Job Crafting: Love the One You're With
And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, Love the one you’re with.
I often chuckle at this lyric from the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song, but I have to admit, it’s practical advice. Why not start with what you already have? This can be applied to work, when you’re feeling unsatisfied, unmotivated, or just plain stuck. It’s not always practical or easy to change jobs whenever this happens. The market is a bit tight for job seekers in some industries like Tech. And while that doesn’t mean there isn’t a job out there that’s a great fit for you, it might take some time to find it. So before you start looking elsewhere, consider whether it might be possible to change your job into something that you would love more.
How do you currently spend your time at work?
Start by assessing your current situation. What are the tasks that you do, and how much time do you spend? If you’re a visual thinker, this article by organizational behavior and psychology professors Amy Wrezsneiwski, Justin M. Berg, and Jane E. Dutton, describes how to diagram your job with boxes representing each of the tasks that comprise your job, where the size of the box indicates the amount of time you spend on it. Or you could just list them out. Notice what gets most of your attention, energy, and time. What skills do those tasks require? What do you like and dislike about them? Which tasks are motivating, and which ones are draining or exhausting?
The next step is to connect back to your talents and passions.
What are your strengths?
Ashley Stahl, author of You Turn: Get Unstuck, Discover Your Direction, and Design Your Dream Career, summarizes 10 core skill sets as follows:
Innovation - the entrepreneur or creative visionary
Building - bringing mechanical or conceptual ideas to life
Words - the communicator
Motion - using your body
Service - the helper or supporter
Coordination - details, bringing things together
Analysis - research, going deep
Numbers - number crunching
Technology -
Beauty - art, aesthetics
Think of these as your innate talents and your energy. These skillsets can be expressed in different ways depending on the person. Stahl says that most people identify with three of these, and the primary skill set is what matters most. If you are not working in core skill set, you may feel exhausted. It helps to notice where your energy is, your zone of genius. If you’re not sure, ask people close to you two questions: when have they seen you at your best and how does the room change when you walk in? Then consider what skill set you are using during those times. Sometimes we don’t realize our own strengths because we are so used to them that we take them for granted.
If you want to dive deeper into understanding your strengths, CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder) has 34 different themes. You can buy the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, or the older StrengthsFinder 2.0, both about $20, to get an access code for the online assessment (for some reason, buying the assessment directly from Gallup costs two or three times as much as the books). I’ve taken the StrengthsFinder assessment a few times and my most recent top five themes were:
Empathy - sensing other people’s feelings, making them feel understood and valued
Activator - turning thoughts into action (similar to builder), “Just Do It”
Restorative - dealing with problems, making things better
Achiever - busy and productive, initiating and moving things forward
Harmony - seeking consensus and agreement, avoiding conflict
These still resonate for me several years later.
What motivates you?
Stahl talks about 10 different motivators
Meaning - spiritual purpose/mission
Optimal health - physical wellness
Time - freedom or flexibility, control of your time
Impact - changing the world, making a difference
Visibility - prestige or recognition
Accomplishment - completion, checking off the boxes
Training - learning as you do
Ease - comfort, or avoidance of pain, shame, fear, or anxiety
Spending - money
Self-expression - bringing emotion or ideas to life
These are the things that motivate you when you’re feeling inspired, or can help when your confidence is low. My top motivators are accomplishment, impact, and health, and as of late, training and self-expression are also in the mix.
Along with your strengths and motivators, knowing your Core Values can help to identify your passion. Now comes the fun part of job crafting.
How can you incorporate more of your strengths and motivators?
What changes would increase your engagement at work? This is when you start to redefine your job, adding your own personal touches. How could you reallocate your time, energy, and attention to incorporate more of your motives, strengths, and passions? Professor Wrzesniewski and colleagues cite three core aspects of work that you can alter:
Tasks - taking on more or fewer tasks, expanding or reducing your scope, changing how the tasks are performed
Relationships - the nature or extend of your interactions with others
Perception/Cognitive - reframing certain aspects of your job or your job as a whole
With these in mind, make a plan to reconfigure your list of projects so you can incorporate your goals. I’ve been inspired by this story of a university hospital cleaning crew who found more meaning in their work through job crafting ever since I first heard it several years ago. The video also covers how organizations can support job crafting for its employees. During a time when I wasn’t finding a lot of meaning in the projects I was working on, I leaned more heavily into mentoring and other pursuits that filled the gaps for me.
It can also help to look outward, considering other people. How does the time you spend on various activities at work benefit the people you serve? Who can, does, or will eventually benefit from your efforts? Go as far as listing actual names if possible to make it more concrete, and if needed, get to know more about them. This reminds me of a practice in user experience (UX) design, where you specify the key user profiles for your product and outline their critical user journeys.
Finally, your job crafting efforts are more likely to succeed if you have support from others. Focus on an organizational or individual strength that will create value for others. Build trust with others, like your supervisor or manager, by getting your tasks done and ensuring the changes you want to make will advance business priorities. Lastly, direct your effort toward the people who are most likely to be open to your ideas.
With job crafting, you’ll soon be able to sing a new version of the old song:
And if you can’t get the job you love, honey, craft the one you got.
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