What’s the job you hired your career to be done?

In our society there is a lot riding on your career. Far from just paying the bills, a career needs to provide meaning, status, belonging and happiness – in a word, Fulfilling. The list of required attributes for a career to be classified as fulfilling is a long one:

  • Work that is engaging and intellectually compelling
  • Provides autonomy in how to perform your work
  • Has variety
  • Is meaningful
  • Helps others
  • Allows you to work with supportive colleagues
  • Aligns with your interests and passions
  • Provides a direct connection between effort and reward

Many people are “disengaged” with their work (68% of us, according to the latest Gallup poll) and the solution seems to be focused around finding a more ideal job – one that checks off more of the fulfilling checkboxes.

 

But what if it’s not your career’s fault? What if you’ve “hired” your career to do the wrong job?

 

Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor, has what he calls, “The theory of jobs to be done.” It’s a strategy to help businesses reframe their ideas on how create innovative products:
“When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again. And if it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative.”

 

Is it possible that we’re hiring our careers to do many things it was never designed to do in the first place? How about just picking a job based on what’s in demand? Balance the trade offs between money and time required. Then check off those “becoming fulfilled” boxes with the things our grandparents called families, hobbies, friends and communities.

 

I think the problem with the “disengaged” worker is not their unfulfilling job, it’s actually the modern day curse of having enough time to try to find a meaning to it all. And when an easy answer isn’t forthcoming through shallow inquiry, the job is blamed. You’ve hired your career to do a job it’s not designed to do.

 

 

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