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 ladder, folks will follow the implicit rules and the crowd.

Who makes sure the team plays to win?

It’s the leader’s job to figure out what rules best support their team to win. For example, Netflix has a culture that seeks excellence. Basecamp documents how they build a sustainable business. Google has the “Googley” culture and a clearly defined ladder for performance review. Every team has its own rules. If you don’t know what success looks like, ask your manager and the top performer in the company.

What if your company culture doesn’t motivate you?

You can quit or take ownership of your growth. Feeling frustrated is natural, but at the end of the day, you have to take control of your job satisfaction in a mature way. Some managers will be kind enough to have career conversations with you and help find projects that best match your skillset (or the skills you want to develop). But it’s…