2010 August

Is Your Job Stuck in ’1984′?

Source: Wikipedia

Complaints from disengaged employees follow a common pattern.

Today I came across this pattern summarized in a work I am sure you have (or had to) read.

After reading an excellent book on North Korea called Nothing to Envy, I was struck by how accurately North Korean society had been described by fictional portrayals of dystopian societies in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I decided to revisit Orwell’s classic.

I came across a passage that sounded surprisingly familiar. It described the ‘Brotherhood’, a group of conspirators who seek to overthrow the government controlled by Big Brother. It served as both a description to a new recruit, and as a warning.* I have emphasized some lines in bold for our discussion:

The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except for an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and you will die. Those are the only results you will ever see. There is no possibility of perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation to generation. In the face of the Thought Police, there is no other way.

Threats of death & torture aside, can you see parallel’s in this description with your worst-ever job? Or maybe you are thinking about your current job? To liberally paraphrase the warning above: “Your motivation must come from within, it is all you are going to have to support you.”

If you are fighting for a cause that resonates at the very root of your being (your own ‘indestructible idea’), the absence of camaraderie, encouragement, help, and achieving clear milestones, may not stop you from continuing to fight. Unfortunately, most jobs (especially the paid kind) don’t meet this level of resonance, because salary is traded for your effort to advance someone else’s cause. As organizations get larger, and the division of labour gets finer, it gets much more difficult to see your contribution to the organization’s goals. This begs the question, is pay enough to ensure motivation?

Usually I close with a recommendation, but I am more curious about your observations & conclusions…

*If you recall the book better than I did, you may recall this isn’t entirely as it seems.

LWD 2010WK33 – Learning About Our Passions

About ‘Leadership Weekly Digest’ (LWD): The goal of this weekly newsletter is to highlight quality articles from the past week –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those we follow on Twitter, and members of the Employee Engagement Network.

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Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow by Craig Dowden

Is your job a calling, career, or just a job? It turns out your perspective on your work has a lot of impact on your level of happiness, and even your income.

For example, of those that consider their work to be ‘a calling’, 81% of them claimed they ‘were always happy at work’, while a mere 9% of those that thought they had a ‘job’ would agree with this statement. While the correlation isn’t that surprising, the 70%+ delta certainly is! Those that consider their job a career land in the middle at 42%.

That few of us (14.5%) claim to have ‘a calling’, and that the corresponding happiness score is so high, is probably explained by the definition used to define ‘a calling’:

A calling – This is the ‘do what you love’ category. People who view their work as a calling jump out of bed in the morning to get to the office. They would continue working, even if they won the lottery. For them, they were ‘born to do this.’ Here are some statements they would agree with: “I enjoy talking about my work to others” and “If I was financially secure, I would continue with my line of work even if I was no longer paid.”

Based on that definition, I am surprised there are 14.5% of people that would call what they do a ‘calling’! That means, that if you think of 20 of your friends, 3 of them would keep doing their job if they won the lottery.

Dr. Dowden then explores the relationship between this level of happiness and income, with the following observation:

The research team found that there was a strong positive relationship between happiness and future wealth, as individuals who were positioned on the very high end of the happiness scale realized, on average, between 8-12 percent higher incomes, when measured in the follow-up period compared to those on the lower end of the scale.

And before we jump into the chicken and egg argument of wealth creating happiness, or happiness creating wealth, the full article details how ‘happiness creating wealth’ was measured independently.

As usual, I am left wondering why people spend so little time finding ‘their calling’; the bulk of people (66%) say they have a ‘career’. Is this yet another example of good being the enemy of great? Maybe the problem is rooted in our education…

Bring on the learning revolution! by Sir Ken Robinson

I wish I could be as funny as Sir Ken Robinson. He has an easy kind of funny, like it comes so naturally he doesn’t even have to try. This is a follow up to his very popular first TED talk “Schools Kill Creativity”. Here is talks about how most people don’t find their passions (or you could say, their calling), and this has a lot to do with our attitudes towards education.

He challenges us to test what we take for granted, like if we should all be striving for college degrees as the first step in our careers. This made me wonder if we should wait until we have learned more about ourselves, and the world, before we choose to spend 4+ years specializing in our chosen field. Too many people invest too much time and money before they have had any way to figure out if they have chosen a path that aligns with their passions. Give it a look, and don’t miss ~12 minutes in where he talks about interviewing for kindergarten:

Live Life as an Experiment by Peter Bregman

So if you haven’t found your passion, how can you go about finding it?

I was first introduced to Peter Bregman’s work through his HBR post on Why Forced Ranking is a Bad Idea, and I have enjoyed his work ever since.

In this post, he explores power relationships by treating interactions as experiments, and may provide a clue to help those trying to discover their passions:

What I learned is the power of framing, of thinking about life as an experiment.

Because when we live life as an experiment, we are far more willing to take risks, to acknowledge failure, to learn and develop. That’s what experiments are all about: discovery and growth. There is no real failure in an experiment because it’s all data. If something doesn’t work, that’s simply data that leads to changing behavior to see if something else does work… If it’s an experiment, then taking a risk is the win — whether it pans out or not.