I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to “buy” a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don’t work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will—all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.

As a principle-centered person, you try to stand apart from the emotion of the situation and from other factors that would act on you, and evaluate the options. Looking at the balanced whole—the work needs, the family needs, other needs that may be involved and the possible implications of the various alternative decisions—you’ll try to come up with the best solution, taking all factors into consideration.

Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because, urgent or not, they aren’t important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II.

Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management. It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important. It deals with things like building relationships, writing a personal mission statement, long-range planning, exercising, preventive maintenance, preparation—all those things we know we need to do, but somehow seldom get around to doing, because they aren’t urgent.

Habit 5 is powerful because it is right in the middle of your Circle of Influence. Many factors in interdependent situations are in your Circle of Concern—problems, disagreements, circumstances, other people’s behavior. And if you focus your energies out there, you deplete them with little positive results. But you can always seek first to understand. That’s something that’s within your control.

There are many participants in the Harvard Study who held “dream jobs”—from medical

researchers to successful authors to wealthy Wall Street brokers—who were nonetheless unhappy at work. And there are inner-city participants who held “unimportant” or difficult jobs and yet derived much satisfaction and meaning from them. Why? What is the missing piece? In this chapter we focus on one important aspect of work that many of us, regardless of what we do for a living, often overlook: the impact that our relationships at work have on our life. Not only because these relationships are important to our well-being, as we’ve discussed, but also because they’re aspects of our work lives that we have some control over, and that have the potential to improve our daily experience immediately. We may not always get to choose what we do for a living, but making work work for us may be more possible than we think.