Jobs are people too

“I hate my job.”

“I love my job.”

“I am just getting to know my job.”

“I am tired of my job.”

Right now you could probably voice one (or more, simultaneously?) of these emotional judgments about your current job – if you are lucky enough to have a current job.  If you don’t have a current job, you certainly have emotional judgments about that, too.

I have had at least one of these thoughts, usually two or three of them, about each of my jobs during my career.  And after holding 14 jobs in five industries living and working in seven different countries, that’s a lot of emotion.

We treat jobs like friends and enemies – with much hope, fear, joy or disdain and little analysis, examination or assessment.  We have relationships with our jobs.

Jobs and careers, people and relationships tend to reign supreme in our attentions and our affections, as they should.  Between the ages of 22 and 65 we spend one-third of our waking hours at work, some of us a lot more than that.  And we devote probably the large majority of the remainder of our waking hours managing or enjoying or stressing about relationships.

It’s all about relationships.

Jobs and careers often elicit our sharpest and deepest emotions.  If you have your dream job (lucky you), you love it, you really adore it.  But mostly, of course, you don’t.  Have your dream job.

It’s not only because jobs occupy (as it were) us so much that we treat them with passion or derision.  It’s also because no one seems to get it, how personal this is to me, to you, to us.

Let’s look at what, today, passes for job definition and awareness:

1. The job description.  Replete with dry business-speak and squishy verbs like “coordinate” and “develop”, this document portrays your job as a mechanistic or an administrative or maybe even a bureaucratic series of steps.  So, your job is a process…
2. The job post.  Part self-promotional brag, part enticing come-on, part reverential hero-worship, this wish-listing document portrays your job as a goal, a summit.  So, your job is a target…
3. The job as it appears on your résumé.  I don’t know about yours but most résumés I see have been designed in the ways consultants, coaches and advisors dictate: use keywords, highlight accomplishments, demonstrate mastery, tailor it to match the job you’re after.  So, your job is a keyword…

How might these compare with:

4. What you say about your job at cocktail parties.  Let me guess.  You don’t describe your job as a process, or a target or a keyword – not unless you really, really are uninterested in the charming, captivating, available (!) person you have just met.  You do, I hope, describe your job in terms that you would use to talk about your own personal interests, your perspectives, your preferences, yourself.  Your job, after all, is or should be you.

Almost every important feature of any job today depends on the person holding that job. The utility of any job requires personal performance from the jobholder.   Job and person are pretty much inseparable.

That is, jobs need to be understood, defined and characterized – they need to be profiled – just as extensively, just as expertly, just as sensitively, as people.

Jobs are people too.

This mandate for human-centric job profiling is, happily, easier than it sounds.  It’s easier because the groundwork has been done.  For literally decades consultants and scientists and researchers have profiled and analyzed nearly every job you or I can imagine in terms of the factors that drive performance in that job.

Why did they bother with all of this?  Because every job is different just like every person is different.  A bad creative designer might be a great head of safety at a nuclear power plant.  Michael Jordan wasn’t too bad at basketball but he couldn’t reach the Major Leagues as a baseball player.

Just as you can find out more about yourself and what you contribute by looking at your psychometric profile, you can find out more about how a job contributes by looking carefully at the job profile.

Good Job Profiles, the ones that use what we know (and we know a lot) about the predictors of performance in that job, will concentrate on competencies – the human, behavioral characteristics that confirm: it’s the person who makes the job.

Good Job Profiles will also emphasize the work environment of the job since matching person and work environment, or company culture, has also been shown to be a strong predictor of on-the-job performance.

If we treated jobs a bit more like people, we might all have a better time and better results at work.  We would be “in a great relationship” with our job and career.

We would say much more often “I love my job”.

Psychometric profiling: All about Eve (and Adam)

The words “psychometric profiling” might scare the heck out of most people.  Psycho is a bad start to anything, and isn’t profiling what they do to serial killers? 

Well, maybe, but let’s stay calm.  At Matchpoint Careers, we use psychometrics and we create profiles and nobody’s going crazy here. 

