I was talking with a friend about career and her job. It was Tuesday, after a 5 day holiday, and she was not happy. What she began describing as a general frustration, sadness and lack of interest in her current job, as we dug deeper, turned out to be caused by a single reason: She was felling a little bit like Sisyphus.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth) punished for chronic deceitfulness. As a punishment for his trickery, King Sisyphus was made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he could reach the top, however, the massive stone would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again.
Similar to the Sisyphus myth, there are many people out there working with a single purpose: “to pay the bills”. They just press some buttons, write some reports, fill some papers, make some calls, debug some software or sell something. They don’t feel that they are doing anything useful, just getting their bosses richer. They work to have fun on the weekends and then have fun on the weekends to forget the work. The boulder just keeps rolling back down.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Most of the time, they don’t even have to change jobs. The first step is to look for a purpose.
To find a meaning for your job, you have to get some information from your manager, peers or from the board of directors. Why the company exists? Even if you are not working in an NGO or in a for-profit, purpose-driven organization like TOMS, your company must have a mission statement and some core values. Do you feel that the mission is important? Do you agree with it’s values? Do you understand how your work and your company fits in the big picture?
Even if you don’t understand (or don’t agree with) the company mission statement, you should realize that what you do can have a big impact on your colleagues lives and in the work environment. With some experience and a lot of effort, you can create work environments that are fun and inspiring. You can be somebody that puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. For those things, you don’t have to be “the boss”, not even a manager. Leadership can be evidenced at all levels in an organization.
All things considered, if a leader really understands how important meaning is, they will figure out that it’s actually essential to spend some time, energy and effort in explaining the big picture, changing some things and getting people to care about what they’re doing. If your manager is not doing that, probably you should talk with him/her about it… Or you can point them to this blog post and the references bellow ;)
References
In this video, Dan Ariely talks about some interesting researches on meaning, purpose and progress
In this video, Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership, all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?”