Tag Archives: Employment

5 Tips For Finding Joy in Your Work

Have you ever met someone who just loved her job? Someone who doesn’t mind working late and regularly starts early? That person that does their work steadfastly and without complaint. I’m not thinking about a rock or movie star. Don’t think of glamorous positions or even high earners. This is about that restaurant server who shows up with a big smile on her face and makes you feel like your family when you’re eating in “her” restaurant. That waiter who thinks there is more to enjoying a meal out then having food served to you.

It’s the couple who clean your office and whistles while they do it. They smile as they go about their work and take on all tasks without hesitation. Although you are in an office building full of people, they know your name. They ask about you and your life. They notice when you go away on holiday and are always willing to stop and chat when they find you working late.

When I start to get cranky and whine about my job, I think of them and what they do. I don’t think of them because I think my job is better, but because they “know” their job is better than mine and they are excellent at it.

I’ve often heard the expression, “your job defines you”, but I think it’s more accurate to say that we define our jobs. We are the ones who decide that the work we are doing is valuable and worth doing well. We determine what it takes to be successful. We decide when we’ve had enough.

I recently heard an interesting discussion about the value of work-life parity. We‘ve all been told, countless times, that it’s important to our health and well-being that we achieve balance. The common perspective is that working long hours or not escaping from work on the weekend isn’t good for you. The idea is that being engaged at work is important to your overall well-being, but don’t be too engaged. Find that balance.

Nigel Marsh, author of “Forty, Fat and Fired” and more recently, Fit, Fifty and Fired Up argues that work-life balance is critical and that it is too important to leave up to employers. Things like dress-down Fridays and flextime mask the essential reality that some jobs or career choices are simply not ever going to be compatible with the demands of having a family and small children.

Marty Nemko, a career coach, makes the case against work-life balance. He asks, is what you’re doing with your time valuable? He argues that the concept that family is primary is only true in terms of the quality time you spend with them. Furthermore, he states that children benefit from having role models who value productivity. He has said that working parents make better role models than stay at home parents.

No matter what perspective you bring, work and life should not be on a teeter-totter. Rather than treating them like competitive teams, see them as a marriage. There has to be a give and take. Consider how much time you spend working. Most people spend more of their waking life engaged in work than they do in anything else. Treating it as if it’s disconnected from your life means you are constantly at war with yourself.

Why wouldn’t we instead strive for the joy of work? Why not decide to look at all the time we spend at work as an opportunity to do something you love. Getting that attitude of joy in our work doesn’t always come naturally. Sometimes it means you have to take steps to bring the joy back or use a few old tricks to get you on track. The following are some of the tricks I use, though to be transparent… I work for myself and I LOVE what I do.

Fake it until you make it

Sometimes you just have to fake yourself out. For anyone who’s done a lot of phone work, you know that even though the person on the other end of the line can’t see you, if you smile, they will hear it in your voice. It seems our brains notice the physical even if our minds don’t mean it. So, be positive. Decide to smile and approach work as if you love it, eventually, you may forget that you were faking it and start loving. This works well in the short term but if the problems are deep, you may need to look to additional solutions. `

Muscle your way through

This approach is essentially about grinning and bearing it until you are past the bit you hate. Sometimes projects come along or times of uncomfortable change and you need to just survive the worst of it. You may not be able to smile your way through or pretend that you’re enjoying it, but if a job is worth having it may be worth the effort of getting through the bad times. This is when you focus forward and think about your long-term vision.

Find a pet project

This approach is really about reminding yourself why you wanted the job in the first place. Look at what it would take to make you happy and engaged and see if you can find a way to introduce that work to what you are doing. Understanding that you can’t always introduce new projects you might want to consider new approaches to doing your job.

Look at your skills

Since you can’t always control the projects you work on or even the approaches you use, consider your skills. Are there basic skills that you can work on to achieve a different level of joy from your work or perhaps a job that will bring you more joy? A writing course, an IT course or perhaps it’s about tweaking your organizational skills.

Take a walk

Sometimes taking a break gives you a new start on your work and you can come back and look at it with fresh eyes. Sometimes a long walk is required, like a good long vacation. If that doesn’t work, consider a one-way walk out the door. There are times when your work simply doesn’t fit you anymore. Just as getting the right cultural fit was important when you were hired it’s important to realize that both you and your organization can change and many incremental changes over time may mean the fit is no longer good enough.

What tricks do you have to keep the love of work present? Is there such a thing as work-life balance and do you even want it?

Communications, Management

Wanted: Communications Goddess

Debra Yearwood 56 Comments

When job descriptions become a communications nightmare.

Chatting with old colleagues, fellow communicators and bloggers on LinkedIn is always good fun and every once in a while I come across something that makes me want to share more widely. In this instance, it started with a series of odd job descriptions that I came across a few months back. In one notable announcement the job description ran for more than three pages…that’s over three pages of required skills and responsibilities. One of my more discerning fellow communicators posted the ad to our LinkedIn group and posed the question, “Who could possibly qualify for this job?”

Wanted Communications Goddess

Many of us read the ad, there are about 163,212 in this particular group, and with some amazement we debated about who had written it. Who could be so clueless? Was there an internal candidate they were trying to protect or avoid? It couldn’t have been written by a human resources professional…we hoped. While we mused over who could have been so silly, more concerning was, who would apply for it? Surely anyone foolish enough, confident enough, delusional or desperate enough would quickly find herself overloaded and overwhelmed. No one thought the individual could exist who had all the skills. The responsibilities were simply too diverse, web master, product marketer, social media strategist and on and on it went. We decided that even if there was someone on the planet who could lay claim to most of the skills, when on earth were they ever going to find the time to put them into play? It made us all wonder about the firm who posted the ad. What on earth would their culture be like?

