Energy Management: Job Crafting
In This Episode
Feeling run down? Looking for a way to maintain or up your energy at work? Tune in to this episode of the LeaderLab to learn how job crafting will help you keep burnout at bay.
Transcript
Vanessa Tanicien, narrating: Hello, and welcome to The LeaderLab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. In each episode my Labmates and I distill our findings into powerful tipping point skills — the smallest changes that tip over to make the biggest impact in the shortest time. I'm your host, and leadership trainer at LifeLabs Learning, Vanessa Tanicien.
Vanessa Tanicien: So for the next five episodes, we're going to be talking about the very timely and very important topic of energy management. We'll share some pro tips and research on how to reduce burnout and increase motivation one skill at a time. I'm hoping that you're feeling energized already.
Vanessa Tanicien: For today's skill, we've got Tania Luna, our co-CEO back in the lab. She's also an emotion psychology researcher and is in the throes of writing her second book. Welcome back to the lab, Tania. And I'm so excited for this topic of energy management, because everything that's been going on right now from the election to the pandemic to the social climate that we're in, I have been feeling really drained. So what are we talking about today?
Tania Luna: Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about a tool for energy management. And I think that, to your point, we're in this space where burnout is on so many people's minds.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. And burnout honestly has been this term that's been tossed around. I guess I even alluded to it in the beginning. But I'm curious, what is the definition that is most widely acceptable for it.
Tania Luna: One of the definitions is actually just describing the symptoms, which is you can recognize burnout if you're noticing physical, emotional, mental exhaustion, and that combination of lower motivation and lower performance.
Vanessa Tanicien: In thinking about that, I'm curious, what research is out there around the arena of burnout? Before we move into this energy management conversation.
Tania Luna: Great question. You know I like to get into that research. One of the things that I think is really interesting is looking at burnout research in the field of medicine because that's where it can be really high stakes. And so often we think about burnout as something that just lives in our minds, but it actually has a huge impact on performance. So for example, research shows that physicians with symptoms of burnout are more likely to report having made major medical errors and they have lower patient satisfaction scores.
Vanessa Tanicien: Got it. And I know that we often associate burnout with too much stress and too much work. And I also know while all those things are true, psychologist Viktor Frankl also said that burnout could be caused by a loss of meaning. What he called the existential vacuum, which honestly sounds like a crazy horror movie, but it's real, this feeling of distress over the fact that nothing matters.
Tania Luna: Exactly. And actually there is some more research on that on the impact of a loss of meaning in the workplace also looking at physicians. So for example, Carazman and team found that doctors who had a lower sense of meaning displayed a high incidence of burnout. On the other hand, doctors who had a high sense of meaning whether in their private or their professional lives actually exhibited only minor to medium susceptibility to burnout.
Tania Luna: Which I think is again so important for us to think about both for ourselves as leaders, because emotional contagion is so real we have to figure out how to get our own energy up, and it's an important thing to remember when it comes to helping our teams feel a greater sense of end energy. And I think that what's motivating and exciting about this research is that while burnout can feel so completely out of our control, there are tools to get our meaning up, which then gets our energy up.
Vanessa Tanicien: Got it. So you're telling me that by infusing a little bit more meaning into our lives, it'll help us manage our energy better, which inevitably will allow us to manage our teams, ourselves in a more effective way.
Tania Luna: Yeah. And prevent the susceptibility that we have right now all across the world to feeling that burnout.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. So I'm in deep bated suspense. What is the tool Tania that you brought to the lab today?
Tania Luna: Okay, here we go. So the thing that I would love to talk about today and get a chance to try out together in a moment is a concept that was popularized by psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski called job crafting.
Vanessa Tanicien: Ah, okay. I'm very familiar with job crafting and I know that there are three types, cognitive, relational, and task. Yes. So Tania, I'm passing the baton to you because I don't want to butcher anything. Can you define each of those for us?
Tania Luna: Yeah. So let's not butcher job crafting. Okay. So we've got the cognitive, which is really the why. Why am I doing what I'm doing? It's about reshaping your explanation to yourself for why you're doing this work or why it's meaningful. One of my favorite tools for that is shifting my thinking from I have to do this into I get to do this.
Tania Luna: Number two, we've got relational crafting. This is about the who. So this is all about shifting who I'm interacting with throughout my work week or throughout my day. So for example, if I start to feel really drained because I have so many meetings with so many people, I might want to recraft my day to have some more alone time. On the other hand, I know we have a lot of team members at LifeLabs who've been really deliberately creating co-working opportunities and saying, "Hey, I'm in this Zoom room, who wants to pop in? So that's a great example of relational crafting.