Actually, “psychometric profiling” just names the process of gaining an understanding of what people are like at work: how they behave, what kind of environments enable them to thrive and what skills and capabilities they bring to their jobs. 

Profiling lets us match people and jobs, by looking at the factors that genuinely predict on-the-job performance.  These factors are three:

• 1.       Competencies
• 2.       Context, or preferences
• 3.       Capabilities

What usually makes the most difference in your job performance are your competencies, how you apply your skills and knowledge, how you meet challenges and obstacles, how you act and react at work.  Our assessments focus on competency potential, on the specific combinations of interlocking behaviors that studies have shown best predict performance in a job. 

There is no one competency or set of competencies that fits every job or level, nor is there any single best competency profile.  Don’t try to find one, it doesn’t exist.  Different patterns of behavior work in different jobs and for different people.  That’s why the competency assessments we use draw, at the most detailed level, on 112 specific behavioral components that fit together in many, many times that number of psychometric profiles. 

Face it, you are a complex, rich and interesting person.  There are no simple one-word names, no tags, no labels that adequately represent you.  You are a mix of competencies, probably a unique mix.

Also extremely important in predicting performance is context, your preferences, values, motives and choices in terms of specific jobs, careers and work environments or company cultures.  If you don’t want to do a specific task or job, if you don’t want to toil in certain kinds of company cultures, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad your relevant abilities are.

The third component is capabilities: the skills and knowledge you draw on at work.  Specific capabilities are often useful and sometimes essential for a job.  You don’t want your brain surgeon to have skipped out on scalpel training in medical school, or to have misunderstood the structure of the limbic system.  But the depth of one’s capabilities rarely determines how well that person performs in a job.  The best future surgeons are not always those who graduate with the highest honors and hardly ever those who have memorized the text books. 

In the psychometric profile, capabilities are the baseline, the table stakes for performance at work.

Add all this up and you get a psychometric profile – a picture of you that shows your skills and knowledge to date, the ways in which you behave at work and the kind of setting in which you work most comfortably.  The richness of information in this profile lets us match you very precisely to specific jobs, and gives you deep insights into who you are and how you might progress your career. 

The matching process, the way your distinctly-you profile is lined up against the performance-predicting requirements of individual jobs and specific careers, leads you to the best job for you, even to your dream job.

With psychometric profiling, getting your dream job involves absolutely no nightmares. 

Jobs are like jeans

What makes for a dream job? 

Maybe your dream job is being a chocolate taster, or the body double for the on-screen partner of George Clooney or Beyoncé but, well, I doubt it.  Your dream job shouldn’t be a fantasy exercise; it should be real and realizable. 

Your dream job is the one that’s a great match with your special, unique talents and, especially, your competencies (more on that soon).  The dream job is the one that’s perfectly fitted to you.

We all know how the perfect pair of jeans fit.  They hug us in just the right places, stretch where we need a little extra, reach the right height on our waist and our ankles, make our butts smaller and our legs longer.  Maybe for you it’s Slim Fit, or Classic Fit, or Relaxed Fit.  Whichever it is, it’s the best fit for you.

When you’re wearing the perfect jeans, nobody wows at the jeans.  They wow at you.

Jobs are like jeans.  Get the right one and nobody thinks, What a great job he or she got.  They think, What a great performer he is she is.  And, just like jeans, jobs can be fitted.  Here’s what you can do:

1.         Forget the fripperies.  Nobody cares about seam finishings on jeans.  Or the zipper fastening style.  No amount of concierge services, bring-your-pet-to-work, or enhanced 401K plans can make up for a job that doesn’t play to your strengths.  Don’t sweat the small stuff, or let it distract you from what matters.

2.         Focus on fundamentals.  Lots of very clever and hardworking scientists have gone gray, and made a lot of money, researching what makes the difference in how well people do at work.  Learn from their findings and make your career decisions on the truly relevant factors, the factors that predict performance (and therefore satisfaction, excitement, reward) at work.

3.         Fit the facts.  Don’t try to squeeze into a job two sizes too small, or get lost in one that could envelope three of you.  Know yourself and go for the right size and shape of job for you. 

