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Chapter Sixteen

ACTION 9
Crafting Meaningful
and Exciting Work

People who Glow are able to craft meaningful and exciting work that stimulates them and others.

Visions and questions are excellent aids to keeping you ahead of the curve and helping you Glow. Mohi’s vision of the innovative company, Ratan Tata’s vision of the one-lakh car, and Johanna’s vision of the creative job agency were all wonderful stimulators of energy—but to sustain energy over the longer term, you also need to be able to design your work and the jobs and projects you do in a way that brings meaning and excitement to you.

Think back to the experience of Harry and Julie in the creation of the chocolate-smelling deodorant spray, recounted in Chapter Nine. The vision was compelling, the questions were exciting, and their initial friendship and conversations sparked the igniting ideas—but to sustain their interest over the longer term, the work they engaged in had to be meaningful and exciting. For Harry and Julie, the work they embarked on really stretched their competence: after all, to encapsulate a chocolate aroma in deodorant form is fiendishly difficult. Our noses are very attuned to what chocolate smells like, so any sense of the artificial will turn people off. Thus the team faced a task that was novel, had few precedents, and would bring challenges that had never been faced before.

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Visions and questions are great initial sparks to ensuring that you Glow, but to remain energized and innovative over a long period of time requires a day-to-day spark. That’s why sparking tasks of the sort that Ratan Tata created are so important.

When the vision is a distant memory and the question begins to fade, tasks are what we do when we come to work in the morning, and they are what we are engaged in when we stay late into the evening; it is the tasks that help us Glow.

Tasks are the parcels of time, activities, and outcomes that define your working life. One of the reasons you Glow is because you are engaged in something that resonates with you. These tasks can be as straightforward as my working with Oriol to design the Hot Spot Chocolates or as complex as creating the one-lakh car. You Glow when you are engaged with tasks that are sufficiently complex that they capture your imagination or sufficiently meaningful that they capture your heart.

Complex Work That Captures Your Imagination

I sometimes wonder whether we underestimate the power of human endeavor and curiosity. How many times have you worked on a task that has been so sanitized, homogenized, and simplified that what you are left with is mind-bogglingly boring? You have been told in detail what to do, a job description has been drawn up and discussed with you, you have been told how to do the work, and you have been given performance evaluations to clarify what the expected outcomes are. At the end, you feel wrung out: where, you cry, is the initiative, the creativity?

You will never be ignited by these homogenized, sanitized tasks. Why? Because you—anyone—can do these tasks with your eyes shut—you can do them in your sleep. These tasks have been chopped up into such small pieces they can never become the sparks that ignite latent energy. You wish you were Glowing, but you feel like an automaton.

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The latent energy that you and others have is much more likely to be sparked if the task you are engaged in is complex, ambiguous, and difficult. The ambiguity resides in the fact that it is not clear at first glance how the task can be performed successfully—you have to work with others to solve the puzzle, and perhaps even persuade volunteers to come and solve the puzzle with you. Thus an ambiguous task demands collaboration and teamwork. Think back to how intensely rewarding this can be and how much potential these moments have to ignite a Hot Spot and make you Glow. I heard this over and over again when talking to people who Glowed:

Meaningful Work That Captures Your Heart

When your questions and visions resonate with your values and beliefs, you Glow, and it shows in your work. When you and others are engaged in a task that resonates with your values and beliefs, you are more likely to Glow.

The one-lakh car Hot Spot remained alight for four years because the task was complex and engaging—but also because this was a task that had meaning for the many hundreds of people who worked on it. Imagine how it felt to be working on a car that you knew your relatives in your home village could use.

Tasks don’t have to be immense or profound for you to find meaning in them. Take my Hot Spot Chocolates story, for example. Designing chocolates for books could hardly be described as meaningful in the greater scheme of things. However, the task created an opportunity for me to Glow because it was meaningful to me personally. Creating Hot Spot Chocolates resonated with my own values and my sense of myself. I guess I see myself as a little creative, somewhat quirky, and a bit eccentric. So the idea of chocolates designed for a book was sufficiently quirky to resonate with my own self-image and values. I hear this same resonance when people talk about tasks in which they have Glowed.

What really strikes me in these comments is that people are personally engaged with something that resonates with them, something that has meaning to them and reflects their personal values.

Meaningful tasks that can ignite latent energy can spring from your self-image, values, and passions—so the meaning comes from inside. Meaning can also emerge from outside of you, through what is meaningful in your context, on the team, or in the company or the community. Tasks are meaningful to you because you can see that through their accomplishment you can make a difference—they have a consequence beyond you.

