Editor’s Note: Making Your Own Best Place to Work

The most important person in creating your Best Place to Work is almost always the company’s owner or CEO, so choose well when you join an organization. The second most important person is not your immediate supervisor. It’s you.

That’s not as simple as “Attitude Is Everything,” though your attitude plays a huge role. More important is your willingness to take risks and intelligently accept challenges outside your comfort zone.

Staying sheltered within what you do well is safe for the short term, but that’s deceptive. Just as repetitive physical motions lead to injuries, repetitive intellectual motions stifle your creativity and deaden your spirit. You eventually join the walking dead and people avoid you.

If you think your immediate supervisor is more important to creating your own Best Place to Work than yourself, you’re wrong. You have the freedom to “fire” that supervisor. If you become a smart risk-taker, an energetic and positive person, you will be very valuable to the organization. Others will notice, probably even your lousy boss.

More important, other supervisors and companies will want you. That lets you dump an awful supervisor, either by moving within your organization or jumping to another workplace. Even better, you can start your own business and never have another boss again.

If, instead, you hunker down and blame your misery on your supervisor – even if the blame is completely justified – no one else will want you. You will surrender your freedom to fire your boss.

Life has never been fair, but it seems like the modern economy is even less fair than the old one. Today, unless you have a union to protect you, your problems on the job are way down on the “Who cares?” list. While society argues about how to care for the young, the physically disabled and others who are truly needy, no one gives a damn about a disgruntled worker with a crummy boss, except his dog. I wouldn’t even count on the dog, though.

Life’s not fair. Get over it. Build your own Best Place to Work.