How Do I Improve the Role I Have? (HBR Podcast)

0:00This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new.

0:36It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

1:06I'm Alison Beard and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:18We're doing a special series looking at how to find joy in our work. At a time when a lot of people are feeling burnt out, disengaged, and unhappy in their professional lives, we're explaining, with the help of author Marcus Buckingham, how to change our jobs for the better. We've already talked about the problem of disengagement and how to figure out what makes us happy. Today, we're going to discuss how to shift our jobs so we spend more time doing those things. I've had great managers that have helped to support me in doing those things that I've liked. And I've always been very vocal about saying, hey, I really enjoy this.

1:52Is there more opportunity for me to do this? Or is there an opportunity to do less of this? Maybe there's a way to delegate some of those tasks. I approached my firm with a proposal that I focused more on delivery and supporting sales. We negotiated an agreement and a little over a year ago, I switched to a role where I have a small sales obligation instead of a quite large one. And I support my colleagues and I spend more of my time really building client relationships and uncovering business development opportunities. And it is so much more fun than what I was doing before. Earlier in my career was when I was ready to move on and try something new and started to look at opportunities elsewhere and went into my boss's office and told him about this.

2:42And his response was, we don't want to see you go. What are you interested in doing? And let's see if there's a match between what you want to do and what we need done. And it turns out there was, and we were able to set up an opportunity for me to do that. And so I've tried to offer similar opportunities for folks now that I'm in a leadership capacity. Marcus's book is called Love and Work. Marcus, very happy to have you back again.

3:11Marcus Buckingham:Lovely to be here, Allison.

3:21okay we have decided that we have a few red threads in our job but a lot of other colored threads you know we've made our loved and our loathed lists we've thought a lot about what really makes us happy so what do we do about it how do we make sure that we have more of those red threads and fewer of the other color every day.

3:46Marcus Buckingham:Well, there's something that you can do for yourself and then there's something you can do with other people because obviously work is a place in which there are other people. The first thing just for you is it begins with you changing your mindset toward your own life. So the first thing you start with is going today, intentionally, what are the red threads that I'm going to find today? Just try it. Change your relationship to your morning. You're waking up, you're going, life's trying to show me some red threads today. Where are they and how can I use them, turn them into contribution in some way?

4:20Marcus Buckingham:So to begin with, it begins with intentional attention. That's the first place to start. Second, when you have got vividness, and we talked last time about, does it matter when, who, does it matter why, does it matter where, doesn't matter how, whatever the verb is that's on your I love it when note. Can you find a way to volunteer that for the benefit of the team over and above that which you're doing? Can you find a way that maybe you don't just have 20 % of it that day? Can it be 50 % that day? Can you find some way in which that particular set of red threads is useful for the team more than what it was?

4:57This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once.

5:31So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com.

5:52Marcus Buckingham:As before, can you volunteer it and turn up the dial on it. Third, can you learn some new skill or technique that takes that natural love, appetite, red threadness and turns it into an actual contribution where the team goes, oh my word, that's useful. So if you like communications and you aren't actually in a marketing role, but it's a small team and there's an opportunity for you to think about how you can help and you just have always liked that, that how do we reach people and create an experience for them. Can you learn MailChimp? Can you learn Eloqua? Can you learn particular software or tools that help you take a natural instinct or orientation of yours and turn it into an actual contribution?

6:36Marcus Buckingham:Don't wait for somebody to give you permission because they can't read your mind. Instead, can you take it upon yourself to learn something that elevates a natural love into a contribution? The second thing, of course, is you do have, many of us anyway, a team leader. And the routine and the ritual that you can and you should expect of your team leader is what I would call a check-in, which is really like doing a mini love it, loathe it. But it's every week. And what it sounds like is this. Every week, your team leader and you are going to talk about what you love last week, what you loathe, what are your priorities this week?

7:14Marcus Buckingham:How can that leader help you? The best team leaders, when we run the data on this, if team leaders are checking in with their people every week, in the next three months, engagement goes up 77 % and employee turnover goes down 67%. There's really good data that shows that frequent light touch attention between you and your team leader is massively important in terms of your contribution. But what if you don't have a boss like that? I imagine many people don't have bosses like that, in part because I think people are strapped You had mentioned before that nurse supervisor who has an average of 60 nurses.

7:53That's hard.

7:54Marcus Buckingham:Yeah. That's not just one nurse supervisor. That's the standard span. We call it the span of control, but we should really call it span of attention because that poor nurse supervisor can't give individualized attention to what people love, what they loathe, what they're doing every week. She can't do it or he can't do it. It's too many people. Now, it makes sense on a balance sheet, but it doesn't make sense for humans. So the first thing is, though, for a team member, it has to come from you first. And all you're really saying, all you're saying to your team leader is, could you talk to me for 15 minutes about the next week that's upcoming?

