I first learnt about the “autopilot syndrome” two decades ago. I was working for a large company as a middle-level manager back then. Learning about this syndrome was a wake-up call. The way I started to look at my work and my contributions significantly shifted thereafter. You become more careful about how you view your job, your progress, your challenges and most importantly how you handle all these.
Finding meaning
Most of us, as professionals, experience this syndrome a few times in our career spanning a few decades. It can set quite early within a few years or after when you have a decade of experience behind. Just to be clear, you are struck by this syndrome when your work has become chasing mindlessly one task after another and at the end of the day, you still feel like you haven’t done anything meaningful. Interestingly, this syndrome is quick to attack those in very secure and safe jobs. You are caught up in doing plenty, but end up feeling empty. Not a great experience to go through, you will agree.
Nobody can escape it
From CEOs to a rookie manager, everyone’s work has two sides to it. One is the novelty side and the other is work, that soon becomes a routine. No job is entirely designed to offer novelty forever. At the same time, a job that is fast turning monotonous, makes people lose their enthusiasm. Given that we all want to add value and be valued for doing so suffers big time with the setting in of the autopilot syndrome.
Looking at it from the way our roles are defined, there are at least 10 aspects that make up for the role to become challenging and interesting. Udai Pareek, father of HR, and a pioneer in making the human resources function an integrated one for deriving maximum value from it has shed a lot of light on this. Interestingly, given the role, we as the role occupants can make ones role effective and valuable by focusing on these 10 aspects. Briefly, they are presented below:
1. Self-Role Integration: This involves ensuring that we have the requisite skills and competencies for the role we are occupying. Distance between the role and our preparedness for the role can be very frustrating
2. Creativity: Exploring opportunity in the role to do things differently, thinking out-of-the-box and looking at innovative solutions to problems will make the role more challenging
3. Proactivity: Taking the initiative when new projects are discussed, choosing to put in extra efforts and walking the extra mile to make things happen for ourselves and others will enrich the role
4. Confrontation: A healthy attitude towards conflicts at work and confronting them with facts and solutions rather than running away will help make the role more vibrant
5. Centrality: A firm belief that our role is critical to the organisation’s success and through our contributions reinforcing that belief is imperative to really positioning the role as being pivotal to business
6. Influence: We enjoy our role when we perceive the role as an opportunity to influence and make things happen. Successful people recognise that influence has nothing to do with the hierarchical authority. It is about learning to persuade and influence without a title and the accompanying position power. In the knowledge era we are living, influencing skills matter much more than positional power.
7. Personal growth: A clear perception that our roles are a source of growth and development is necessary for keeping the autopilot syndrome out of our way. And growth is not necessarily vertical and driven by promotions. We are discussing a sense of learning, and contributing as critical aspects of growth.
8. Inter-role linkage: How do we network with other roles in the organisation? Do we exchange ideas and perceive plenty of scope for discussions? Then, our challenge will be high on the job. If we see isolation and become a victim of it, we suffer the syndrome.
9. Helping relationship: There are two sides to it. We feel comfortable reaching out and seeking help when we need it and we are perceptive and offer help when our colleagues need it. Then, we find our jobs very fulfilling, we find it very boring and even hurting.
10. Superordination: This is the last, but most important of the 10 dimensions of making our roles productive, effective and challenging. When we are able to relate our job to a larger purpose of the organisation, we tend to enjoy our job a lot more.
Managing the auto-pilot syndrome is as much our responsibility as it is our organisation’s. Those of us who build as many of the above dimensions into our role hardly ever suffer from it.
Try giving it a shot and you may never suffer from the syndrome any time in your career.
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