What are these fundamental factors that predict performance in a job?  How can you separate them from the fripperies? 

There is a lot to say in answer to these questions – we could talk about this subject for hours, and maybe one day we will.  In its details it’s a long story.  After all, it took decades of work on the part of all those very clever and hardworking scientists to get the answers.

Here’s a very short summary of the fundamental factors that predict on-the-job performance:

It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.  Skills, knowledge and education take you only so far.  What really makes the difference between so-so performers and shining stars at work is the way in which they work, their behaviors on the job, their competencies (that word again).  Getting results at work, for most of us, usually requires a great deal more than technical skill or specific knowledge, rarely involves only one right answer, and almost always demands that we work with others.  In other words, how we work predicts performance more accurately – much more accurately, it turns out – than the skills we employ in doing the work.

This statement has been demonstrated scientifically and repeatedly, and matches (reassuringly) with what we all sense and observe.

Of course, every job has different fundamental factors, different behaviors and different specifics required in the way, for example, that the jobholder must work with others.  Further, each of us has a unique combination of talents, traits and preferences that represent an ideal match with some jobs’ factors and represent a disastrous mis-match with other jobs’ factors. 

In my career so far, I think I have done really well at leading companies with complex people-centric solutions and I know I did really badly at staffing a Congressional committee.

Luckily, there are ways to know what combination and level of factors matter in each job, and what kind of person is likely to excel in it.  You can know this.  It’s what we do at Matchpoint Careers, Inc.

Don’t settle for ill-fitting jeans because you really need a new pair of jeans.  Get it right.  The result will be wow.  

Dream jobs and the fifth dimension

What’s your dream job?  Are you confident you even know what it is?

Whatever it is, chances are you aren’t doing it right now.

I can say that with confidence because over half the people employed in America are dissatisfied at work.  One in five has never had a job that felt right.  Only 6% feel they have pursued their dream career.

But being Americans, we don’t just sit there.  We take action; we:

1. Gut it out.  People who do this are the survivors.  They breathe, they exist, they keep their jobs, even if they don’t accomplish much.
2. Gripe.  These are the grumpy water-cooler junkies.  They complain, they rant, they create negative vibes for everyone else and change nothing.
3. Galvanize.  These types pull like-minded people together to, you know, do something.  They’re rabble-rousers, movement-makers.  Too often, their efforts fail, and then they…
4. Go.  These people quit, expecting the next job to be fantastic, a “great opportunity”, “really exciting”.  Eighteen months into the new job, they’re gone again.

Back in the old days, too many of us gutted it out nine-to-five, believing we had no other option.  Or we griped or galvanized.  Today we still, some of us, do those things but having now received bucket-loads of sage advice about taking control of our career, about being in charge of our destiny, we go.  In droves.

If you are an average American, you will have three to five careers in your working life.  If you’re between the ages of 18 and 37, you are likely to change jobs 10 times.  Don’t think you’re immune as you climb that corporate ladder: the average executive job lasts 2.8 years today, down from 3.3 years in 2006.

I have had 14 jobs in my career, by my count, making me gloriously qualified to peer inside the rapid turnover environment in which we all work.

Unless we reverse the trend, by 2017 we’ll all be talking about the absurdly long duration of Congressional terms. Two years in only one job?  Get real.

Of course, changing jobs can bring advantages – breadth of experience, adaptability, increased networking opportunities, and so on.  But all too often people leave because something has gone wrong.  Eight times out of ten it’s the fit between the person and the job.  We find ourselves in jobs that looked great on paper but in practice don’t play to our strengths or give us fulfillment.  Midway through the week, we feel tired rather than energized.  We get antsy, our tempers fray.  We just don’t fit.  In our minds, we start running through those G-options, even while knowing that none of them really works.

How about trying another way?  Try the fifth dimension:

5. Get it right.  Secure the right job, the right career, for your unique mix of talents and preferences.  Find out what your dream job and career would really be.  Know yourself.

It can be done.  We know how to do it, we have the technology, we have the science. More on that, on how you can make it happen, coming soon.