I saw a very interesting interview in the Gallup Business Journal today: Creating the Job You Love.
At a recent conference, Shane Lopez, Ph.D., Gallup senior scientist and one of the world’s leading researchers on hope, was talking with well-known vocational psychologist Mark Savickas, Ph.D. During that conversation, Savickas said, “Work won’t love you back anymore.” That sentence stuck with Lopez — and it changed the focus of one of his research projects.
Great bosses want their people to have autonomy.
We’ve all heard that we should balance our work and family lives because our families, unlike our jobs, will love us back. But what Savickas meant was a little different. “What Savickas was saying is that there’s no loyalty in the modern American workplace anymore,” Lopez says. “You won’t get much professional development anymore. You won’t be on a team that stays together two or three years anymore. You won’t spend your career in one place. So I started wondering: What if you love your job? Can you buck the trend in the modern workplace and have a job that will love you back?”
Lopez was already conducting research on Career Well-Being, but Savickas’ comment prompted Lopez to broaden his view. “I needed to figure out what ‘loving your job’ means,” Lopez says. “What I discovered was that it’s not the Confucian notion of ‘Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ Instead, people who love their jobs aren’t choosing jobs they love — they’re making jobs they love.”
Of the thousands of workers Lopez researched, only 1% truly loved their jobs. And they weren’t necessarily hedge fund managers or rock stars; they were teachers and gas station attendants and preachers. What set them apart from other people is that they were proactive in designing the job they have, as Lopez, author of Making Hope Happen, explains in the following interview.
Go read the rest here, it’s worth the time!