Instead of quitting the job you dislike, how about ‘job crafting’?
Recently a question came up from a reader who has eight years to go until retirement and was trying to decide whether to stick with an unhappy job that involves a lot of travel or to look for something new.
Perhaps there is some way to remake the job or remake how she thinks about the job, so she can end up feeling more fulfilled. She might do well to look into what is often called “job crafting.”
Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, advocates a “test-and-learn” approach to career management, that is, experimenting with new work interests on a smaller scale, rather than making a sweeping change, very much akin to reshaping one’s current job rather than dumping it for a new one.
Perhaps the reader was thinking of the situation as a binary stay-or-go decision, but should instead try to reshape the job at hand. Job crafting is a term associated with the work of Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behaviour at the Yale School of Management.
It involves focusing on the elements of your job that you can control to steadily reshape your gig. This might mean emphasizing certain tasks over others, or changing the nature and frequency of interaction with particular colleagues. Those might seem like marginal actions, but the idea is they can add up to a more satisfying day-to-day experience.
They can also help you work with your boss to adjust your responsibilities so that they better match your (evolving) skills, says positive psychology coach Gayle Scroggs.
“Work on engagement,” she said. “You want to have a supervisor who cares about you. Say ‘This is how I do my best work, can I do it this way?’” So asking for something like a reduction in work travel can be positioned as something that isn’t just better for you, it’s better for the organization.
Job crafting can sound more like a coping strategy than a plan for moving on — but sometimes that may be appropriate. It can be helpful to frame such changes as something practical and doable, not radical and dramatic.
Scroggs recounted coaching one burned-out client to make her commute more enjoyable, and suggested she invite friends to lunch, for example.
“I focused her on appreciating the positive things,” rather than obsessing over the negatives, Scroggs said. These modest-sounding actions, barely related to work itself, ended up improving the client’s performance and overall comfort with her job.
“Then she told me the bad news,” Scroggs added with a laugh, “which was that she didn’t need me anymore.”