Quiet Maverick: How To Secretly Craft A Job You Love

Earlier this week, I met with one of my more junior team members to check in with them and see how things were going.

During our meeting, he told me he was really enjoying his role on the team and he felt the team was making significant progress. But he also confided that he felt he wasn’t being fully leveraged and that he had more to offer. He expressed a desire to have more opportunities to apply his technical skills and contribute even more.

What a brilliant coaching opportunity! There was no way I could pay up the opportunity to engage him in a coaching conversation; those are the best parts of my day.

While I’m obviously not going to go into the details, there’s some insight from the conversation that I’m going to share, as it is a common issue I encounter.

Let’s explore…

Assuming that you’re not working for yourself and that you have a job with a boss, there are two basic approaches you can take with your work.

You can do the work your boss asks you to do. Most supervisors bring lists of ‘things they want done’ to their employees and then expect them to do the work. Depending on the type of job you have and the style of your supervisor, they may ask you to do the work in a certain way, or in other cases, you may have a fair bit of freedom in how you do it. But the idea is that you do the work your supervisor assigns you. That’s the first approach.
The second approach is that you engage in work that no one explicitly asked you to do, but it is something you know needs to be done. It also should be something you know will allow your boss – or even the broader organization – to achieve one or more of their desired outcomes. This approach requires you to understand the pressures your supervisor and your organization are facing and what they’re trying to achieve, as well as being willing to do some work that might not have an immediate and obvious payoff.

You can be a really solid employee by taking the first approach, and if you work hard, you’ll likely deliver quality results. If you are consistent with this approach, you’ll likely have a good relationship with your boss, and they will respect your work. Sounds great, right?

However, there are drawbacks to this approach:

You’re disempowered. You have very little say in the work that you do, even though you might have some influence or control over how you do the work. But you’re stuck with doing the work that gets put on your plate.
You’ll never be an outstanding employee with this approach. The best employees are the ones that help the team and the organization achieve outcomes in ways that might be unexpected. They find new ways of accomplishing team goals, ways to make the team or organization more effective.
You’re constrained in how much impact you can have in the organization. By ‘staying in your lane’ and handling explicitly what you’re asked to do, even if you do it amazingly well, you won’t stand out in the organization.
Most importantly, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to intentionally craft a job that could be great for you.

When you choose to take on work that no one assigned to you, you have a lot of freedom. You already aren’t bound by the same constraints that you usually face, and you can tackle the problem in new and interesting ways. There’s no one breathing down your neck waiting for it, and no one telling you that you must do it in a certain way. You’re free to play and explore, to learn by trying and quietly failing, until you’ve got something worth showing. Once you’ve built something useful, you’ll have picked up new skills along the way, or been able to apply talents you already had in a different way than you usually get to.

That’s both a win for you, and a win for the organization. You’ll have showed an ability to get things done and been able to showcase skills you wouldn’t have gotten to showcase otherwise. You increased your value to the organization. The organization wins as well, as you improved something. That is one of the best ways to make a name for yourself; to improve things around you when you’re not even asked to do so.

That was the conversation I got to have with this team member, and I’m excited to see what they do. I could tell the idea of taking ownership of the work excited them, and they were full of ideas of how they could make things better. It simply hadn’t occurred to them they could take on work that wasn’t directly assigned to them, that they had more freedom than they expected.

Many of you reading this probably do this to some extent already, as you’ve already had some career success. But I still encounter many people that feel boxed in and constrained by their work, and I spend a fair bit of time working with them to understand that often, many of those constraints are self-imposed. Most people working have way more flexibility than they realize, if they can be strategic about how they approach it.

I’m convinced that taking responsibility for crafting your job into something that works for you is one of the major life unlocks. Everything gets better when you can tailor your work into something that allows you to work in a way that aligns with your strengths, personality, and interests.

I encourage you to spend 30 minutes over the next week reflecting on what work you could take on that would be interesting to you and be of benefit to your organization or team, and how you might just start working on it, without asking for permission.

Let me know how you make out!

Quotation that I’ve been pondering

In his incredible essay “How To Do Great Work”, Paul Graham shares this gem:

“When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.“

It is extremely common to not know what to work on next. There are so many interesting things in the world, so many areas one could study, so many ways one can earn money in today’s world. It can be overwhelming. But if you just follow your curiosity, good things happen.

Journal prompt

If you had to choose one or the other: would you rather be interested in your work, or have others be interested in your work? Why? And how might that impact how you approach your work?

Your call to adventure

We explored how helpful it can be to intentionally craft your work into something that works for you. You can either be a victim and keep working in a way that makes you unhappy, or you can take control and design your work life into something that adds to your life, rather than leaves you feeling drained.

I’ve got the tools to help, if you’re ready. But you need to take the first step.

Will you dare to allow yourself to take that first step?

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