Creating an Integrated Life Where Work Adds to Life

 

 Response to: What Does Work/Life Balance Mean to You?

My father did a great job with work/life balance by integrating work with life to an extent that most people do not. Instead of the typical what I do for work requires sacrificing "life" he built a life where what he did for work enhanced life. He was a professor and worked for a year in London a year in Singapore and a year in Nigeria. The life experiences that having work and excelling at work to the extent that he could arrange such options provide a much richer life than if he maximized life by restricting his effort in work. We had experiences that are invaluable and extraordinary.

I realize doing this to the extent he did is very difficult. But growing up with it I learned that the idea that you could design the whole life (including everything) to maximize life.  And that it may well be that extra effort at work rather than detracting from the rest of life enhances it. For me the key is to focus on maximizing the whole and within that realizing sometimes there are tradeoff (essentially a zero sum game) but there may well be times when you can design the system of your life to find win win solutions.

I wrote about this on my blog The Aim Should be the Best Life – Not Work v. Life Balance

 Both my brother and I have applied the lessons we learned from that integration of work and life to our lives in ways that made our lives much more meaningful and rewarding.

Intrinsic Motivation and the Danger of Overgeneralization

Comments on Motivation by Kurt Häusler

> You have to pay enough to keep the issue of money off the table

I agree with that sentiment. And I agree we do tend to overgeneralize and discuss management practices without enough attention to local conditions (at the country level, and even smaller geographic level and even very big differences between organizations).

But I strongly disagree with "so intrinsic motivation is of limited utility."

Creating and maintaining workplaces that let people take pride in their job is hugely important. We spend a huge amount of our time and energy at work. Even if we are paid less than we should be it is still important to have work we can be proud of doing. Yes, the issue of low pay also has to be addressed but it isn't an either-or choice.

In fact, by creating systems that let people take pride in their work we take advantage of more of their potential and thus create more value which can make it easier to pay more money. If we instead, decide to reduce the importance of intrinsic motivation in our management systems that is likely to be a mistake. Granted in some places the importance of intrinsic motivation may be so well understood and incorporated that focus should go elsewhere but I question how often organizations are really doing so well on that front they need to reduce that focus in order to focus elsewhere.

Related: Motivation, Rewards, Performance Appraisals and Your Career - Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation - Two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity

Spend More Time Doing What You Do Well

Comment on: Is it Better to Work on Strengths or Weaknesses?

As you say to the extent your weaknesses are things you have to do spending time improving them usually makes sense. I think often the most productive thing is to spend time working on the system to maximize the use of people's strengths and minimize the use of their weaknesses. This often has a big impact without much effort.

And when you do that it is often the magnitude of strengths that makes a big difference. So you can avoid dealing with much of the weaknesses in the team and focus most effort on the strengths. And when you do that my getting even better at x allows the improvement not to just be x * 1.1 but (x * 1.1) + (y * 1.3) + (z * 1.4) - (if say I am now 30% "better" than y at the task and 40% better than z. Obviously it doesn't work so cleanly in the real world but that concept that you can get way more improvement normally by adjusting the way work is done than just by having everyone get less bad at the stuff they really should avoid doing most of the time.

You do also have to pay attention to the long term, so if someone wants to move into supervision but has some weaknesses they need to address and strengths to improve working on that makes sense.

Related: Take Advantage of the Strengths Each Person Brings to Work - Helping Employees Improve
- Many Good Employees Want to Continue to Do Their Current Job Well - Lessons for Managers from Wisconsin and Duke Basketball

A College Degree Isn't an Acceptable Hiring Screen

Comment on: Do You Need a Degree to be Hired to Develop Software?

In all the time I hired developers (about 10 years), I never made a college degree a requirement.

The best developer (who was also much more - designer, coach, architect, program manager...) I ever helped hire didn't have a college degree.

Our company had just hired a new HR person that started "showing their worth" with new rules such as the dictate that all hires must have a college degree. Thankfully our team agreed to hiring him was wise and the CIO decided that dictate was nonsense and we hired the applicant.

I have written about what a great software development team we created.

In addition to a college degree being a lousy hiring screen, so are most of the automated screen poorly designed HR departments use. Years of experience, experience with a list of specific software, keywords listed, etc. are just lazy and poor criteria to use to reject applicants.

Related: Dee Hock on Hiring (2010) - Hiring – Does College Matter? (2007) - Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm (but yours shouldn't be) - The Illusion of Knowledge - Working as a Software Developer

Sustaining Management Improvement Through Personnel Changes

My reply to a comment on Reddit about my interview: Leadership While Viewing the Organization as a System.

So if a new manager is able to mess it up, the system was necessarily weak? Not sure I agree.

Looking at the context the interviewer asked about a new CIO coming in a gutting the management system. I said if they have a strong management system that can't happen. Executives can't just have whims (usually driven by a desire to "make their mark") that throw out the principles used to manage the company if there is actually a strong management system.

Most organizations just float with whatever fads are going on, so in most they can flip flop as new executives come into place.

On the question of new managers making mistakes. Yes, I agree they can. Once again good management systems make a significant effort to bring new managers up to speed. Those management systems reduce the likelihood of failures created by new managers making mistakes. Again, most organizations do a poor job of brining new managers up to speed: Toyota does a good job, the USA military does also, Costco does a good job, I think P&G does (but my information could be outdated). Many others do this well, but the majority of companies do this extremely poorly. That is a serious failure of a management system and I would put more of the blame for those failures on the poor management system, that the managers making mistakes when they were put in a position they shouldn't have been (being made responsible without proper preparation).

Related: Poor Results Should be Addressed by Improving the System Not Blaming Individuals - Management Training Program (2005 Curious Cat post) - Curious Cat Management Improvement Dictionary

Should You Consider a Career in Manufacturing?

My response to this question on LinkedIn

Your Career Advice for Generation Y Adam Zak the Lean Executive Recruiter. Expert helping CEOs & their senior HR leaders recruit the best Lean executives in America.

Imagine your closest friend asks: "My son wants to consider a career in manufacturing. Should I encourage him?" How would you respond? And why?

I don't think generation [whatever you chose] makes any difference.

I do think there is some wisdom in looking forward to see the career prospects if you head down a certain path. The guesses about the future are far from perfect but also far from useless if you have some sense in thinking about the future. The prospects for manufacturing seem perfectly fine to consider such a career in my opinion.

Really for nearly any career I suggest keeping a focus on constantly increasing your skill and ability. And I would rather focus on building up skills that are adaptable to a changing workplace as my prediction is things will continue to change a great deal. Becoming an expert in lean manufacturing is great because that will be valuable in the likely changes in the workplace. Working with technology is likely to continue to grow and grow so building you abilities in that area is great. Growing your ability to work with other people is transferable to any workplace.

Related: Signs You Have a Great Job … or Not - Joy in Work in the Quality Improvement Field - The Benefits of Blogging