It’s Monday morning again! “How do you feel about going into work? Perhaps you’re having a hard time getting started. Write down right now 2-3 job duties that drag you down; you’d prefer to push them aside, and do them later in the day, or tomorrow…or never.”

This is a simple conversation that you can have as a career professional with any client. Many of our clients will present us with a story about a bad jobfit, which is often characterized with negative opinions about the job’s circumstances, such as lousy pay, a bad boss, a long commute, and so on.

But take some time to probe their story for more details about regular or frequent job duties.  Here’s a simple exercise you can use to bring more clarity into the situation.  Ask them, what are the 5-10 job duties that they are expected to perform each day or week as critical job requirements? Get them to identify which  job duties they enjoy and don’t enjoy.

Ask them if they can remember a time when they looked forward to Monday mornings, in their current job, or in another job.  If you have their resume handy, ask them to highlight  the critical job requirements that they enjoyed performing on a regular basis in their previous jobs.

Perhaps they procrastinate with starting or completing certain job duties.  Get them to identify the job duties in their current and previous jobs where they procrastinated.

Identify items (both positive and negative) that seem to recur in their performance evaluations, regardless of who does the assessment.

Make a list with two columns: one of job duties that energized them, duties that they enjoyed performing consistently; and, another column, of job duties that drain them, duties that they push aside or procrastinate on.

Then take their current job description and estimate how much time is spent each day or week performing job duties that drain them. If they are spending 40% or more of their time performing job duties that drain them, or duties that they chronically delay doing, they may be suffering from a job misfit in terms of their critical job requirements.

What is a good jobfit?

It may be helpful to remind your client that there is no such thing as a perfect job where one is 100% happy and satisfied all the time with their core job duties. The world is just not organized that way! However, many studies show that the key to career success is to limit the downside of a job to 40% of job duties.

The remaining 60% of job duties should be organized around your client’s natural strengths, especially how well their talents and motivations correlate with their core job duties. In general, if we spend about 60% of work hours in a jobfit, then our work will be challenging and will provide a sense of growth and fulfillment.

Try to correlate your client’s natural strengths with specific job duties. Help them develop a job description aligned with what makes them happy and productive in the workplace, so that they can operate 60% of the time in a mode that comes naturally and effortlessly to them. This 60/40 split will energize them. This is jobfit.

However, we may also need to remind them of the likelihood that many times this 60/40 ratio may slip to 40/60 or worse, in which case they may feel drained by brief periods of routine work. This is nothing to be alarmed about as long as the ratio returns to 60/40 in due course; if it doesn’t, they’ll need to take action.

In performing this simple exercise with your client, you may discover that they do, indeed, have a good jobfit. You can then turn your attention to the frustrating factors of their job circumstances. I will deal with those factors in my next article.

But if you and your client agree that there is a serious misalignment between their natural strengths and the critical requirements of their current job, you can then discuss opportunities for refashioning their current job into a better jobfit, or finding a better fit with their current employer, or identifying other careers/jobs that will recognize and reward them for the job duties that energize them.

At that point, an assessment may be in order, one that can match them to good jobfits–specific jobs in specific work settings with the right combination of extrinsic and intrinsic factors to bring out the best in them and reward you for their strengths. A good career assessment can provide such matches with clarity. The information may be valuable in terms of developing options with their current employer or with a new career target.

If how you feel about going to work on a Monday morning is an accurate “thermometer” for measuring your jobfit, then you can raise the temperature by helping your clients wake up excited about the coming day’s activities.

Community College Career Counselors work with many students who plan to transfer to four year colleges.  Students often select “liberal arts” majors such as English, History, Psychology, Political Science or Sociology and come to career counselors to find out what kind of jobs or careers they might explore related to their majors.  We often refer students to university career center websites.

Since I am in California, I have some favorite University of California and a few other University Career Center sites that I share with students.  Career assessment and exploration tools and the answers to “what can I do with a major in….” can be found at university websites such as the following:

• http://iccweb.ucdavis.edu/ – UC Davis
• career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm UC Berkeley
• http://careers.ucr.edu/careerPlanningCounseling/CareersMajor/Pages/careersMajor.aspx – UC Riverside
• http://www2.ucsc.edu/careers/handouts/majors/economics.html – jobs you can get with an Economics Degree from UC Santa Cruz Career Center
• http://career.ucsd.edu/ UC San Diego
• http://www.career.uci.edu/ - UC Irvine
• http://www.sfsu.edu/~career/ – San Francisco State University
• http://www.fresno.edu/careerservices/students/career_exploration/occupation.asp – Fresno Pacific University is a private college in California with an excellent career center
• www.assist.org – click on “majors” which will show majors and direct links to University of California campuses and California State University campuses.

If you have some favorite University Career Center websites from other states, please share with me.  Here are a few of my favorite university websites from outside of California:

•  http://www.uncw.edu/stuaff/career/majors/index.htm – University of North Carolina at Wilmington
• http://www.pdx.edu/careers/choosing-majors-and-careers -Portland State University, Oregon
• http://careerservices.rutgers.edu/CareerHandouts.shtml – Rutgers University, New Jersey

In his 1969 book by the same name,  Dr. Laurence Peter, formulated the following principle: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”  It is based on the notion that employees will be promoted so long as they work competently until they reach a position where they are no longer competent and there they stay, stuck, unable to earn further promotions.

This principle is famously played out in the popular TV series The Office by actor Steve Carroll, who portrays the role of Michael Scott, branch manager of paper company Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Pennsylvannia.  If you watch the series, you may find it hard to believe that Michael was ever competent at anything!

