What if you could design your workday to be filled with much more of what you love? Well, you can, says Charlotte Blair, Gallup Accredited Strengths Coach.
Job crafting is all about doing more of the tasks that give you energy and joy. Here, managers enable employees to customise their roles, allowing them to align tasks, relationships and cognitive aspects with their strengths and motivations.
Unsurprisingly, job crafting has been linked to better performance and intrinsic motivation. And as a result, more companies are crafting roles to fit the people, rather than searching for people to fit the roles.
When employees have the autonomy to design their own jobs, they take greater ownership and responsibility. Amy Wrzesniewski, an award-winning professor at Yale School of Management, has spent 20 years researching how people make meaning of their work. She suggests we think of the crafting in three buckets:
- Task – What, when and how.
- Relational – Who you work with.
- Cognitive – Altering how you think about the tasks.
Play to your strengths
Research by Gallup finds that when people have the chance to do what they do best every day and play to their strengths, they are over six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs. And they are more than three times as likely to report leading happier lives!
The challenge is that not everybody knows what their strengths are. This is where assessments like CliftonStrengths can help individuals discover their unique fortes.
Trash and treasure
In a team meeting several years ago as a newcomer in a consulting firm, I was assigned to peer review some materials. This triggered panic and dread due to my dyslexia. Although I was new, I suggested I might not be the best person for the job and asked if someone wanted to swap.
Sam eagerly volunteered, expressing her love for peer review work. This baffled me – a task that drained me gave her joy!
“Well, would anybody want to pick up my inductions?” asked Joe, half joking and half serious. “I’ll do them; I love inductions”, I piped up.
I am energised by meeting new people and believe strangers are friends I haven’t met yet. One of my CliftonStrengths is WOO, which stands for Winning Others Over. In essence, I am socially courageous, and networking comes naturally to me. I easily break the ice and make connections.
My friend Lisa calls this ‘trash and treasure’. One person’s trash (tasks that drain them) is another’s treasure – a task that energises.
Our team then started ‘job crafting’; working out the things we loved that played to our strengths and exploring the things that drained us. It helped that we all knew our own CliftonStrengths and those of our fellow team members. As tasks and projects came up, we were able to think about who would be best suited and who would be energised and motivated by each one.
So, next time you think of quitting a job that drains you and offers little joy, consider instead how you could redesign the role to suit you…
Charlotte Blair is one of Australia’s longest-established and most experienced Gallup Accredited strengths coaches, working with people across the world to help them discover and use their strengths to meet their goals.
Also read: An agile mindset for EAs | Executive PA Media
