Working Wounded: Where Will Your Career Be in 10 Years?

March 24, 2006 — -- DEAR WOUNDED: Think back to 1996, the year that Working Wounded made its debut. Ten years (that's 20 years if you worked for a dot-com … or am I the only one who remembers "Internet-time"?). This week I'm going to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly of the last decade at work and what needs to happen to make the next 10 years better than the last 10.

One huge change is how work used to have some degree of predictability. You knew who your competitors were, and you knew the marketplace and the quirks of your coworkers. Now, as they'd say in Jersey, fughettaboutit.

Competitors come at your organization from totally unexpected directions. Every organization I know has had at least one discussion about how either Google or Microsoft is looming on the horizon. The marketplace seems to be on speed with trends coming from nowhere and departing almost as quickly -- it wasn't like this in the case studies in my MBA program.

And finally, most of us are moving from working for organizations to working as a collection of individuals. Ten years ago we would actually learn about the people we worked with in coffee breaks, training sessions and lunches. Today training is done online and we tend to hang at our desks during breaks and lunch. We don't seem to have colleagues anymore, just distant acquaintances.

Then there is technology. I think of it like the old wedding reception dance, the bunny hop (and you thought the macarena was troubling). You remember the bunny hop -- one step forward and two steps back? Sure, technology allows us to do many things faster and more efficiently; until it doesn't. Recently, I had a computer die and it took me more than two weeks to get back to work, even though I had everything backed up on a separate hard drive. The problem was that all of the programs I was using had been updated and they couldn't read my "old" data. Technology, what a time saver.

Sadly, our morale seems to have dropped sharply. The Conference Board, hardly a group of wild-eyed anarchists, did a survey of workers and found that workplace satisfaction had dropped in the last 10 years from 60 percent to 50 percent. And my e-mail reflects this trend -- we're unhappy and getting unhappier.

But the biggest change at work relates to our leaders -- the captains of industry, as they used to be called. Back in 1996, business magazines had glowing articles that treated CEOs like rock stars. Today it seems like "perp walk" is the most common phrase we read in features about corporate leaders.

This generation of business leaders has lost the hearts and minds of the work force. And yet I see little being done to try to get it back. So I'll keep my fingers crossed that in the next decade we'll see a generation of leaders who really lead. But the fault, Dear Brutus, doesn't totally lie with our leaders; we have to do a better job of holding their feet to the fire.

Here's hoping the next 10 years bring us closer together and restore some of our faith in the corner office!

We'd like to hear your strategy for making the next decade better than the last one. I'll give an autographed copy of "Working Wounded: Advice that adds insight to injury" (Warner, 2000) to the best submission. Send your entry, name & address via: http://workingwounded.com or via e-mail: bob@workingwounded.com. Entries must be received by Wednesday, March 29.

Here are the results from a recent workingwounded.com/ABCNews.com online ballot:

How would you rate the job interviewers that you've had during your career?

• Excellent, 20 percent
• Mediocre, 55 percent
• Terrible, 25 percent

Our winning strategy for surviving a merger comes from P.W. in Tacoma, Wash.:
"There is an old saying about mergers: it's impossible to mate two dinosaurs and create a gazelle. And that's been my experience. For all the talk of efficiencies, mergers are confusing and distracting. Money gets wasted, people are copying their resumes on company copy machines and a formerly cohesive workplace becomes every person for themselves. I wish we could see fewer mergers, but I fear that we'll only see more."

Driven to drink…Statistics on drinking at work that will surprise you:

• Workers who admit to drinking during work hours at least once during their career, 22 percent
• Men who admit to drinking at least once during work hours, 30 percent
• Women who admit to drinking at least once during work hours, 19 percent
• Workers who admit to drinking during work hours on a weekly basis, 10 percent

From: DDI / Badbossology.com

Bob Rosner is a best-selling author, speaker and internationally syndicated columnist. His newest best-seller, "Gray Matters: The Workplace Survival Guide" (Wiley, 2004), is a business comic book that trades cynicism for solutions. Ask Bob a question: bob@workingwounded.com or http://graymattersbook.com.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.