But, the fact is that people are promoted because they are competent.  And they are competent because they have a particular flair or talent or strength for performing certain job duties.  Their work is valued so much that they are often rewarded with a promotion to a supervisory position.

Peter Principle

However,  the Peter Principle becomes active when a managerial position requires a set of skills that do not come easily or naturally to the person who has been promoted into it.

For example, I have worked with a good number of engineers who excelled at troubleshooting technical problems, especially when they were left alone to work in their own way at their own speed to analyze a particular problem and design a solution, often building the solution with special tools & equipment.

They were masters of a physical world of structures, machinery, and processes.  Then they are promoted into a managerial position where they are required to collaborate with others on committees and make decisions through long meetings before moving those decisions up a hierarchy for approval.

In the meantime, they must resolve disputes between employees who disagree on how to proceed; they must plan years in advance for potential scenarios and compete with their colleagues for scarce organizational resources, and fight about money and budgets—none of which they have a genuine interest in or a knack for dealing with.

However, some engineers feel they must put up with this job misfit for the sake of a better compensation package, or the admiration of their peers, or the expectations of power, prestige, and status for someone their age.

And, of course, it is very difficult for accomplished individuals to admit that they might not be good at everything they turn their hand to.  Ego.  Or, to put it in traditional terms: pride goeth before the fall.  But, the simple fact is, not every individual is cut out for management.  The American Management Association estimates that only one-third of individuals have a knack for core managerial duties.

Motivation is the Key

If someone is not motivated by their core job duties, their performance will degrade, so that when the inevitable downturns of an economy occur, they may be laid off when their performance is compared to others who are suited to managerial duties and feel motivated by their work.  Or, the level of job dissatisfaction fosters dis-ease that leads to physical illness, anxiety, depression or any number of stress-related disorders.

Sure, we can learn managerial skills by taking courses but just because we know how to do something doesn’t mean we will do it.  For example, you can learn how to do conflict resolution but if you avoid conflicting situations or highly charged emotional encounters then you will not excel in such situations.

Listen for talent clues

Helping our clients find their right jobfit is never easy.  But, in the end, guiding them into a managerial position when they are not suited for it does not serve them or you in the long term.  Listen carefully to their stories.  What parts of their experiences energizes them most?

- Do they come alive in situations during which they take an active role (high-involvement or high-touch) in managing the talents of people under their authority?

- Are they comfortable with authority and the inevitable stresses and strains that accompany it?

- Do they have a knack for selecting or choosing people, matching tasks and people, and tapping the strengths of those under them?

- Can they negotiate well with peers for competing priorities in their organizations, or do they tend to withdraw when they need to be assertive?

- Do they confuse leadership—the ability to motivate and inspire others to follow a cause, aim, purpose, or objective—with management, a talent for resolving conflict at different levels between corporate goals and union objectives, between stakeholder interests, contract disputes, supplier complaints, or putting out fires on the front lines of daily operations?

There are many paths to success.  The one most healthy is the one most natural.  Help your clients stick to their strengths.  Help them navigate the world of work and advance in their careers efficiently and effectively.  By doing so, you add value to their careers and to your business.

“I hate my job!” If you’re a coach or counselor who, like me, has worked with thousands of individuals, then you’ve heard this phrase hundreds of times, at least!

If you’re client expresses this sentiment with genuine emotion, remind them that the power to change their career is right under their nose…well, behind the nose actually! Stored in our brains are memories about events and activities we truly enjoyed in life since childhood.

Ask them to do a quick inventory from childhood years (ages6-12), then teen years (ages 13-19), then young adult years (ages 20-29), then thirties, forties, and so on. In each period, there are specific examples. Help them create a shortlist of their top 10 most enjoyable events.

The Power of Story

The power of our stories is in the facts, people, and events of our lives. These stories are like veins of gold that run through our life. Mining gold, however, involves moving a lot of ore with tools and equipment to get at that precious metal.

Similarly, mining the veins of gold in our life is easier when we use the tool of writing. Help them write about what is important to them, not what they did to please others. Identify those activities that gave them an intrinsic sense of pleasure and satisfaction, where the rewards were more internal than external.

Brutal Honesty

Above all, encourage them to be brutally honest about what is they truly enjoyed, as opposed to what they are simply proud of accomplishing. We may be proud of a certain accomplishment but there is no real innate pleasure from the activity itself. For example, many people get high grades in school in order to please their parents, not because they truly love math, or history, or truly enjoy studying and doing homework.

Pick a Format

It actually makes it easier to tell the story if we stick to a proven format. You may want to analyze or evaluate their stories for an accurate and reliable picture of their motivational pattern. Or, you may want to turn the exercise over to a personal story analyst to really nail down the essence of who and what they are in terms of work when they are doing what they enjoy most and doing it well.

For example, our stories can be analyzed to identify and define our Key Success Factors. Please understand that the factors critical to success are very different than personality traits, or the results you get from Myers-Briggs and other personality assessments they may have done.
Career match result

A personal story assessment can answer in very clear, concise and meanginful terms the questions: What are the natural talents they use and consistently bring satisfaction to them when they are doing what they enjoy most and doing it well? What is the subject matter that they gravitate to without even trying? What circumstances or conditions have to exist in the job environment to bring out the best in them? How do they naturally build relationships with others? How do these success factors combine to create an essential motivation; that is, the thing they are best at and best suited for in terms of work?

The Right Picture

This accurate and reliable picture of their right work can be developed into an Ideal Job Description and matched to specific opportunities in the world of work.

Turn the negative “I hate my job!’ into a positive that reinforces your value as a coach and counselor. Give them real hope that is grounded in who and what they are, and show them how that correlates to real jobs in the world of work!