Your Life's Work
Know talents, abilities to find your work type
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Bob D. Mcdonald & Don Hutcheson
Mark, 43, dragged himself to work every day. As soon as he hit the office, his assistant handed him a stack of phone messages left over from yesterday. She also usually pressed him for an answer to some problem in one of the field units of the pipeline company where he was a senior manager.
He typically looked at his desk and groaned inwardly. There were at least 10 half-finished projects there and, on most days, he knew he wouldn't even look at any of them.
A string of people would call him, come by his office, stop him in the hall and interrupt him with one problem after another. He would try to answer them, put them off or figure out what to do. Inwardly, he wanted to pull his hair out.
Emmy, 35, worked across the hall from Mark. Also a senior manager in the same company, she was responsible for long-range planning. Her group produced economic forecasts as they related to pipeline use and what that would mean for land purchase, construction, staffing and other variables.
Emmy's job bored her to tears. She had only been in her position about nine months and was ready to quit. She had been quietly finding the names and numbers of headhunters in hopes of landing something a bit more interesting.
Mark and Emmy were both high-performers who had been promoted regularly. Mark had been with the company 13 years. Emmy was a recent hire and a bright star from another utility company. Their boss was entirely satisfied with their performance. But both were quietly going crazy.
Why? There are millions of jobs. There are, however, only a very limited number of work types -- the role people play at work regardless of the job title.
Some work types involve interactions with others -- managing or selling. Some involve kinds of problem solving -- tactical and immediate problem solving, or technical and scientific problem solving.
All work types are formed and defined by a combination of your natural talents and abilities and your personality. Your natural abilities and your personality make some work types easy for you to do and others more difficult.
No matter how well or poorly your natural abilities and personality line up with the work types of your job, they don't tell you if you can or can't do that job. They just tell you how easily you take to it.
Our research shows that when people are in roles that match up with their natural abilities, they are almost always happier and more satisfied. They also are more successful and more productive.
Abilities and personality can't tell you everything, but they are definitely the place to begin. Our experience has been that when people find out about their natural abilities, they make more or less conscious decisions about their roles and tasks at work to better use their talents.
People typically do not make wholesale changes or massive job shifts. Rather, they go about their jobs differently so that they begin working with their natural abilities rather than against them.
Working against yourself
Mark and Emmy, though quite successful, were clearly working against their abilities.
Mark felt for the first time in his career he was in a job he couldn't do. He felt this was possibly a midlife crisis or maybe he had just reached his limit.
Emmy was just mad. She could hardly make herself pay attention to the mounds of reports and columns of numbers that were her entire job. Going out into the field was worse. There she was expected to listen to an engineer talk about pipe sizes, as if she cared.
When Mark and Emmy went to a team seminar their boss had arranged, they were both startled to discover their work types didn't match their natural abilities.
For the first time in months, Mark felt there was hope. He realized that he wasn't incompetent or stupid; he was just working against his natural abilities. It was immediately clear to Emmy that her most powerful natural talents were not even being touched by her job.
Finding a fit
Mark's best match between his natural ability and work type was in problem solving, logical/analytical, prioritizing, and problem solving/consultative. The natural abilities that made these work types easy for him made it easy for him to line up facts according to some kind of logical order. The personality characteristics that made these work types feel natural to him were that he almost always preferred to work by himself on a project; he didn't like to delegate; and he enjoyed owning a whole project, beginning to end. He didn't really want to turn over anything to others.
By handing over some minor projects to some team members, guarding his privacy for some time each day, and owning a few of the more interesting projects, he was able to concentrate his efforts in a way that actually used his most powerful natural abilities.
Emmy's greatest match in abilities was in problem solving, general. Her job was to gather information and put it into a long-term plan. What Emmy really liked to do was to deal with a crisis quickly, and then move on to the next one. She took this information to her boss, and they were able to work out a transfer to another role at the company. She headed up the team that dealt with the cleanup when a leak was discovered in one of the pipelines. This was a role she found exciting and interesting.
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