada visi, sedangkan orang-orang Detail Oriented akan berfokus pada perjalanannya, bagaimana sebuah tujuan akan dicapai, jalan mana yang akan diambil, apa konsekuensi dari setiap tindakan yang akan diambil, usually about how. Ketika dua pendekatan ini bisa disandingkan, tentu saja hal-hal menakjubkan bisa saja terwujud dari partnership tersebut. Don't want to spoil the book, tapi inilah yang terjadi antara Martin Luther King Jr. dan Ralph Abernathy, Walt Disney dan Roy Oliver Disney, Bill Gates dan Paul Allen, bahkan banyak contoh-contoh lainnya.

Berita baiknya, setiap dari kita sebenarnya memiliki kedua sisi tersebut, hanya saja satu bagian lebih dominan daripada bagian lainnya. Hal ini memungkinkan kita untuk belajar mengerti apa yang dipikirkan oleh counterpart kita, dan apa yang bisa kita lakukan untuk mendukung mereka. Everyone have their own advantages and disadvantages, the point is how to use that to your benefit?

Big picture helps us to determine what should be done and why it has to be done, Detail Oriented will make sure we do that right and deliver the right results. Which one are you anyway? (CBA)

This is my end of year's reflection. We shall welcome 2015 in less than 12 hours here.

Well, we all know that technology evolution is maybe faster than light nowadays, it's not exaggerating though. New technologies are perfected every day, we even lost count of it, I'm sure. But, are those technologies are really capable of replacing people?

Decades ago, we could find more people who can overcome a PC's calculation time in complex math equations, but nowadays, the computer would finish the calculation before you are able to think of it. You could also ask for anything on the internet and "the internet" will be giving you lots of answers.

So, how this could happen? How could a creation surpass the creator? Is it just me, or nobody really thinks about it and just accept reality?

In my opinion, the only reason technology begins to replace humans is because human tends to upgrade the technology more than they upgrade themselves. Technology means to HELP people, not REPLACE people. I know we are more intelligent than our predecessors, I mean, Hey! I even know things that my parents don't know of their age?

The reality is UPGRADING is not the same as UPDATING. Update means to add the information, just to refurbish, renovate, refresh or whatever it is. The upgrade means to promote, increase, elevate, move up, taking us up to the higher level. You could update your Windows XP to the latest update, but you won't overcome the Windows 8, do you know what I mean?

The fact is, more people upgrading their smartphone than upgrading themselves, and sadly sometimes here I am, doing the same things as people do. We keep promoting the technology level, without really promoting our level, and by the time the world realizes that maybe it's too late. We upgrade the artificial intelligence so much that maybe at one time later we already been depending on the AI to make our DECISIONS. It's funny that we hate other people dictating our lives but we often leave those things to make a decision for us.

I don't say that we should leave all the technologies we made and go back to the old days, the evolution of science & technologies are always a good thing I told you, but the idea of depending on the technology to live is just a bit "funny" though for me. For me, it is HARD TO DO a calculation without at least a calculator or maybe an excel sheet in front of me, but it doesn't mean that I CAN'T DO the calculation myself without them. It's a big difference.

I understand that sometimes we are afraid to make mistakes and push all the things to the machine that hardly makes any mistake. But don't forget that making mistakes is the quality that makes a human become human. Well, Adam was made a mistake, so here we are.

Well, this is my and my reflection, it doesn't mean to judge anybody including you. Simple question for us: Shall we keep updating? Or shall we start upgrading? Goodbye 2014, I'm not gonna miss you though, welcome bright 2015, God Bless. (CBA)