Workplace Identity
BUILDING WORKPLACE IDENTITY FOR ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
Be your best, and give your best.
What is brand to a business, identity is for a professional, which makes him stand apart amidst scores that are part of a workplace. The workplaces these days are rife with impersonality, and an individual is best recognized only by his strengths, and in achieving the assigned targets. Our early school days short story reinforces the point of how you can create identity for yourself. In the race, the rabbit lost and the tortoise won. Rabbit exhibited consistently its arrogance and priding on being the fastest runner of all animals. Tortoise exhibited consistency in focus to win, though it was the slowest of all animals. The point I am driving home: Both have presented their identities strongly and consistently. Rabbit after it lost the race, realized that priding on being the fastest will never win him the race.
Before one creates one's own workplace identity, one needs to understand what actually constitutes workplace identity. Workplace identity is your talent, competency, skills set, and your knowledge. It is said, that your work speaks for itself, which may be the resultant of your proven talent, skills set and your knowledge. So, to create workplace identity what needs to be done? Usually, in the organizational process, a professional is hired to meet a specific work requirement, which he has to fulfill diligently. During the course of work, the professional creates for himself a strong identity, and becomes the one-point contact for all matters concerning the tasks which he is good at. But, every workplace identity has a fixed existence period, as the challenges of workplace keep changing, as the nature of jobs to be performed keep changing, which means starting from the scratch, again to rebuild your identity.
Workplace identity has a direct bearing on organizational effectiveness. How is that so? An identity created by a professional through consistent and dedicated work brings into place a sense of security and dependability in the processes that deliver solutions or services to the firms' customers. But, again there are ups and downs in this; as the professional moves from one set of tasks to another, and his earlier tasks handed over to his predecessor, or completely phased out, organizational effectiveness will not be the same as earlier.
How could one establish one's identity at workplace? Especially, this question becomes all the more relevant when a professional is just a start-up, or just joined a firm and started working. Establishing identity depends primarily on two factors, internal and external. When I say internal, I mean that, the individual professional's zeal to learn and excel in workplace. By external, what is meant is that, the boss's or the delegating authority’s discretion in delegating the right tasks to professionals, in which their strengths lay. For this the boss, needs to know in total the strengths and weaknesses of his subordinates. So, only when the internal and external factors work in tandem, than the right avenue for creation and growth of workplace identity, and is sure to result in organizational effectiveness.
Globalization has made the whole world One-Big-Market-Place, with buyers and sellers doing business and reaping benefits irrespective of their nationalities, creed or culture. Internet has made globalization complete, by making information available anywhere, anytime, and ticking businesses 24/7 cutting across geographical and time limitations. In this context, understanding workplace identity is of much greater relevance today then it was yesterday. In the globally competitive arena, the organization which has an effective work processes in place, is sure to be in the forefront of business. But for this, much depends on the organizational leadership initiative to take strong steps, recognize the importance, and nurture workplace identity.
