A dear friend and former colleague of mine emailed me the other day. She recently retired from an organization where I had worked for many years, most of them closely with her, and to this day, she remains one of the wisest, most generous, and funniest colleagues I’ve ever worked with. She’s been cleaning out her office, of course, and this latest email came from her archives—it was an email from very long ago that gave her input into that year’s performance review for me.
It was so lovely to read that email. She wasn’t my direct supervisor—she was what is known as a dotted-line supervisor, which means that she headed up the team I worked on, not the department I actually belonged to (organizational charts are so crazy). She and my direct supervisor shared a really important trait: they consistently made me feel very seen and appreciated for my contributions to that job, not only for the things that squarely fell within the scope of my actual job responsibilities, but also for all the things that didn’t. (This is a highly underrated quality of a great manager and most people don’t understand how much thought, care, and effort managers like this put into reviewing employees under their supervision.)
In my earlier career years, I was both a dream employee and a nightmare employee. I was a dream in that I could write quickly and clearly, grasp what needed to be done without being told, and I could both focus on details and the big-picture strategy. I was a nightmare in that I was often irreverent and snarky, easily prone to rage or miffiness about actions or words from others I perceived as wrong or misguided, and sometimes reluctant to conform with the prevailing professional standards for certain jobs. For example: when I graduated from law school, I already knew I didn’t want to practice law, but a friend of my mother’s insisted on getting me an interview with his uncle at a very famous, very large law firm in Manhattan anyway. His uncle was a senior partner and when he interviewed me, he clearly wanted me to be impressed with him and the firm and I clearly was NOT. I asked him, just to be polite, “What qualities do you look for in job candidates?” And he replied, “Polished, whip-smart, hungry to win and get ahead—we don’t hire anyone but the young hawks of their classes, the ones who will successfully chase down their prey.” Reader, I burst out laughing at this comment. This puffed-up old white guy talking like this, to me? I do like birds, but, young hawks? (Also, I think that cheetahs and other big apex predators “chase down” their prey, not birds, get your animal metaphors straight, sir.) NO THANK YOU.
(My mother’s friend, it must be noted, was unhappy that I had not tried harder in the interview; I was also not sufficiently contrite when he called me to demand an explanation for what had gone wrong with respect to this favor I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.)
Anyway. I eventually found jobs that were more aligned with my skills and interests, which turned out to be mostly in the field of public interest communications. On top of my gratitude at the opportunity to build a career in a field I find both meaningful and motivating, I’ve also been grateful for the latitude I was given, in many of my jobs, to exercise both the skills I was hired for, and the skills for which I wasn’t. I knew what my core job responsibilities were, and I knew that I had to execute those faithfully and well. At the same time, I was also given some extra room to do some more creative things, too, and what’s more, over time I was seen and rewarded for those extra things.
I don’t mind doing the extra things, if those extra things are satisfying to me and help make the organization a better place to work at, in some unquantifiable way. I’ve always been puzzled by the people I’ve met, as a manager and through other means, who want nothing more than to be promoted in their jobs. I get that people who want promotions are ambitious in their careers and want the money and access that promotions can bring. But I also wonder whether they understand what it means to be seen—what it means to be appreciated not just for doing your job well, but for doing your job extra-well, in ways that are not easily quantifiable or matter for promotion purposes.
Here are some examples of the extra things I did in each job:
–Even though I was in the communications department, I was asked to organize and host welcome events for new employees, even though my job was ostensibly strategic communications, and I invented ice-breakers that would enable longstanding employees to connect with newer ones. I will never forget the comptroller coming into my office and saying to me, humbly, “I want you to know that I appreciate the way you can create spaces for us to show up as people, not just as colleagues, for each other, which has never existed before in this organization.” Or, as the president of that org once wrote of me, “She added a lot of life to this dead-ass place.”
–I was asked to join a planning group on improving our organizational processes and I designed a skit to show just how crazy-complicated and unnecessarily bureaucratic our process was by showing how long it took for a project to go from idea to implementation.
–I wrote goodbye songs and skits for everyone’s farewell events! I am extremely good at writing new lyrics for existing songs although tbh, I haven’t had the nerve since Randy Rainbow’s political parody songs took off.
–I’ve designed many sessions and conferences and by and large, I’ve eschewed traditional panel presentations and speaker line-ups and tried to design and facilitate experiences which are more interactive and engaging. For a recent meeting, I designed a session about narrative change as a game, with teams—and it was really, really fun!
Listen: I get that it may not be fun to do extra things if you’re in a job where they’re determined to squeeze every little bit of juice from your soul for as little reward or recognition as possible. Like, it’s no fun to be asked to plan everyone’s birthday lunch or goodbye party because you’re the lowest-paid person in the organization, which is also why you may feel like you can’t refuse. That’s what we call exploitation.
But if you are like me—a little bit nutty, a little overly fond of having fun—and you can do your job, AND find creative extra things to do, AND get appreciated and rewarded for those extra things—well, that’s the work jackpot. It really is.
I’m worried that many of you out there are feeling meh to downright disenchanted with your job. And maybe it is time to think about breaking up with your job or at the very least, start thinking about what’s next for you. But ask yourself: is there something I can do to make this job a little bit more engaging and creative for me and everyone else around me? And if not, what can I look for in my next opportunity that will let me do that?
Minna Jung Consulting 