What job were you hired to do?
That’s a funny question to ask an entrepreneur. Ask a dozen business owners and you’ll probably get more than a few funny looks in return. Then maybe some answers like this:
“What do you mean? I wasn’t hired, I hired the employees.”
“I wasn’t hired to do a job. I needed work and found that I was good at this, so I started selling it. And I’ve never worked a day since.”
Other business owners might sense that there’s another question lurking nearby. They’d tell you that they’re “hired” by their customers to do a job well. Or that they were hired to be your personal executive assistant, or to make your house stun passersby, or to make sure you don’t die while you’re using a ladder.
In his book, How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen asks his readers the same question: what job are you being hired for?
To help his readers understand, Clayton uses the example of a friend of his who came home from work one afternoon to find the breakfast dishes still on the table and no evidence of dinner. Sensing his wife had had a rough day and needed a hand, he didn’t say anything, he just cleared the dishes and started making dinner. As he did so, his wife quietly disappeared upstairs. Finding her in their bedroom after he began feeding the kids, he expected to be thanked for helping out, only to find that she was very upset—at him.
As they talked, the realization dawned on him. His wife explained that she hadn’t had a hard day because of the chores. It had been difficult because she had spent hours and hours with small demanding children and hadn’t spoken to another adult all day. What she needed most right then was a real conversation and he had essentially given her the silent treatment, all the while thinking he was doing her a favor.
Clayton concludes, suggesting that if we studied the subject, “we would find that the husbands and wives who are most loyal to each other are those who have figured out the jobs that their partner needs to be done—and then they do the job reliably and well.” He then continues, “[t]his principle—that sacrifice deepens commitment—doesn’t just work in marriages. It applies to members of our family and close friends, as well as organizations and even cultures and nations.”
This is what I meant when I said we have to change our passions and learn to be passionate about helping someone else. It’s not just about helping our customers, that’s table stakes. Any business that doesn’t take care of its customers is destined for failure.
No, as employers, we have been hired by our employees to do even more important jobs, jobs that make the importance of meeting financial targets and creating network effects pale in comparison. We’ve been hired to take risks that they can’t. We’ve been hired to bring stability. We’ve been hired to have a vision, to shape it, and to help them see it. We’ve been hired to have expectations and then to provide a platform from which leaping can occur.
We can’t do those things without sacrificing our own reasons for doing business.
But that’s the job we were hired to do.
I love the focus on using a company to help employees. This alone is a valuable service to society (as society is composed of employees). I’ve been reading “Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull from Pixar. Part of the book made me think of your blog. After a crisis at the company, he started asking people the question, which is more valuable, good ideas or good people? He says, “People think so little about this that, in all these years, only one person in an audience has ever pointed out the false dichotomy. To me, the answer should be obvious: Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.” A paragraph later, he says, “To reiterate, it is the focus on people – their work habits, their talents, their values – that is absolutely central to any creative venture.” Understanding this, the goal of the development department was redesigned to focus on people – to “find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.”