Leadership Weekly Digest - The Best in Employee Engagement

About LWD: The goal of this weekly newsletter is to bring to the fore quality articles –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those I follow on Twitter, and/or members of the Employee Engagement Network.

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Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want by by Amy Wrzesniewski, Justin M. Berg, and Jane E. Dutton (Note: This content is available for subsribers of the Harvard Business Review online or print version.)

Does your job really have to suck?

Many people change jobs or even companies to end up in the exact same unfulfilling situation as before, their surroundings have changed, but they are still the same person trying to do the same job the same way, with similar relationships and the same sense of purpose (or lack thereof).

In this article, the authors suggest a technique called ‘job crafting’ which they describe as “redefining your job to incorporate your motives, strengths, and passions. The exercise prompts you to visualize the job, map its elements, and reorganize them to better suit you.”

Their approach suggests:

Cataloguing the tasks you perform in your job, and evaluating how much time you devote to each.
Analyzing the relationships that you have with the superiors, peers and subordinates.
Being clear about the perceptions you have on how the purpose of your job relates to the objectives of the company, and its role in society.

Armed with this information, you can begin the crafting process. Research by these collaborators from Yale, Wharton & Ross (U Michigan) “indicates that employees (at all levels, in all kinds of occupations) who try job crafting often end up more engaged and satisfied with their work lives, achieve higher levels of performance in their organizations, and report greater personal resilience.”

The article provides two concrete examples of this process, where ‘job crafters’ better align with their motives, strengths and passions with:

The time they spend on different tasks, selecting to spend more time on areas that create more emotional reward.
Their perceptions on how their job contributes to work and society, which sometimes requires making changes to their behaviour in the job.
The relationships they maintain and develop within the organization, favouring those with a higher return on investment.

The best thing about this approach is that it can be done by the individual employee, so it can scale easily within an organization, especially if sanctioned by supportive managers. Resources are offered at http://jobcrafting.org, where they offer an inexpensive work book and other resources.

If you are an employee trying to seek support of their own job crafting initiative, the authors suggest using the following three approaches to gain support (all direct quotes, using ‘Fatima’ & ‘Ivan’ from their two article case studies):

Focus on deploying an individual or organizational strength that will create value for others. For instance, Fatima positioned her work to enhance what other teams were doing, while Ivan found a way to help meet the objectives of the Latin America group.
Build trust with others (typically your supervisor). Fatima assured her supervisor that she wouldn’t let tasks slide and that some of her newer tasks could become central to the organization. Ivan was careful to align his efforts with his role, building trust with the head of the Latin America group.
Direct your job-crafting efforts toward the people who are most likely to accommodate you. Fatima reached out to Steve Porter because he was interested in her plans to bring technology into the heart of her job tasks. Ivan realized that his time would be wasted pursuing a toxic relationship and instead focused on a more promising one.

Based on my personal experience with an unstructured job crafting approach, I highly recommend considering evaluating the flexibility of your role, and considering some job crafting. Whether you are desperately clinging to an unrewarding job, or considering an immediate move from your organization, this is a very viable option to improve results for yourself and your employer, and it might just get you to that rewarding job faster!

Why Change Is So Hard: Self-Control Is Exhaustible by Dan Heath

Are you old enough to remember making mixed tapes, or at least mixed CDs? There was an unwritten rule that mixes shouldn’t include the same artist twice, perhaps with exceptions for band members that became solo artists, or collaborators with other bands. Well, I feel like I am breaking one of my unwritten rules by featuring Dan Heath two weeks running. This is the risk you take when regularly reviewing such luminaries as Seth Godin and the Heath brothers; they hit the mark so often! So even after reviewing perhaps 100+ articles in the areas of leadership and engagement for this week’s LWD, this one still rose to the top.

The crux of this article –and accompanying video– is that people have a limited and measurable amount of self-control. Any time a person has to pay conscious attention to their actions, a self-control account balance begins draining that will need time to be replenished. In other words, when you are doing what comes naturally, this self-control balance isn’t drained nearly as quickly, avoiding exhaustion. For example, if you are an introvert, you are going to run out of energy quickly when asked to be an extrovert in front of customers for long periods of time! Since our work focuses on improving performance and engagement by helping individuals identify their intrinsic motivators and talents, this observation really resonated with us. More time spent doing what comes naturally, means more net energy available to individuals and their organizations, and less burn-out.

Dan illustrates the science behind this observations by illustrating a sadistic* study where people were selectively deprived of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies (which they could see & smell), and instead asked to eat radishes. A (no self-)control group was allowed to eat the cookies. Both groups successfully followed direction and only eat what they were told. But when tested on an apparently unrelated activity, their performance varied greatly: the ‘radish group’ gave up on the (impossible) task in 50% of time compared to the control group; this showed a correlation between the self control activity and subsequent discretionary effort. While the radish eaters resisted the temptation to eat the chocolate chip cookies, they drew down on their self-control account, and had less available when asked to perform a task that required more self-control (equating to patience & mental effort).

Or maybe radishes just create a strong need for the bathroom.

*I’ve asked some of my friends involved in research, and they don’t think this study would have made past their ethics boards.

Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work by Alexander Kjerulf

‘Celebrate’ might be a strong word to describe an appropriate reaction to mistakes, especially big ones. My personal view is that the response should lie somewhere between ‘celebrate’ and ‘don’t shoot the messenger’. Mr. Kjerulf (no, I have no idea how to say this), does point out some excellent reasons to create an environment where talking about mistakes is encouraged, and post mortems are conducted without blame:

When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make: When [you] can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, [you]’re more likely to fess up and learn from your mistakes.
You don’ have to waste time on ‘Covering Your Ass’: Huge amounts of time and energy can be wasted in organizations on explaining why the mistakes that do happen are not [your] fault.
When mistakes are celebrated, you strengthen creativity and innovation: “Make mistakes faster”… mistakes are an integral part of doing anything cool and interesting and the sooner you can screw up, the sooner you can learn and move on.
Failure often opens new doors: failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise.
When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes: Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because, people who work under pressure are less effective… resist reporting bad news… [and] close their eyes to signs of trouble.

But perhaps the best reason to read this article, is to find out why Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh isn’t getting any ice cream.