Not all tasks are meaningful and consequential—and of course, they don’t need to be. In our heart of hearts, we know that many of the tasks we are involved in are important in a rather routine, mundane way but really have very little impact or consequence over the longer term. That’s fine—but remember that these tasks are not the ones that will ignite latent energy, and you will not Glow as you accomplish them. So you need to balance them with tasks that are more meaningful for you.

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One impediment to creating interesting and meaningful work is the conviction that you are so busy, you don’t have time for anything else. If that is so, before you can think about making your work more exciting and meaningful, you may have to clear away some of the debris and face the problem of overdemanding work.

Facing the Problem of Overdemanding Work

Figure 16.1 presents a model for thinking about work that you may find useful as you consider how best to clear away the debris that stops you from working on complex and meaningful tasks. Since most of your work probably involves other people, my suggestion is that you share these ideas with your colleagues and go through the exercises and action points together.

In the figure you can see your work as a core with an outer boundary around it. At the core of the job or the task are the demands and obligations that everyone who does the job or task is obliged to meet. For example, in my job as a professor at London Business School, I am obliged to teach for a certain number of days each year and write a certain number of research articles. It was part of the deal when I took the job. In the actions that follow, you will have an opportunity to review the demands and obligations of your work and make efforts to understand them and possibly reduce them.

FIGURE16.1. A Model of Your Work

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At the very outer limits of the job is a boundary that defines the limits of how you currently do your work. This outer limit could be defined by your current competencies, the resources you have currently available to you, or the time you have. These are the constraints. Last year I realized that one of the constraints I face as a typical baby boomer is that I don’t have technology coursing through my veins in the way my teenage sons do. This was constraining my attempts to extend my work and make it more exciting by building a participative Web-based community around my ideas. So I am currently reducing this constraint by learning to use community-based technology and working with technological people.

Between the innermost core of demands and the outermost boundary of constraints is a space we might call your discretionary time. This is your room for maneuvering, the space you can play in, where you can craft the job any way that you want. You can make it more interesting, more meaningful, more complex, and even more fun. For example, in my own discretionary time, I have spent a significant amount of my time building a virtual movement around the idea of Hot Spots. My contract at London Business School does not oblige me to do this, and I have some (although not all) of the resources to make it happen. It’s in that space I have a lot of fun and excitement and often feel that I am Glowing.

The trick to creating exciting, meaningful work is to increase your discretionary time as much as possible so that you have space for the exciting and the meaningful.

Mapping Demands and Constraints

When Johanna first worked with her colleagues to build the creative agency, she realized that the demands and constraints of the job gave her little discretionary time to take some of the actions that would make her task more exciting and innovative.

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She had attracted a small team—Rajan, José, and Brian—to work with her, and each was as passionate as she was about the creative industry. As they began working together and tackling day-to-day tasks, they implicitly developed a sense of the demands of the job, primarily the following:

• It’s important we dress in a creative way ( being “on brand” is crucial).
• We must allocate time outside the office to meet with and network with creative people. So we should go to gallery openings and art shows to make sure we understand the creative industry.
• When we work with creative clients, our interactions with them must be clear and thoroughly followed up. We don’t want the reputation of being a disorganized bunch of semicreative people.
• We must each interview at least twenty candidates a day if we are to become financially viable.
• We must write up in-depth interview notes and file them on a daily basis.
• We must be in the office by 9 a.m. at the latest.
• We must work from the office at all times.

These all seem to them to be realistic demands. However, as time went on, it became clear to Johanna that the team was beginning to lose energy and Glowing less brightly. The vision was still compelling and the questions were still intriguing, but the people around her were increasingly overburdened with the demands of the work and had little discretionary time to bring their own ideas and inspiration. When Johanna and her team examined the constraints, they found three that severely reduced their opportunity for discretionary time:

• We are constrained by financial resources and must all interview at least twenty candidates a day if we are to become financially viable.
• We are constrained by our competence: we would like to systematize some of the data collection but don’t have the skills to do so.
• We are constrained by having to be in the office from 9 to 5.

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Making Space for Meaning and Excitement

As the team members looked at the demands and constraints of their work, they asked themselves two questions: Are we overspecifying the job demands? And are we overestimating the constraints of the job?

By answering both questions, Johanna and her team were able to redesign their work to provide sufficient discretionary time for reflection and innovation, which in turn made their everyday tasks more meaningful and interesting to them. Let’s look at what they did to make more space for meaning and excitement.

