Your Job Is Not Your Job
When I was reflecting earlier this year on my life and work for the Secret Resume Podcast, I found myself naming the Waking Up the Workplace Interview Series as one of the places where the threads of my career seem to have come together. Not just that, but been inspired, enlarged and expanded.
And ever since I listened to that series about 11 years ago, the work of Fred Kofman has had a big impact on me.
The impact grew as I read his books, attended training and workshops he had created or was speaking at, and began to write.
In some ways, given how relatively little I have engaged with his work… reading his two books, once each. Listening to an interview once. A couple of workshops and one training course… given how relatively little I have engaged with his work it is incredible how it has stuck with me.
I have found myself, many times, returning to his work across the six and a half years of this blog.
Indeed one of the times I did that, in the article It’s Time For You To Die, another part of my Secret Resume, remains my most-read 12-minute article (partly because Kofman shared it himself).
Today, knowing that this week’s blog was coming, I found my mind coming back again and again to one of Kofman’s ideas.
This time, it was a story he tells in The Meaning Revolution. An invocation to remember: your job is not your job.
The clarity with which Kofman explains that in the book makes it a story I have repeated countless times to clients: often acknowledging them for doing a thing that many people struggle with.
In essence, Your Job Is Not Your Job is an idea about honour: about doing the right thing not the thing you are supposed to do.
The idea is this: leading a workshop in a company, Kofman would ask, ‘What is your job?’
The answers will come back. Perhaps a business function: accounts, marketing, sales.
Perhaps a role title: administrator, manager.
But remember: your job is not your job.
Underneath your job, beyond what your tasks are in the day, you have a bigger job.
Your job is to help the team win.
Just like every player on a football team’s job is to help the team win.
And just like in a football team, as long as the defenders think their job is ‘defending’ or the attackers think their job is ‘attacking’, then the team is less than it could be. And less likely to win.
In an organisation, your job is not your job.
Your job is to help the organisation to win, to fulfil its purpose, to succeed in the world. And so is everyone else’s.
The stories clients often tell that elicit the Your Job Is Not Your Job story from me are often about their frustration with others: with those who, for one reason or another, seem either unable to see that alternative action would help the team win, or who can see it but choose not to do that because… it is not their job.
Your Job Is Not Your Job speaks to the higher purpose in our actions.
It speaks to the spirit of the roles we take on, not the letter of them. (And just like with rules, the best time to break a role is when breaking it is more in the spirit of it than sticking to it.)
Your job is not your job.
As a worker, as a team member, as a leader. Your job is not your job.
As a husband, as a wife, as a parent. Your job is not your job.
What if even as a human, your job is not your job?
What if your job is not to be a human, whatever that means?
What if your job is to live in service of something beyond you, of human spirit, helping that spirit help all of us succeed, together?
What then?
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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