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News Article |
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Are cancer survivors really “opting out” of the workforce by choice? Would more be working if they could? And if they are, is this revolutionary, as some have claimed, or reactionary? There are now more than 10 million cancer survivors in the United States that remain alive more than five years since they were diagnosed and more exponentially every day. In the past year, we have raised a new debate about cancer survivors – what should they be doing with their time and talents. But with the national discussion focused on the relatively few cancer survivors who have accomplished remarkable feats, such as Lance Armstrong or Neil Cavuto, a more important issue is left untouched: What happens when cancer survivors who step off the treadmill – for a matter of months or years – want to go back to work? What chance do they stand of getting anything like their previous jobs or salaries? And why is work so important to a cancer survivor? One way to start thinking about all this is to demolish the false dichotomy between ‘working’ and ‘cancer.’ Anyone who has held down a job while going through cancer treatment notices the similarities between these two so called separate spheres. You’d be surprised by all the transferable skills. The ‘doctor’s office’ and ‘ your office’ aren’t peopled with creatures from two different planets. What works when trying to manage multiple doctors, second and third opinions and lab results from disparate locations often works in the business world – and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Leadership can blossom or be strengthened from the experience of dealing with cancer. And increasingly, that fact is beginning to be acknowledged, by female leaders in particular. I have interviewed nearly 25 successful working cancer survivors, healthcare professionals and a few employers as part of Good Health for Life’s Work/Life Connections Research & Advocacy program. All of them said they had acquired skills from dealing with their cancer that made them better managers, administrators, and diplomats, even CEOs. Cancer treatment, it turns out, is excellent training for leadership, not just in ‘soft’ fields like education or social services but also in the hard-nosed world of business. Anyone who can overcome the fear of the diagnosis, communicate with a bevy of doctors to make sense of their treatment or manage a fractious household trying to cope with cancer can just as readily smooth a boss’s ruffled feathers, motivate a team and survive the most bizarre office crises and intrigues. Ann R., an executive with a national travel company, put it this way: ‘The same lessons you learn to apply once you are diagnosed are probably the same lessons you ought to apply in the business world.’ Ann has two basic rules: 1. No whining; self-pity is the quickest way to defeat, 2. Always remember that the glass is half full; be optimistic about new opportunities each day. My own ‘Aha!’ moment came shortly after my treatment commenced in 2002, when I was busily devouring anything I could read about managing my illness and noticed an uncanny resemblance between this advice and the tips contained in management books I’d read as a business professional and in college. A few months later, I decided to test my hunch that how-to advice for cancer survivors and how-to advice for aspiring business people was the same material packaged differently. I signed up for some seminars sponsored by the Women’s Technology Cluster in San Francisco [http://www.wtc-sf.org/] and soon realized the wealth of similarities. For example, as a cancer survivor, it’s really important to manage stress because the body simply cannot cope with as much of it any more without shutting down. Balancing priorities and managing realistic expectations become proficient skills that once again are easily transferable to the business world. Today’s more confident cancer survivors in the workplace are now realizing that they learned many of their skills while going through their diagnosis and treatment. One of these high achievers, Karen, President of her own firm, summed it up: “I’m a better manager because I’m a cancer survivor, not in spite of being a cancer survivor.” “Get a life,” in other words, may be sound career advice. And learn to see your role as a cancer survivor as a relevant credential in the workplace. In my conversations with working survivors, four categories of transferable skills were mentioned over and over again. The first is multitasking: the ability to keep a dozen balls in the air at once, to focus in the midst of constant distractions and to handle crises with a steady hand. Second is emotional IQ, the ‘people skills’ that are increasingly understood to be part and parcel of every leader’s repertoire. Any good leader, for example, knows what I call ‘how to recognize an insecure employee when you see one’ – that is, has the ability to handle irrational and immature individuals, who are as common in corporations as in kindergartens. The third category of survivor strengths comes under the heading ‘growing human capabilities’ – mentoring techniques that help bring out the best in others. And the fourth is what political scientist Valerie Hudson calls ‘habits of integrity.’ To be done at all well, surviving cancer requires those old-fashioned virtues that are often hard to find in our self-indulgent culture: courage, humility, hope, selflessness and self-mastery. This one is tricky; I don’t think people who are cancer survivors are any more ethical than anyone else. But I know that many survivors are acutely aware that they are role models, often to their frightened children. They get in the habit of accepting tough trade-offs, learning to live with some chaos and giving up the illusion that they can always maintain control. No wonder one cultural psychologist has described cancer survivors coping skills as ‘routine, unexamined heroism.’ This isn’t about glorifying cancer survivors per se or about reconceptualizing leadership as survivorship behavior. It’s just giving credit where credit is due. And it’s good news for any cancer survivor who’s working now or wants to. Of course, it is one thing to say that people who conscientiously survive cancer learn transferable skills and quite another to convince a skeptical employer. If a person is trying to get a job in a traditional company, talking about his or her skills as a cancer survivor could be frightening and intimidating. As one survivor in Florida put it, ‘Can you picture going to an interview and telling them that you have ‘time management and prioritization’ skills because you make arrangements to get to and from all your treatments on time? Or ‘project planning and organizing’ skills because you planned and supervised getting second and third opinions for treatment options? I can just picture the look on the interviewer’s face!’ Right. But the good news is that this is changing. I talked to a mechanic who had been out of the job market for five years, and after a series of inconclusive interviews, he captured the attention of his new boss with a new resume that intelligently listed the skills he had exercised as a cancer survivor, including ‘never pointing out a problem without having a solution’ and ‘infusing an overdeveloped sense of responsibility into every project.’ He got the job. This is how change happens. And it can happen very fast when cancer survivors gain the courage of their convictions and dare to say out loud what they know is true. If you’ve been diagnosed and treated for cancer and survived, you really can handle whatever else life might throw at you.
Louise Stanley is a cancer survivor, founder and executive director of Good Health for Life – a national organization that focuses on helping get cancer survivors back to work through its nonprofit survivorship programs featuring an entrepreneurship and workplace center, economic research, education and advocacy operations. |
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Cancer Survivors & Work Do Mix! by louise Stanley |
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Date: 11/15/04 |
