Your Job Is a Tire on a Car

What do you do when you have been fired unjustly from your job? In your mind and opinion it was not fair. There are a couple of situations where being let go left you with this impression:

• A co-worker or several co-workers did not like you.
• Your boss did not pay close attention to your performance to know you were doing a great job.
• Management received complaints about you and you do not know who said it or what was said.
• Your boss and co-workers did not give you adequate training.

Situations outlined above can put your job in jeopardy and you can be caught off guard with a sudden dismissal for no clear reason.

The bottom line: Sometimes being fired from your job is not about your skill set or personal performance. Sometimes you are let go because you do not fit in or get along with the team. It doesn’t matter that those opinions are subjective unless you have grounds for clear discrimination.

Let me explain why.

How you get along with your co-workers, boss and the rest of the organization has a direct impact on your performance and your co-worker’s performance.

Here’s another way of thinking about it.

Let’s say you have a car with a brand new set of tires. After about a year, one of the tires starts to develop a slow leak. You notice it and put some air in it. A few weeks later, the tire is still losing air. The rest of the tires are good, but they have to work harder to keep your car moving because of the tire losing air.

You take your car to a garage and they tell you that you have a couple of choices: 1) try to plug the tire and see if it is fixed or 2) replace the tire and keep driving without issues. The garage recommends the second option because they believe the first option is a stopgap and that the other tires will continue to be stressed – possibly resulting in replacing all the tires.

The choice is yours. In a perfect world where money is not a factor in the decision, you opt for replacing the tire.

Now before you get mad about being compared to a tire, the analogy is about one part (you) of a large system (the organization) not functioning well with the other parts of a system. If what you do causes significant inefficiency or bumpiness, you may be let go or fired.

The most important thing to do is figure out how you fit in, how you contribute and get ahead without making the system or organization reject you. When you figure that out and integrate into your organization successfully, your career will advance naturally.