Got your own Bacon Number?

(This post by Sridhar Krishnan was originally published in 2013 on the Transcend Talent Transformation Blog.)

Google ‘Rajnikanth Bacon Number’ and here’s what you get:
Rajnikanth's Bacon number is 3

Rajnikanth and Anupam Kher appeared in Uttar Dakshin.
Anupam Kher and Jennifer Lawrence appeared in Silver Linings Playbook.
Jennifer Lawrence and Kevin Bacon appeared in X-Men: First Class.

Based on the theory that any two people on the planet are six or fewer connections apart, the Bacon Number of an actor is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Hollywood star, Kevin Bacon. Indian movie star Rajnikanth is three links removed from Bacon. Kevin Bacon’s own Bacon Number, of course, is zero.

While celebrities have their Bacon Number, working professionals everywhere have their own measures of how well connected they are. Our place in an organisation chart or our proximity to a high profile Executive VP, for example. Deeper immersion in social media has inevitably accentuated our focus on the quantum and quality of our external connections. As in the number of our LinkedIn connections or Twitter followers.

This is understandable. For many of us these are measures of our place in the web of professional relationships around us. After all, no man is an island.

But, while growing our network of external connections and their impact on our professional lives, are we overlooking another equally, if not more, important connection?

How frequently do we pause to examine our connectedness to ourselves? I don’t mean self-connectedness in some metaphysical sense but in a more tangible and pragmatic sense, in a way that matters to working professionals.

To explore what this connectedness feels like, why it matters and how one might achieve it, my starting premise is that one’s professional self has a centre. I contend that this centre is defined most dominantly by two aspects.

Firstly, what type of work activities do I find enjoyable and fulfilling? This is different for different people. I can identify certain types of work that have given me greater satisfaction than others. Any creative task. Any opportunity to solve a worthy problem and learn from it. Any opportunity to be of value to my team members, their work and their careers. And other such work.

Secondly, the centre is also defined by one’s system of beliefs and values. This is harder to characterise. It is not easy to precisely and fully answer the question, “what are my main beliefs and values?” I can think of a few that matter to me. Respect for the individual. Loyalty to my team, my customer and my employer. Personal accountability. Maybe a few more that I’m not able to put my finger on right now.

But even if we’re not able to compile a full list of our convictions, we instinctively know when we act contrary to our beliefs and values in the course of our workplace interactions. And that awareness is a good enough place to start.

For example, if I were to assuage a team member’s anxiety by saying “you’ve got a pretty good shot in the next round of pay hikes and promotions six months from now” when, in fact, I’m not convinced about it myself, I know I’m operating at a distance from my centre.

So what does it mean to be connected to these two parts that make up the centre of our professional selves? And why does it matter? When we operate close to our centre, doing tasks we enjoy and find fulfilling, by staying close to our beliefs, that passage of work is intrinsically more meaningful. The more frequently we are able to do this during the course of a workday, the greater the cumulative sense of fulfilment at the end of the day.

Going back to the Bacon Number metaphor, when I’m operating at or close to my professional centre at any point during my day, my personal equivalent of the Bacon Number is zero. I’m fully connected with my centre. I’m in a state of equilibrium, tethered to a good place.

The more I drift from this centre, the greater my degree of separation from myself. Perhaps because I’m working on a meaningless task or straying too far from my beliefs, these passages of work feel like out-of-body experiences and detract from my sense of fulfilment.

How can one achieve this connectedness to one’s professional centre? For starters here are two recommendations.

1. If you know the types of work that you find the most engaging, try to create room and build these in to your workday. Reality dictates that busy work that feels like chores will come our way every day. But, instead of succumbing entirely to that inevitability, returning frequently and deliberately to work that we find engaging and meaningful keeps us tethered to our centre and improves the probability of having a more fulfilling day in the office.
2. In the situations we manage, the decisions we take and the conversations we have with our teams, customers and bosses, it helps to maintain awareness of when, why and how far we stray from our convictions. Making reasonable compromises to a dearly held belief in the interests of a larger good is acceptable if we are conscious of that choice. It still keeps us anchored to our centre and prevents us from straying too far and too frequently.

Making work meaningful does not have to mean a change of jobs or careers. It is possible to experience cumulative fulfilment at work by being aware of the centre of our professional self and exercising the choice to stay connected with it.

To achieve that, it helps to develop our own internal compass, our personal version of a Bacon Number that tells us how well connected we are to ourselves.