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Is it Smart to Allow Your Job to Involve a Lot of Things You Don't Like Doing?

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Marcus Buckingham gives a good answer to this question in The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success:

Some people will tell you that you need a little difficulty in your life, a little grit; that, as an oyster makes a pearl, this grit will strengthen you, round you out, and polish you into something fine and valuable. No grit, they say, no pearl.

Now, of course, there is a sense in which this is true. Especially in life in general, suffering and difficulty plays a critical role in our sanctification.

But this doesn’t mean we should seek it out for it’s own sake. And, more to the point here, Buckingham is talking specifically about career choices. When it comes to your career, it is not advisable (and, I would argue, it’s not biblical, either) to purposely take a job, or allow responsibilities in your current job to be added, which grate you down.

This can sound irresponsible at first. And, of course, there are times when we just need to do things we don’t prefer for the sake of the greater mission. When it is necessary for the sake of others, we should do whatever needs to be done to serve them and make things better.

But Buckingham is here responding to the idea that it will somehow make us more effective in our work if we intentionally seek out tasks that grate us down — or allow others to impose them on us out of the misguided notion that it will be good for us.

We should be skeptical of this notion, and here’s why:

When it comes to your career, grit will only grind you down. Every minute you invest in an activity that grates on you is a poorly invested minute. It is a minute in which you will learn little and that will leave you weaker and less resilient for the next minute. It is a minute you could have spent applying and refining your strengths, a minute in which you could have taken leaps of learning and that would strengthen you for the minutes to come.

In other words, the notion that taking on tasks that drain you will make you more effective in your work is actually another form of the fallacy that we will grow most by focusing on our weaknesses. For, as I’ve blogged before, your weaknesses aren’t ultimately what you are bad at, but what drains you.

To focus on your strengths means carving out your role such that you are doing on what you do best and what strengthens you most of the time. This is how you will be most effective in your role and for your organization. I think most recognize this; but what is hard for people to see is that this means, by definition, seeking to cut out of our roles the thing that drain us, at least to the greatest extent that we can.

This is not a country club approach to work. I’m not advocating that we slack of and not work hard. Quite the opposite. We ought to work hard, be diligent, and excel in what we do, taking great pains even to do this. And we will be more effective in doing this when we are working in our strengths — the things that energize us — rather than our weaknesses.

Does It Really Matter if You Love Your Job?

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A lot of people say it doesn’t matter much if you love your job. If you do, that’s great — it’s a bonus. But the main purpose of a job is to put food on the table, and actually liking what you do is secondary.

This is actually bad advice. There are lots of reasons, but let me mention just one: if you don’t love your job, you risk being a poor steward.

I’m not talking here about people who have no choice in the matter. In the NT exhortations on work, slaves are the best example here. A slave had little or no control over his work, and Paul said “don’t worry about it — you are serving the Lord in what you do, and he values it and will reward you” (see 1 Corinthians 7:21; Colossians 3:23-24).

But we aren’t slaves, and we do have a choice in our work. This increases our responsibility to choose wisely. And it that choice in what we do for our work is a stewardship.

And here’s how that relates to why you should do your best to seek out a job you love (or, sometimes better, turn your job in to something you love most of the time): you will be more effective in your job if you love it.

We can, of course, work hard in jobs that we don’t love. But the extra effort, the mastery that takes us above and beyond and makes us maximally effective, is fueled by enthusiasm. To the extent that you lack this enthusiasm for the activities of your work, you will be less effective. You will not be able to stretch and push yourself and grow in your knowledge and skill as highly as you could otherwise.

Which means you will not be contributing as much as you could. Which is another way of saying: you won’t be making the difference you could and serving others to the extent that, perhaps, is truly needed. You will be leaving things on the table — things that could have benefited others, and wouldn’t have necessarily required much more from you because, after all, you have to work anyway.

I don’t necessarily want to say here that it is wrong to settle for a job you don’t love. But I do want point out that finding a job you love is not ultimately a matter of serving yourself. It’s a matter of serving others, because you will be more effective for the sake of others if, most of the time, your job is something you love.

Processing Your Work is Part of Your Work

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Very well said by David Allen in his latest newsletter:

Processing your inbox is your work. It’s not something extra you have to do, or some distraction that doesn’t belong in your life…unless of course you feel the same way about your physical mailbox. Like it or not, dealing with all your email is as much a part of your work (and required to do your job as well as you can) as keeping lists, clearing your head, or doing regular reviews. Yet consistently, we come across a resistance people have to driving their inboxes down to zero on a regular basis—as if that’s a luxury reserved for those who don’t get much input or don’t have anything better to do. It’s a critical component for keeping you in a clear, current and creative space to work and play at your best.

Five Ways to Neutralize Your Weaknesses

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Since we are to focus on our strengths, not weaknesses, what should we do about our weaknesses?

The answer is to neutralize them. Marcus Buckingham gives five ways to do this in his helpful resource kit The Truth About You. The resource kit covers a whole lot more than this, but here’s a quick summary of the five ways Buckingham gives to neutralize your weaknesses.

1. Just stop doing it

Some things that we think we need to be doing might not be necessary at all. Originally they may have been, but circumstances and needs have changed — and our thinking just hasn’t caught up yet.

So for some things, ask “do I need to be doing this at all?” And if in doubt, maybe stop doing it for a while and see what happens.

2. Partner up

As Buckingham puts it, “seek out someone who is strengthened by the very thing that weakens you.”

