I often get clients that come to me complaining about how their job saps their energies and how they find it difficult to get up in the morning and to go to work! One client recently came telling me how badly he wished he’d the opportunity to just chuck up his job and go into the forest to contemplate, and to get away from the harried life that he is forced to endure. He is a senior executive at a well-positioned Silicon Valley high-tech company and is very well paid, even by Silicon Valley standards. I often say that money does not always bring happiness, but happiness will get you the money you need!
One reason most people fail to find joy in what they do is not caused by their job, but by their attitude toward their job and how they chose to view what they do. Chip Conley of joie de Vivre hotel chain that has emerged as one that stands out for superior customer service and as one that made profit even in the recent downturn, talks about how he encourages his employees to find joy in the most demeaning, boring, and repetitive jobs by simply re-framing and renaming what they do. He talks about an immigrant woman who has been on his janitorial staff for over 20 years, because, through his leadership she re-framed her job not as a toilet and bathroom cleaner, but as someone who brings joy to her hotel guests through her superior work! In an industry beset by nearly 100% employee turnover, joie de Vivre experiences less than one tenth of that number, mostly attributed to how Chip has inculcated this spirit of letting his employees find joy in their work.
So, how do you find joy or happiness in what you do?
One approach is identifying an aspect of your job that you do not like to do, but have to do, and then finding happiness in doing it. Although it is easy to make this suggestion, it is much harder to make it practicable. One approach to make it work for you is to find the element(s) that make your job objectionable. If it is the people that make that so, then dealing with those people and redefining what they need to do to get what you want can transform the job calculus. This can involve changing the environment in which this can be made possible. Once again, re-framing the objectionable transforms that curse into a boon.
In my client’s case his job was to get very highly paid scientists and engineers to regularly document their new ideas so that this knowledge could be shared across the entire organization and could be used as a catalyst to increase the company’s knowledge repository. He was unsuccessful in this endeavor because many felt threatened by this knowledge-sharing idea and felt that once their intellectual crown jewels were known outside their circle their company may see them as dispensable. As a result, he was always fighting an uphill battle getting employees to “donate” to this knowledge bank. Once we knew the source of the “curse” in his job, we decided to re-frame that requirement in different terms.
First, we decided to change the system within his organization that required employees to share their generated knowledge. The prevailing system did not have any incentive for people to build the knowledge bank of their creative ideas. One way was to provide a peer-rated knowledge repository that would provide appropriate incentives to those contributing to it. The other was to rank those within the group in how they contributed to this knowledge base and who were the most prolific in their valued contributions. Although this change required management approval and some time to implement it, once in place the entire attitude of those contributing to this knowledge base changed and people felt less threatened to share their knowledge. Although this is still a new initiative, the results so far are positive.
All of this change redefined my client’s job and from the get-go my client was re-energized about leading this change and then overseeing how the knowledge bank would grow. Even in its early stages, my client feels re-energized by how this change has revitalized his interest in the job and how others are seeing him as a guiding light!
Finding happiness in what you do is not the result of external causes; it is mostly the result of your own attitude and creativity in getting others to respond to what you do and what you want from them. Merely by re-framing your need and by providing the environment in which this need can be easily met, you can transform how you derive happiness from your own job. It is that simple!
Good luck!