8:29Marcus Buckingham:I want to share with you a bit about what I'm into, what my red threads are for last week or however you want to say it. Well, I got a kick out of last week. If you don't, you're not comfortable with the word love, use joy or use passion or use interest or something. And then here's what I'm focused on this week. That's 15 minutes. That's 10 minutes. Maybe you have a longer conversation because something you bring up prompts a coaching moment from her or him and you got 20 minutes. Okay. All you're asking is you want me to be productive this next week, right? Okay. We got 52 of these weeks. I want to talk to you each week about the next week just so that I can figure out how I can have a week that's actually both productive and nourishing.

9:08Marcus Buckingham:That's what I want. That's what you want. Can you do it under the radar without having that kind of conversation for people who do have absentee bosses or bosses that are too controlling and prescriptive? There, obviously, there's stuff, going back to the 73 % of people who say they have the freedom to maneuver to fit their jobs better. There's a lot of stuff that we need to do ourselves and we can do ourselves. We can identify our red threads. We can put the detail to that in terms of I love it when, and we alone, frankly, can put the detail to that. We can volunteer those. We can learn skills to refine and sharpen those, we can deliberately try to tilt the floor, if you like, to mix my metaphors, so that you're doing more and more of those.

9:52This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments, it's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together shop now at palmolive.com this episode is brought to you by google chrome you think you know a browser but gemini and chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks gemini and chrome is here for it ready to make anything online makes sense?

10:41There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

10:48Marcus Buckingham:You can, you do have that power. Having said that, all the data that I've been aware of these last 25 years shows that you do develop best in response to a human being and often that other human being is a team leader. So if you are working with someone who is controlling, mistrustful, you can try to go up and say, hey, listen, this next week, what are the priorities? How can I help? Can you run some interference for me? This is what I'm thinking about next week in terms of what I could do more of or what I could do less of. You should try that. If you're consistently being shut down, then all of the data that I've seen shows that you will never be as productive or as engaged or as resilient as you could be.

11:27Marcus Buckingham:Your team leader, I'm afraid, is a very important part of your work ecosystem. So you need support in finding those red threats. I mean, not finding them. You need support in shifting to them. Well, yes. Then if you keep getting shut down, then you'll have to make some very practical decisions about where you scavenge next. Because if you're with someone who basically tries to shut you down, there's just no way to sugarcoat that. And you may have to earn the money. There may be no other job for you, although right now, and probably for the next five years, there's going to be more choice perhaps than you've ever had.

12:02Marcus Buckingham:But your team leader is a critical, critical part of the way in which you get to experience joy and passion and nourishment at work. I'm sorry, the data is unequivocal. Yeah. And so you've found these red threads, you're gathering them, you're focusing more of your time on them, but there's still all the other colored threads and all of that work needs to get done. So how do you stop doing stuff that Thank you both, but allow the organization and your team to still function. Well, what's interesting, right, is that if you actually take the steps that we were talking about before, you volunteer.

12:38Marcus Buckingham:Well, first of all, you pay attention to it. You understand the detail of that red thread. You start volunteering, even if it's not in your job description. You volunteer for it. You learn skills that refine it and sharpen it. And over time, what you'll find, I mean, I ran a company, I had 150 odd people, all different teams. and what you do, I promise you, managers want people to step into a space and do more, but they don't read people's minds. So they don't quite know where people are going to give you that discretionary effort. If you're doing all the things I'm just describing, people will start going, ooh, that, whenever I need that, she's the one I turn to, she's the one I turn to, she's the one I turn to.

13:17Marcus Buckingham:And what you'll find is not always, particularly if your manager is controlling and weird, but you'll find the world starts maneuvering you into a place where more and more and more of that very valuable thing is what people start asking you to do, which gives you power, by the way, to turn to your manager or your colleagues and go, listen, if you really want me to do this and this and this, then I don't have time for this and this and this. It doesn't always work out that way, but if you begin to express so much value in terms of your contribution in the area of that which you love, and you've taken your love seriously, then people will start, I promise you, any kind of moderately good team leader will start maneuvering to go, well, we can't have her not do that.

14:00Marcus Buckingham:We need that to the nth degree. It's when you don't take that initiative and when you don't take your loves seriously that you sort of sit back and wait for some manager to come design the perfect job for you. That is never going to happen. But if you take that initiative, the world starts sort of maneuvering itself toward that which you love. Love is attractive. It's a weird magnetic sort of thing. And then in the end, you're going to have many, many occasions where the team will start to go, we need her to do an awful lot more of that. And therefore, we're going to have to take this off her plate.

14:35That's a very optimistic view of teams and organizations. Because in my experience, particularly recently, I think that people have just had the work piled on and don't feel that they have that opportunity to. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

15:15Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? there's no place like chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus offload as much as they would like yes so look try that everything i just said

15:51Marcus Buckingham:it could be optimistic but you look at the best teams that happens a lot so try that first of course if it doesn't actually shake out that way then the opportunity for you exists to use your red threads to give you the nourishment that you need because frankly for most of us and i know this is going to sound a little bit simplistic as I say it, but for most of us, the challenge isn't that we don't have enough time. It's that we don't have enough energy. And so your red threads are powerful because they give you energy. They nourish you. So some people say, well, you should do all the things you hate first so that you're then rewarded by doing the stuff that you love.