No Super Heroes Need Apply

The challenge with a bad job description is that it not only means you won’t find who you’re looking for but it also takes a toll on how your organization is perceived. Jobs with ridiculous descriptions or ones that have to be posted multiple times make people think twice about applying. They assume the role was filled and vacated and that begs the question, what happened? If you do manage to find some brave soul to apply then you have to manage their inevitable despondency and disengagement. To add insult to injury, it often takes a long time for the employer to know that it’s the description that has failed and not the employee. In worst-case scenarios employees are fired and replaced several times before someone figures out that they should rethink the job. Most of the time employees figure out pretty quickly that the job simply can’t be done, but coming to that realization and trying to explain it to a boss are two very different things. In some instances the employee throws themselves at the job with great abandon hoping that if they just apply a heroic effort they can make it happen. Burnout will eventually get them and then it’s back to the drawing board.

Noted human resources consultant, Lou Adler explores the job description challenge in various articles on LinkedIn and Inc., as well as, in his book, Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiring to Build Great Teams. Adler suggests that instead of describing a job based on skills, hiring managers should consider what the right candidates would need to do in order to be successful in the job. He argues that when performance is the lens through which a job is viewed, flaws in the description become evident. He also suggests that managers interview departing employees to discover if the job has changed over time. Take a look at this short video.

What do you think? Would you would prefer, to be interviewed on performance or skills? Would you be more responsive to a job description based on skills or performance? Ever come across a job that would take a goddess to perform?

Image courtesy of Gameanna/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Management

Label Blindness – When You Become Trapped By Your Title

Debra Yearwood Leave a comment

Have you ever worked with someone and thought, that guy is brilliant, I wonder where he’ll end up? Only to find out later that the person has been sitting in the same low-level position for years. Have you ever found yourself struggling for recognition and getting no response or acknowledgement of your efforts? It never fails to amaze me when talent goes to waste, so I rarely stay quiet when I see it in play. I have argued with a boss to give one of my reports a raise because they were working well above their pay grade, while poorer performers were making more money. I have suggested to others that they would lose talent if they didn’t do something to acknowledge the contributions of loyal employees.

Sometimes circumstances mean that there simply isn’t a tangible way to thank staff members, either there’s no money, no way to give a promotion or change their title and so while they are verbally thanked, they get no other compensation for their efforts.

Then there are those occasions when a special kind of blindness happens that makes bosses, colleagues and even school systems unable to see a true performance or recognize intelligence. Scott Barry Kaufman speaks about this challenge in his book Ungifted. In it, he explores some of the challenges we face when we place labels on people. What those labels do to our ability to assess intelligence and performance and how we can stifle ourselves by not looking past the label. Labels are handy and they help us to navigate, but they can also blind us to potential and deafen us to cries for help.

Barry challenges traditional intelligence assessment tools and looks at an array of other indicators that emphasize the importance of adaptation to task demands as the essence of intelligent functioning. More importantly for this discussion, he looks at personal goals and passion. These can have a tremendous influence on performance.

When I argued with that old boss to recognize the contribution of a colleague his initial response was, she’s an assistant, she can’t make the same money as an executive assistant. When I asked him to break down the responsibilities of the two titles and demonstrated that not only was my assistant performing similar tasks as an executive assistant, but in fact was performing beyond them he eventually had to relent and give her a raise, but he was reluctant. She was by far more engaged, she enjoyed her work, she was not phased by the more mundane aspects of the job because they were part of the bigger challenge. The same could not be said about her colleagues. In fact, the very behaviours that marked her as superior were spurned by her colleagues as “beneath them”. She easily our performed them. But her title made everyone blind to what the collective impact of her work was. So while titles seem like the least of the things you should worry about, they can have a profound and stifling effect on your career progress.

When labels become the predominant way you assess employee value it is not only limiting for the employee but can be devastating for an organization. To put it bluntly, it’s a morale killer. It sends a message to employees that they need not try if they don’t have the right title. It also gags those with the title who need help. Just as we can develop biases that make it impossible for us to see capacity. We can also create unrealistic expectations because someone has a title, degree or another label. When that person needs additional support, they can feel pressured not to ask for it because expectations are so high.

The real challenge with using titles to define how we see people is that they make it impossible for us to actually see the person. A label reflects a time and place, a specific set of circumstances and their outcome. Labels rarely capture the essence of a person, their will, creativity or drive. When I’m passionate about something and fully engaged, I show a dedication and focus that bears little to no resemblance to me when I’m uninterested or unimpressed.

There are a couple of things that you can do to avoid label blindness.

As an employee:

Learn to speak up for yourself. There are no magic job fairies. It’s up to the employees to ask for that raise, promotion or recognition.
Build the ask into regular negotiations. Set clear goals for yourself with your boss and when you meet them, ask for recognition in a form that suits you. It may seem like a hard thing to do, but it gets easier with time.
If despite your best efforts you’re still not recognized for your contribution then you have a few choices. Accept it, be persistent or move on to another job. Waiting too long rarely pays for itself and can lead to frustration, disappointment and disengagement.

As an employer or supervisor:

Remember that you hire the whole person not just the skills needed for the job that is currently open.
Employee resumes should be reviewed on an annual basis but more importantly, a fair and mutually established performance review with metrics should be used as well. Consider compensation. What can you do to acknowledge good performance?
If they are performing above their grade at your request, you need to acknowledge that work in some way or you will pay the high cost of turnover.

Have you ever had label blindness or been affected by it? What solutions do you find useful?

CommStorm