The Messy Art of Job Crafting

In this week’s episode of the excellent podcast “The Hidden Brain”, Shankar Vedantam invests a half hour to have us think about our dream job. We all know the one — you hear the stories about people who leap out of bed in the morning eager to meet another day at work, who find deep meaning and fulfillment in their daily toil, who wouldn’t change a thing if they won the lottery tomorrow because they’re not in this job for the money. Then Shankar pulls a fast one. What if, he suggests, you could change the job you’re in right now to be the dream job you wish you had?
While some lucky percentage of us are able to get hired directly into a role that we find fulfilling, it turns out that there is probably an opportunity for a lot more of us to be able to turn the job we are currently in into one that is more meaningful by turning to the concept of “job crafting.” To help make the case, Shankar brings on Amy Wrzesniewski, an organizational psychologist who has published many papers on job crafting, including an excellent 2013 summary article in the journal Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology. You may have heard Wrzesniewski or the concept of job crafting before. Since she introduced the model in 2001, it has been discussed in multiple fora, including Forbes, the New York Times, NPR, and TED. The basic idea is that people who have invested in actively adjusting the parameters of their job to better fit their own passions or in ways that they feel would better improve their effectiveness in their role are people who find their work more fulfilling than people who take the job as it was spelled out for them by their managers or organizations and simply execute on the tasks they have been given.
It makes sense, right? Shifting a role around so that you can pull in something you feel passionate about should naturally help you feel more passionate about the job itself. The act of giving agency to employees to say what works well and what doesn’t as they perform their role will help them feel more invested, as any opportunity for adding agency does. Even reframing the way a someone thinks about the work they do adds a deeper sense of purpose to the job than the mechanical details of executing a task. To illustrate, Wrzesniewski has provided examples of teachers who invest in technology for their classrooms to channel their passion for tech into their work, auditors who see their job as protecting innocent people rather than simply confirming numbers in ledgers, hospital cleaning staff who see their role as caregivers and healers just as much as the nurses and doctors who are treating the patients.

So what does this mean for managers of a team? There’s an inherent messiness and more than a smidgeon of chaos theory going on when job crafting gets overlaid on top of job descriptions. After all, we already had our team neatly planned out to perfection, right? We were hired to perform certain duties, and by Jove, those duties we shall perform!
So then challenge for managers becomes figuring out the best way to respond — if at all — when team members attempt to do some job crafting of their own and start performing work that is beyond their initial job description (or start cutting back on work that is part of it). It seems clear based on Wrzesniewski’s research that a team member who has the opportunity to transform their role into one that more closely channels their passions is likely to be more enthusiastic and committed to their work, so there is inherent value in job crafting even when all other things are equal. It requires managers to relinquish some control of our grand vision on how we had composed our team, but this must be weighed against the opportunity to provide team members with agency over their very role in the organization, which can not only provide the above benefits, it helps them grow as individuals and members of the team as well.
“But we can’t have chaos,” you say. “Why else am I a manager here anyway if not to craft the roles for my team?” The answer is that the underlying mission of our job as managers is even more fundamental than laying out our team roles. Our own role is to enable our team to do the best jobs they can for the organization. The key, therefore, is to step back and look at the work your team members are doing vis a vis the needs of the organization as a whole. Why are they choosing this particular area to try to craft their job to fit? Are they filling a need that wasn’t being met, or improving their ability to do the work and meet the goals that have been set for them? Chances are, that is exactly what they are doing. If not, is there a way you as their manager can guide their attempt to craft their jobs into something that does support what they are trying to add in a way that makes sense for the organization? Remember, even if, from your perspective, it is a “wash” in terms of job efficiency, the benefits to the individual and to the team to allow them to craft their job will tend to make it worth giving them that ability. Only when an individual’s attempt to craft their job would result in a situation where they would be investing their energies into an area that would actually diminish their job performance does it make sense to intervene, review with the team member, and redirect in a way that will produce a more positive outcome.
But more than just tolerance for job crafting, given the above benefits, managers should go further: managers should be advocates and champions for their team members working to craft their roles into something better. Why would an individual need their manager to be their champion when it comes to role crafting? Because when roles shift, friction is a common side effect. Not everyone will be as enlightened as you are on the benefits of role crafting and will be concerned to see people acting outside the strictly-defined rules of their job. Let observers know that it’s ok, even good. Let them come to you if they have concerns about role overlap or toes getting stepped on. These concerns may be legitimate and you’ll need to discuss role boundaries with the observer and/or your team member. Or they may be something you can easily resolve by pointing out how your team member is doing an even better job for the organization in their tweaked role, crafted just for them.
He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
― Francis of Assisi
When has a member of your team exercised job crafting of their role in your organization? How did your organization respond? How did you respond in turn?