First, they looked at each of the demands of the job and asked themselves whether they really had to meet that demand. This revealed that many of the demands were responses to a major financial constraint, the cost of renting the office. They had taken a short lease on an office in central London, and paying the rent had become a major burden. So they decided to look around town for alternatives and found a shared office space at a fraction of their central London rent. By moving to this shared office, they were able to reduce their financial burden and gained the additional advantage of working with a network of creative people.

Next, they began to question the demand for them to be in the office between the hours of 9 and 5. They realized that many of their potential clients would actually prefer to meet in the evening rather than during the day. So they decided to draw up a team schedule showing when each team member was available for interviews. They also agreed to two mornings of “core time” each week when they would all be present at the office and hence available for meetings and discussion as a team.

Finally, they saw that some of the more mechanistic demands of their job were driven by technological constraints: lack of computer skills. So they agreed that the next person they would bring onto the team would have a background in information technology. Once their new IT colleague was on board, they were able to build a more efficient way of storing interview data and so free up more of their time for actual recruiting and interviewing work.

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By reducing the demands and constraints of their work and increasing their discretionary time, each team member was able to conduct more interesting and more meaningful work, opening the opportunity to Glow. José was able to bring his fascination with the fashion industry into his work by spending time with fashion experts and at design school fashion shows. The close relationship he has built with the fashion community has been great fun for him and paid off for the company, which has become the first port of call when fashion students are job-hunting. Brian was able to bring his excitement about the potential of technology to fruition by building a Web presence that boosted interest in the creative agency.

Actions to take now to create space in your working life

Action 9.1 Mapping demands. Set aside time with your immediate colleagues to make a list of the current demands of the job you do. Take a look at Johanna’s list of demands as a staring point. Remember that demands are the ways of working and the tasks that you believe anyone doing your job would be required to do. Then taking each demand in turn, ask the following questions:

• Is this demand crucial to the performance of the job?
• Have we overspecified this demand?
• What would it take to reduce this demand?

Action 9.2 Mapping constraints. Next, list what you believe are the key constraints of the work—time, money, equipment, skills, and so on. Again, taking each constraint in turn, ask the following questions:

• What impact is this constraint having on my working life?
• Is this a realistic constraint, and what could we do to reduce it?

Creating space at work is best done with strong, trusting relationships within your group and a network of acquaintances outside the group. Creating space is about pushing boundaries, shrinking unhelpful demands, and transforming tasks and relationships into sources of ignition.

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Creating Meaningful and Exciting Work

Now that you and your colleagues have increased your discretionary time, you have space to craft more meaningful and exciting work. Remember that tasks that ignite latent energy have at least one of the following characteristics:

• The work is sufficiently complex to capture your imagination (like the chocolate-smelling deodorant).
• The work has personal meaning and resonates with your values (like the underlying creativity theme in Johanna’s recruitment agency).
• The task has impact—you believe that it will make a difference to you or the company (like Ratan Tata’s one-lakh car).

So as you go about making work more conducive to igniting latent energy, keep each of these in mind. Let’s first take a look at these three possible characteristics of igniting tasks.

Crafting Complex Work That Captures Your Imagination

You Glow when you are engaged in complex work that captures your imagination. Complex work stretches your thinking, pushes the boundaries of your skill, and encourages you to broaden your networks to find solutions. However, there is a limit to whether complex tasks can motivate and sustain you as you Glow. When tasks become too complex for you and your colleagues to perform in a successful and satisfactory way, they become overwhelming and frustrating rather than engaging and exciting. Figure 16.2 provides a simple way to think about the relationship between complexity and frustration. You will Glow when you find that optimal point of complexity at which a task becomes a real force for igniting latent energy and possibly fueling a Hot Spot. Below that optimal point, and the task is too simple to engage and excite you; above that optimal point, and it becomes too complex, more a point of frustration than a point of ignition. You should be focusing on achieving the optimal point.

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FIGURE 16.2 Task Complexity and Ignition

Actions to take now to identify the optimal point of complexity

Action 9.3 Mapping complexity. Think about your work and the tasks you perform. Plot each of these tasks on the complexity graph in Figure 16.2.

• For tasks that are very simple and probably dull, ask yourself whether this is a task that needs to be done. If it does, try to make it as routine as possible.
• For tasks that you are finding too complex, think about ways to remove some aspects of the complexity. Are there other people in your extended network whom you might ask for help? Or is it possible to chunk your work into more manageable parts so that it is not so overwhelmingly complex?
• For tasks that are at optimal complexity, consider whether you can enlarge these tasks and make them more central to your daily life.

