Category: jobs

Labor Day thoughts: Relax, and enjoy your work

Office_FlickrCombing through my zillions of Twitter favorites this Labor Day morning, I ran across these two gems from last February.

Both posts seemed to be appropriate reads for this day set aside to honor and recognize the achievements of the American worker, so I thought I’d share them.

If you’re off the grid for this holiday — and I hope most of you are — then perhaps this will make good reading for the coming, short workweek.

1. Joy at work: It’s your right. This Harvard Business Review post by Allison Rimm, an executive coach, is a must-read for all of us who don’t want to let go of the details for fear of losing control. Rimm writes that “achieving joy at work is not only possible; it’s a necessity.”

I’ve come to appreciate that happiness on the job is a leading indicator of an individual’s ability to sustain high levels of passion, performance, and productivity over the long run. If we can uncover our true gifts and find work that makes regular use of them, we’ve fulfilled our responsibility to use them wisely and we’ve optimized our chances for claiming our right to enjoy the process.

Maybe it’s just an amplification of that trite cliche: Do what you love and love what you do. But Rimm is on to something here. If you’re going to do work, you should enjoy it. And you have a right to enjoy it. (Hat tip to Kim McGrath of Wake Forest University for sharing the post on Twitter.)

2. Relax! You’ll be more productive. This New York Times piece by Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, In this article, Schwartz talks about the importance of taking breaks during the work day to enhance performance. “The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology,” he writes. “Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.”

So plan to build some breaks into your work this week. You’ll be better off, and so will your organization. (And if you can sneak in a nap every now and then, so much the better.)

(Hat tip to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who knows a thing or two about being productive, for the share.)

Update, thanks for Mike Petroff, who shared this):

3. Slowing the work treadmill. Harvard business professor Teresa Amabile on why we would be better off doing less. “In the short term,” she says, “people become less engaged in their work if their creativity isn’t supported. They will also be less productive because they often can’t focus on their most important work. In the long term, companies may lose their most talented employees, as well as losing out because they won’t have the innovative products, innovative services, and business models that they need to be competitive.”

Photo: Hard Day at the Office, by Craig Sunter-Click 64.

Like a boss

Image via fashionablygeek.com

Today is National Boss’s Day, and if you’re like me, you think of it as just another conspiracy by the greeting card, floral delivery, and bagel and cookie industries to get our hard-earned money.

(I say this even though I’m very grateful for the carry-in luncheon my colleagues in the S&T communications department threw in my and my assistant director’s honor on Monday. Thanks, guys! It was a great treat and totally unnecessary, but appreciated!)

But even if National Boss’s Day is a corporate conspiracy, maybe there’s some value in recognizing — and thanking — the bosses in our lives. After all, if we are fortunate enough to hold down jobs in this economy, we either are bosses or have bosses, and the people who are bosses always have bosses of their own. And with employees everywhere being asked to do more, many of us are essentially our own bosses most of the time.

So, whether we like it or not, we are like a boss.

So maybe we should like a boss — as in, show some appreciation for their efforts or at least sympathy for their plight.

When it comes to bosses, I tend to agree with Bob Sutton, the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, who says that most bosses have good intentions and want to do a good job. (There are, of course, exceptions, and we’ve all encountered them. Sutton also wrote about them in his book The No Asshole Rule.) As Sutton writes on his blog, “[M]ost bosses I know work extremely hard and are dedicated to improving their skills” and are “concerned about becoming better at practicing their difficult craft.” While writing Good Boss, Bad Boss, Sutton worried about the plight of supervisors and “how hard it is to be a good boss — the job is never done, it is amazingly easy to screw-up, and wielding power over others makes it all even harder because you are being watched so closely (and are prone to tuning-out your followers — the other half of the toxic tandem).”

“Yet, despite all these hurdles, the best evidence shows that many, if not most, people find their bosses to be competent and compassionate.”

So, whether you are a boss, report to a boss, act in both capacities, or work as your own boss, here are some tips from around the web that can help you be more like a boss, and perhaps even help you like a boss. And if you’re like me and aspire to be a competent and compassionate boss, perhaps these tips will help you on your journey.

(By the way, if you’re in to reading business books, I highly recommend Good Boss, Bad Boss. It mad the list of my favorite books of 2010.)