Why Do People Redefine Their Jobs?

Virtually everyone is motivated to succeed, but people don’t experience a sense of success when a job is too easy. Alternatively, they won’t succeed at all if the job is far beyond their capabilities. If they can do the job but find it unchallenging, they’ll redefine its scope so that it is challenging. If it’s challenging but not doable, they’ll transform it into something they can do.

Both are natural and sensible reactions—from the jobholder’s perspective. The downside, of course, is that the job has been changed, which almost ensures that it won’t fulfil its intended function.

On one level preventing employees from changing jobs should be simple: Make sure it is doable and challenging. But problems with feasibility and a lack of intellectual stimulation usually aren’t obvious, and neither is the way most jobs get altered. What’s more, productivity isn’t just a function of a job’s definition and the individual performing it. The people who oversee the job are integral as well, and their approach needs to be carefully framed by the jobholder so that the latter is set up to succeed.

To the Boss: Tailor the Task to the Person

There’s an unspoken assumption that a job is a collection of tasks the employee does every day, every week, and every month. The trouble is that modern managerial jobs aren’t easily defined and evolve over time.

A managerial job is actually an array of projects—with varying degrees of difficulty—that take shape, require intensive work, are completed, and then fade into the mists of time. If you’re a brand manager at a consumer goods company, for instance, your projects could include launching a new brand extension, repricing your existing offerings, creating ad copy, working out a problem at one of your key retailers, analysing the profitability of your brand, and so on.

Given all that, a one-size-fits-all definition of “brand manager at Anywhere Inc.” probably won’t reflect the reality of an employee with that title. Their role on some projects will be too challenging, and on others not challenging enough. And they’ll redefine each project to suit their needs. I’ve seen this happen with jobs across industries from software to telecom to professional services to consumer goods to finance. Problems emerge most often when an employee has to do tasks concerning both the management of a current project and the creation of a new one.

In almost every case, tasks related to the current project feel easier and less scary, while it’s difficult to even know where to start on the new project’s tasks. What inevitably happens is that the person in question redefines their job as taking care of the current project first and then working on the new one. Just as inevitably, they never gets around to the new project’s tasks because the current project is “more time-consuming” than they imagined. Years go by without any progress being made on new ideas because managers always had other stuff to do first.

How can you stop that kind of thing from happening?

One method that has seen success is through team members evaluating their team leaders after every project through anonymous feedback. With a blanket of safety for anonymous feedback, team members could be open and honest and provide real, critical feedback which resulted in better results all around. Examples of this have been shown to work too. For one team leader, anonymous feedback found that when a new case was given to run with a group of team members assigned to work on it, they’d break the project down into its component tasks and parcel them out to various people. Sometimes team members’ preferences and experiences would be considered, or their requests would be acted on. But mainly the leaders would deploy their team members as they saw fit.

Bosses want a real, value-adding job. And when they haven’t been given one, they tend to create one that isn’t terribly helpful: nitpicking.

One team leader did something different. He would sit down with each team member and talk about the role that person would like to play on the case. While he couldn’t fill every request, he was always able to go a long way in that direction. This team leader had figured out the key to productive subordinates was ensuring that they all found their tasks both challenging and doable. And because his world was explicitly project-based, he knew that he had to do that with every team member more than only once a year—or once ever.

Such discussions are named chartering conversations. During them, if the manager intuits that a subordinate is nervous, they can consider splitting the responsibilities, with the subordinate taking a smaller slice. Or they might ask the subordinate to work on the task and come back with a recommendation for them to consider. If that’s still too intimidating, then the subordinate’s task could be to generate options for the manager to consider. And if that is still too daunting, then the manager will have to dig in and provide help, structuring the task enough that the subordinate can see his way to generating options. If after all that, there is still a problem, at least the manager will realise that they probably has assigned the wrong person to the job, which is a useful thing to know early.

On the other side of the coin is a situation in which the task isn’t challenging enough. Once again, the manager has to figure that out in the chartering conversation and determine a way to make the task sufficiently engaging for the subordinate, by having a dialogue about how it might be redesigned.

What’s the bottom line? If you want to make sure the people you oversee are productive, you must have a conversation with each subordinate to codesign every task so that it is both challenging and doable. Though that might sound too time-consuming, the savings on rework will dwarf the hours you spend on such conversations.

To the Jobholder: Give the Boss a Job in Return

Job design is a two-way street: Each subordinate must also help design the tasks that the boss will do—or else the boss will make them up by themselves, with results the subordinate may not like.

Harvard Business Review

Roger L. Martin

January 2023