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”.