Your Job Is Not Your Job

Aligning Your Strengths with Your Role’s Needs

What do a barista, janitor, and CEO have in common?

On the surface, very little. One serves coffee, another takes out trash, and a third runs a company. But if you ask them all the same question, “What is your job?” you may be surprised by their answers. The meaning of their job is so much more than a job title or paycheck. At a deeper level, they share a fundamental human need to find purpose in their work.

This begs the question: What is your job?

Is it about executing tasks at hand or motivating your team to achieve strategic goals? Reducing your purpose to a job description does it a disservice. In this talk, Fred Kofman laid out why your job is not fulfilling a prescribed set of responsibilities but to help your team win.

How can you keep your purpose top of mind?

It’s hard to hold a high-level perspective amid the daily grind. Most folks just follow the incentive systems. With an hourly-paid gig, the incentive is to do a good enough job and maintain good relationships with the employer so the job can last for a long time. If the job has a path to promotion, the incentive is to consistently do the “next level job” so you can get promoted. For companies that do not have an explicit career…