I browsed the artcle entitled "Job Sculpting" in the book "Harvard Business Review on Appraising Employee Performance". The framework of The Eight Life Interests had a lot of insights for me. The article says that each person has between one to three of these life interests which dominate that person's motivations. It's important to understand the life interests of the people in your team in order to sculpt a career that will keep the person motivated. I think it's a good framework for O&B to apply in Career Planning for our employees, to better understand each person's motivations.
The Eight Life Interests are:
- Application of Technology
- Fondness for learning new technologies and applying them to solve business problems.
- Also applies to people who approach business problems by "taking it apart".
- Fondness for learning new technologies and applying them to solve business problems.
- Quantitative Analysis
- Usually see analysis of numbers as the best way to solve a problem.
- Find math work fun.
- Examples are those that like to calculate forecasts or investigate ratios.
- Sometimes called "Quant Jocks".
- Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking
- Enjoy thinking and talking about ideas.
- "Why" is more interesting than "How".
- Examples are people who like to create business models, prefer to talk about "the big picture", and enjoy reading academic articles.
- Creative Production
- Enjoy the beginning of projects most, because there are many unknowns and one is able to create something out of nothing.
- Often seen as "out-of-the-box" thinkers.
- Many entrepreneurs, R&D scientists, and engineers have this life interest.
- Counseling and Mentoring
- Enjoy teaching.
- Derive satisfaction from being needed or from helping others succeed.
- Managing Peole and Relationships
- Enjoy dealing with people on a day-to-day basis.
- Derive satisfaction from workplace relationships.
- Should not be confused with Counseling and Mentoring.
- Enterprise Control
- People who like being in charge.
- Happiest when running projects or teams.
- Sometimes considered "control freaks".
- Influence Through Language and Ideas
- Most fulfilled when writing or speaking.
- Enjoy storytelling, negotiating, persuading.
Personally, I think my interests lie firstly in "Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking", followed by "Creative Production", followed by "Quantitative Analysis". I prefer to work more on such things as strategy formulation and finance.
Currently however, my job as general manager of a busy start-up leaves me with not much time to pursue tasks along my life interests. It did at first, but as the company grew, all the tactical work took over almost all of my time. It's a good thing that everyone in the management team of O&B is superb, or it would've been much worse for me. I'm looking forward to a couple of years from now when we're a little bit bigger, where I can hopefully have time for more strategic tasks.
No comments:
Post a Comment