The power of partnering should not be under estimated. In one of his other books, Buckingham points to Bill Gates as  example and points out that “Bill Gates’s true genius, the genius that differentiates him from the masses, lies in his ability to find just the right partner at just the right time.”

In response to those who would say “of course he can find the right partners; he’s Bill Gates,” Buckingham responds: “The causal arrow actually goes the other way. He is ‘Bill Gates’ in part because he had a genius for finding the right partners.” “Whatever your assessment of Gates, when faced with a role that repeatedly calls upon your weaknesses, you would do well to remember that effective partnering is the quiet secret of the successful.”

3. Sharpen your strengths to make your weaknesses irrelevant

This means becoming so effective in your areas of strength that your weaknesses are overwhelmed; they become a non-issue.

He gives Tom Brady as an example here. He writes:

Brady holds the ball very tightly, which makes his passes exceptionally accurate, but it also prevents him from throwing the ball as far as other quarterbacks like John Elway, Brett Favre, or Brady’s predecessor at New England, Drew Bledsoe. Rather than try to transform him into someone he wasn’t, his coaches built their game plan around a series of short passing plays that would demand, and capitalize on, Brady’s awesome accuracy. When he took over from Bledsoe as the Patriots starting quarterback, Brady threw a record 162 passes in a row without an interception.

4. Look at your weakness through one of your strengths

This means finding a way to use your strengths to do the activity that weakens you.

Buckingham gives Rudy Giuliani as one example here. As an attorney, Giuliani was very effective at arguing his cases in court. But when he became mayor of New York, he struggled giving speeches to a roomful of people behind a lectern.

He worked at it and hired a speech coach, but still struggled. Then his coach said to him: “You love arguing. So turn every speech into an argument. Come out from behind the lectern, leave your notes behind, take questions from the crowd, and then walk around where everyone can see you and make your case.”

As Buckingham points out, this worked perfectly and has been Giuliani’s style ever since. “He comes across as comfortable, powerful, authoritative; exactly what a leader should be. He took his weakness — public speaking. He looked at it from the perspective of his strength — arguing. And he neutralized it.”

Buckingham adds:

“And oh, by the way, he has also gradually become better and better at doing regular public speaking. You’ll find this too. You’ll find that when you fall back on one of your strengths, it has a side effect of helping you with your weakness.

5. Suck it up and do it

Sometimes, obviously, this is just what you have to do.

But don’t go here too fast. That’s the mistake most people make — and thus they short circuit better approaches that will make them more effective for everyone.

So treat this as a last resort, and seek to minimize the time you have to spend here so that most of your time can be spent on your strengths.

Seven Thoughts on Time Management from Doug Wilson

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Great thoughts by Doug Wilson.

Here are the seven points:

  1. The point is fruitfulness, not efficiency. [Comment: This point is especially excellent. Very often, the question for optimal efficiency backfires and is actually less efficient. It’s this way in management as well: seek effectiveness, and efficiency often follows. Seek efficiency, and you’ll probably lose both.]
  2. Build a fence around your life, and keep that fence tended.
  3. Perfectionism paralyzes.
  4. Fill in the corners.
  5. Plod.
  6. Take in more than you give out.
  7. Use and reuse.

Read the whole thing.

Church Productivity: Organizational Effectiveness and Not Personal Effectiveness

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This is a guest post by Loren Pinilis. Loren blogs on time stewardship at Life of a Steward.

For a long time, my desire has been to not waste my life. I wanted to do great things for God and to bring him as much glory as possible.

But I was going about it all wrong.

My thinking was refined by Dave Harvey’s Rescuing Ambition and by what Matt has said here on What’s Best Next.

I had an individualistic view of good works. Productivity was all about what I personally could contribute and accomplish. I looked for ways to use my strengths and to follow the callings and burdens that God had given me.

But I’ve realized the New Testament model for effectiveness is strikingly different. Instead, we see God working through his church. We see the passion of the apostles to build up this corporate body. We see God creating, refining, and growing local congregations of believers — and expressing his love to the nations through them.

This should radically change our view of productivity. We shift from a model that focuses on personal effectiveness to one that centers on organizational effectiveness. The most important thing is the team record, not the stats of the players.

This organizational productivity is not about finding fulfillment in our ministry. It’s not about making sure our gifts are utilized to the fullest. It’s about what’s best for the church.

There is a relationship between personal effectiveness and organizational effectiveness. God did, after all, give us strengths and gifts that he intends for us to steward well. But when spiritual gifts are discussed in the Bible, it’s in the context of the church. These gifts are given so that we join with others who have complementary strengths – and together we build up the church, serve the needs of others, and fulfill the Great Commission.

The danger, however, is when the church becomes merely a vehicle for us to pursue our personal ministry goals. In the desire to maximize our own individual productivity, we end up devaluing the local church. Instead of the church being a functioning body, it becomes some Frankenstein’s monster of individual parts sewn together.

I like the way Dave Harvey puts it: “The church shouldn’t merely accommodate our ministry; it should help define it according to the present needs of the church. This means if you have a burden for adult education but the church needs someone to teach kids, then grab the milk and cookies and get your lessons ready.”

“Having a heart” for a particular area of ministry is a signpost pointing you to an area where you may be the most productive. Passions are often God’s way of showing you how you can contribute to the greatest organizational effectiveness of the church.

But the performance of the body is the final measure of success — not our fulfillment. Not our individual accomplishments.

If the pursuit of our lives is to bring God glory, let’s make sure we’re doing it in a way that honors him and his body. Let’s do what will help the church the most — asking first “what needs to be done,” rather than simply “what would I like to do.”