Passions and ProfessionsLeader |
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I was standing in a 10th floor conference room, next to the wine and cheese, having just finished my talk to a group of twenty-something professionals. One approached me. “My colleagues and I?” he said. “We don’t get to talk about the fun stuff very often. Where the world is going. What technology means.
“In this job,” he confided, “we’re getting dumber by the day.”
Dumber by the day. That could be the cheerless motto of millions of workers — and not just the bank teller or burger flipper, but even those with supposedly plum jobs.
Take Bruce Bartlett, deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury under George H.W. Bush. Bartlett’s job was so crushingly boring, he told The Washington Post, that occasionally he would simply leave the office in the afternoon to go to the movies. One day he ran into a senior official in another government department, who happened to be a friend — and who also was going to the movies.
Sure, most everybody, even the twenty-somethings, are thankful just to have a job in today’s recessionary times. Many stay in their jobs because they’re not sure where they would get another one right now. But that doesn’t mean they’re happy.
Does “happy” matter? Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway writes that “earning money [is] the main reason for work”— not finding happiness or meaning. And she’s right that for many people money remains the primary motivator.
But what then to make of Wharton Professor Alex Edmans’ research showing that companies with happier employees generate superior returns to shareholders?1 Perhaps it’s because people are happier in their work when they’re learning and growing. It’s simply more fun when we’re deeply engaged with our role. The poet John Ashberry calls it the “paddle-wheel of days”: getting so absorbed with what we’re doing that one day dovetails into the next.
Thus the correlation between happiness and higher shareholder returns: more engaged workers are happier because they’re learning and growing, which helps them innovate new products, processes and business models, in turn boosting revenue and cost productivity.
But if all this is true, how do people become more engaged with their work? One clue comes from a recent New York Times column exploring how, during the financial crisis, more people realized that, if they were going to have to work more intensely to protect their income, they might as well work at something they find meaningful.
We need, in other words, to find the sweet spot where our talents, passions and roles overlap. That option isn’t open to everybody. But for many of us, I suspect, the question is less “why can’t we?” than “why don’t we?” The answer may combine both imagination and entrepreneurialism.
A friend of mine provoked envy from his peers in 1999 by creating a new role in a big firm involving then-new web-based learning concepts. One of them asked: “why does he get the glamour job when I’m stuck at the client doing training binders?” The answer: because my friend made it happen — and his colleagues did not.
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Lang Davison
Editor at Large