16:26Marcus Buckingham:I actually do the opposite. There's a bunch of stuff in my job because I don't love everything that I do, that I do only after I've started off my day. Every day for me, I start off with all my red threads because they give me energy. And then I found I can plow through the stuff that, like, I don't like confrontation. I so don't like confrontation. But if I've done a lot of stuff in the beginning of the day that actually invigorates me, I find I can almost talk to anyone about anything. I'm often called upon to mingle. I hate mingling. It's super stressful for me. Maybe it comes back from when I had a stammer and I couldn't speak, but I hate it and it will never not stress me out.

17:09Marcus Buckingham:So one of the things that you can do is what I can do. I love interviewing people. Well, can you look at some of the stuff that drains you through the lens of that which you love? Whenever I now have to mingle, either remotely or now in the reality of the world, I just take three people that I'm going to meet and I'll just interview them for 20 minutes one after another and that's my mingling. It doesn't always work but you can actually use the power of that which you love to kind of transform some of the other activities that bring you down. I mingle in exactly that same way and I ask so many questions that my husband often apologizes and says I'm sorry she's a journalist.

17:45Marcus Buckingham:Just asking questions and shutting up is a really good way to get through a party. So have you seen people, individuals that you've worked with, you know, in any kind of job, move their existing role so that they have more of those red threads they're focusing on every single day and getting rid of the other ones? Like you've seen this work in practice? All the time. When you actually put the data to this, you can track it through very simple measurements of sentiment. So you could start with a team and ask some very simple questions, which we do all the time. Do I have a chance to use my strengths every day?

18:33Marcus Buckingham:Do I have a chance to do something that I love every day? And you can see data where the person starts off and they're at a 3.2 or a 3.3 or the team in general is at a 3.2 on a scale of one to five. 3.2, 3.3 on those questions. But what I've seen time and time again, you fast forward three months and these numbers move really quickly. You can get teams where that's at a 4.9 or even a 5.0 across the entire team. And it's not like the team's doing different work. It's just that they've had the conversations where somebody went, I lean into this, but I need help here. Somebody else went, I need help here, but I lean into this.

19:10Marcus Buckingham:And lo and behold, the team begins to coalesce around the uniqueness of each person on it. You see it happening all the time and it happens really quickly. Is that for everyone on the totem pole? Can the lowest tier employee do this just as easily as a C-suite executive? It depends on the C-suite executive and it depends on the person lower on the totem pole. We have designed an awful lot of jobs so that the people lowest on the totem pole have less choice. They have less autonomy in what they're doing. Having said that, if you look at retail, if you look at hospitals...

20:10more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

20:40Marcus Buckingham:if you look at warehouse work, if you look at manufacturing work, there has been over the last decade or so, an increasing understanding of the need just in order to get better quality, to have decisions being made as close to the action as possible. What encourages me is there's more and more realization, even just for pragmatic reasons like quality, like safety, to push decision-making down into the team. Well, when you do that, you are actually letting people make more decisions about how they do their work, how they support one another, how they check in with one another. Does that happen as much at senior levels?

21:19Marcus Buckingham:No, probably not. I don't know that for a fact. I actually don't have data that suggests that you only see these big transformations at senior levels. You actually see transitions in teams at all levels. The variable seems to be whether or not there's trust that exists between the team and the team leader, regardless of the level. Where there's trust, then there's individualization. Where there's no trust, there isn't. Is it possible that in a scenario where you don't have a great boss or you don't have a lot of trust, that you can identify these red threads, try to shift a little bit, but the real answer is maybe not quitting your job, but shifting your role, getting a new title such that it's very clear to everyone that you're now going to be focusing on X, Y, and Z, you know, that you do love and not on ABC that you don't.

22:14Marcus Buckingham:Yeah, that's actually, it's a very, once you've scavenged and you found some of these red threads and you volunteered, maybe you're in human resources, but you found that you're always instinctively aware of brand. And every time you go to a conference, you are aware of how the company's branded. And so you keep sending emails about it and you keep sending emails about it. And then eventually somebody goes, you seem to be fixated. I mean, you're in HR for crying out loud, but you seem to be fixated on how we're coming across to our customers. At that point, keep volunteering. But at some juncture, it absolutely makes sense to go, you know what?

22:54Marcus Buckingham:I need to change the role because the role I want to be in, frankly, is I want to be in charge of brand. I want brand to be part of my responsibilities. One of the big changes that we can do is to change jobs from defining them in terms of the steps that are needed to defining them in terms of the outcomes. And so if you're the sort of person who's like, I'm into brand, then putting that and making sure that's put into your title, into your job description, even in terms of what you put on LinkedIn or Indeed or whatever, formalizes it for people. And that kind of symbolism is really, really useful.