“Most of us want a better way of working,” an anguished colleague wrote recently, “but most of us do not know what a better way of living or working is.” He is not alone, given that over half a million people have come to read my article, “The Ten Happiest Jobs” along with “Think Your Job Is Bad? Try One Of These!”
Since tens of thousands of books have been written on these issues, any short answer is going to sound superficial. But given the widespread interest, here is a short summary of my thinking on these important questions. Important, because after all, what could be more essential than deciding how to live and work?
If we want to a better way of living and working, we need to understand: (1) What is it about our current way of living and working that we don’t like? (2) Can we identify other ways of living and working that would be better?
Why are we unhappy in our work?
I believe that what makes most (big) organizations all around the world so painful is the preoccupation with efficiency and making money (or “outputs” in public sector organizations). In those organizations, which usually profess to have many values, efficiency is the one that tends to win all arguments. This is soul-destroying for all involved, and paradoxically turns out to be not very efficient, that is, it leads to behaviors that end up destroying the organization as well as the people in it.
What is not often realized is that this way of running organizations is quite recent and has only been dominant for the last three decades. Understanding why and how it became dominant is a long story, on which I have written a great deal. Understanding the background is important if you want to know why many people are unhappy in their work- and most surveys indicate about 80 percent are.
The value of efficiency is pervasive. Even conferences focused on improving organizations, such as Agile, Lean or even Stoos, often assume that the efficiency and making money are the dominant values of any organization. Becoming aware of, and shedding, this assumption is one of the first steps to getting to a better way of living and working.
What would be a better way of living and working?
On this, there is an ongoing debate.
One school of thought says: Let’s list the values that we like and try to create organizations that have those values. In my experience, that doesn’t get us very far. We end up with long lists, but no real clarity on why these values are to be preferred over others, or whether organizations run in this way are likely to survive. It mainly leads to confusion. We end up going round and round in circles.
Another school of thought says: Let’s make things more fun for the people doing the work. Engaged employees will lead to better and more profitable organizations, which will make for better living and working. That has been tried for around a hundred years. I believe that the record shows that although this often appears to work for a while, it ends up creating organizations that are not sustainable. The organizations start losing money and hence go out of business, until a preoccupation with efficiency re-emerges. This tends to takes us right back to the way of living and working that we didn’t like, unless we adopt the third approach.
The third school of thought, to which Roger Martin, Fred Reichheld and a growing number of others (including me) belong, is to say: Let’s focus organizations and our working lives on creating delight for others (customers, clients, users). This way of thinking and acting aligns with several thousand years of philosophy (caring for others is at the center of almost all moral philosophy)…
Read More: forbes.com