Crafting Meaningful Work That Resonates with Your Values

Now you have created more scope in your work, how are you going to make it more meaningful? Your work is meaningful when it resonates with and reflects your personal values. As I have shown, as you learn to Glow, you will consider the role that your values play in your work—as a source of thinking about cooperation and as a way of framing the relationships that will be crucial to you. Here your values act as the core around which you can construct meaningful work. We each have our own unique values, and so what is meaningful for you may not be meaningful to another person. Your challenge is to understand what is valuable for you and to ensure that at least some of those values come through in your work.

Actions to take now to create more meaningful work

Action 9.4 Identifying your work values. First, make a note of the values that are central to your work. You may want to look back to Action 8.3 in Chapter Fifteen, in which you thought about how your friends would describe your values. Following is a list of work values that people often find important; pick the two that have the greatest resonance with you:

• The opportunity to make a real difference to those around me
• To work on something that I believe does good for the world
• Being able to work to a high degree of excellence
• Having a great deal of autonomy to work on what interests me
• Being creative at work
• The opportunity to support others through coaching and mentoring
• The opportunity to create something that I am proud of
• Having friends I can trust
• Stability and lack of stress
• The opportunity to provide for myself and my family

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Action 9.5 Placing your values at the core of meaningful work. Focus on the two values that resonate most deeply with you, and ask yourself these three questions:

• Do these values play a role in my current work?
• What aspects of my work are nearest to them?
• What could I do now to extend those aspects of my work to more fully encompass these values?

Recall how in the creative agency José redefined his work so that he could spend more time at fashion shows. In doing so, José crafted work that was more meaningful to him and that resonated more fully with his work values of creativity.

Crafting Impactful Work That Makes a Difference

You Glow when you believe that the work you do has a positive impact on yourself or others. Think back to the Tata workers and their knowledge that the cars they made would help India’s rural community immensely. Impactful work comes from a vision that engages and excites you and work that resonates with your own values. Impactful work also comes when you understand the effect your work has on others. (Would the workers in the Tata automobile factory have been so motivated and energized if they had no idea what they were building?) To make your work more impactful, you need to build stronger and more feedback-rich relationships with the broad network of people who are influenced by your work. This feedback helps you understand the impact of your work. The feedback may not all be positive, but the positive feedback provides a wonderful opportunity for you to Glow.

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Johanna worked hard to make the work of her team more impactful. One of the ways she did this was by linking the experiences of her clients to the day-to-day experiences of her team. She asked successfully placed candidates to give the team feedback about their experience of the recruitment process. She then made sure that the feedback was shared by everyone. She also asked clients to tell stories about their new jobs. Johanna and the team then posted some of these stories on a bulletin board to remind everyone in the office of the impact their work had on the lives of their clients. So even on the bleakest or most hectic days, team members can read the stories on the wall and be reminded that they are making an important difference in people’s lives.

Actions to take now to create more impactful work

Action 9.6 Understanding and getting closer to your stakeholders. To understand the impact of your work requires that you understand whose lives you are affecting. Think about these three areas of impact, and jot down some notes about the people involved:

• People who supply a service to you and your team
• Your customers and clients
• The wider community that could be affected by your work

Now think about who your stakeholders are and what you can do to make your work with them more meaningful and consequential. Here are three actions you can take:

• Ask them what impact your work has had on them.
• Discuss your hopes and aspirations for your work with them.
• Think of ways to link your work more closely with their needs.

By reaching out into your community, you are better able to create work that is impactful and creates an atmosphere in which you can Glow.

Key Points in Chapter Sixteen
ACTION 9
Crafting Meaningful and Exciting Work

Visions and questions are great energy-igniting sparks that help you Glow, but to remain energized and innovative and keep the flame alive, you need meaningful and exciting work. Tasks are the activities and outcomes that define your working life. One of the reasons you Glow is because you are engaged in doing something that really resonates with you.

Facing the Problem of Overdemanding Work
Often work lacks meaning and excitement because you are overwhelmed by the minutiae of day-to-day demands. So the first stage is to clear some of the debris from your current work and face the problem of overdemanding work.

Action 9.1 Mapping demands

Action 9.2 Mapping constraints

Crafting Complex Work That Resonates Your Imagination
The latent energy that you and others have is much more likely to be sparked if the task you are engaged in at work is complex, ambiguous, and challenging.

Action 9.3 Mapping complexity

Crafting Meaningful Work That Resonates with Your Values
Such work reflects your values and resonates with you.

Action 9.4 Identifying your work values

Action 9.5 Placing your values at the core of meaningful work

Crafting Impactful Work That Makes a Difference
You can see that this work is making a difference in people’s lives and thus has positive consequences beyond yourself.

Action 9.6 Understanding and getting closer to your stakeholders