Vanessa Tanicien: And there's one more, that task crafting.
Tania Luna: Yes. And then task crafting is really about the what. So you've got cognitive is why. Relational is who. Task is just what. So this is about changing literally the tasks that I'm doing. So that could be looking at my day and saying, which of these things can I delegate? Which of these things can I do differently? Or it might even be something like earlier I was sending out invoices and I was noticing my energy just going way down.
Tania Luna: And so what I started doing in terms of task crafting is saying, "Okay, what I can get motivated about is thinking about how to optimize our invoicing system." And so I was getting the task done and also leveraging that part of my brain that I know I'm going to get more energy out of.
Vanessa Tanicien: So how can we begin to apply each of these? I'm very curious as to what this looks like.
Tania Luna: Yeah, so I think this is a really powerful tool for us as leaders, because again, emotional contagion is really impactful. When we feel our own energy draining it's really easy for that to tip over and impact our teams. So we can use job crafting for ourselves and we can use it in those coaching conversations and our one-on-ones with our teams to help them craft their own jobs.
Vanessa Tanicien: All right, Tania. So I think I've got it, those three kinds of job crafting, cognitive, task relational, but I'm interested to try it on for size as I'm sure some of our listeners are itching to as well.
Tania Luna: Yeah, let's do it. So would you be willing to share, what is an aspect of your role that you don't find energizing?
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. I will say that as a facilitator, I get a lot of my energy from working with folks on different issues, guiding people through conversations. So probably on the lesser energizing end of my job would probably be some of the more administrative things. Like the emails and things like that, I would find a little less titillating.
Tania Luna: Titillating. That's a high bar. Okay. So let's see if through this conversation through some job crafting, we could make it like 10% more titillating.
Tania Luna: So let's start with some cognitive crafting. Okay. So cognitive crafting is all about shifting how you think about, let's say, the administrative aspects of your work. So if you step back and think about what would happen if I didn't do this or why is it important to me personally that this aspect of my work actually gets done, what comes to mind for you?
Vanessa Tanicien: So when I think about the types of emails that I'm sending, it's really about ensuring the health of the business, right? So making sure that our sponsors and other folks have the right information, so that way we can continue booking business and be able to make more impact overall. And I guess when I put it that way, where one links up to the other, it makes it a little bit more motivating and thus more energizing to do.
Tania Luna: And I love what you just did there where you didn't just say, well, it helps us grow our business, but you went one step further and you said, and it allows us to make more impact. So the more that you can connect to, "what is the thing about this that personally is important to me?" the more our energy tends to go up.
Tania Luna: So let's try the other one relational, and then you can pick your favorite. So relational crafting. What tends to give you more energy working alone? Working with others?
Vanessa Tanicien: Well, it definitely depends on the thing, but I would say for these tasks that we're talking about, these emails and things like that, it would be cool to figure out how to do that with other people. I haven't figured that out yet, but maybe a group situation with a playlist after that.
Tania Luna: Okay, that's great. So one option is when you start doing that work you link up to, why does this matter to me? Option number two is get some others together. See if you can have a little bit of an admin party, get the work done together.
Tania Luna: Let's talk about task. Now, this is the what. Is there anything in your workflow or in the way that you're going about doing the admin aspects of your work that you have some control over and you can tweak?
Vanessa Tanicien: So I am a competitive person at heart and I like to give myself little mini goals. So I guess, figuring out, could I do this faster or could I automate something? Doing something that makes it a little bit more fun in the face of a little bit of the illness that I can experience.
Tania Luna: And what's really important about something that you pointed out is you find that aspect of your work de-energizing. As leaders, we have to remember everyone on our team is going to be motivated and energized by different things. So it's important to really deliberately do this kind of crafting work for ourselves and for each individual on our team differently and not make assumptions about what is going to be that energizing factor for the people on our teams.
Vanessa Tanicien: All right. So there we have it, three different ways to manage our energy and keep burnout at bay. And it's not about what we do. It's about how we do it. And to get more energy out of your job, focus on three types of crafting: cognitive, relational, or task.
Vanessa Tanicien: All right, that brings us to our LeaderLab listener experiment of the week. So Tania, now that we know so much about job crafting, what are we asking our listeners to bring into their laboratory of life?
Tania Luna: As usual, I would recommend starting small. So think about your own work that you do and decide on one type of job crafting that you're going to try out to increase your energy levels by at least 10%.
Vanessa Tanicien: And that's a wrap of another episode of The LeaderLab. Make sure to subscribe so that way you don't miss an episode. And if you want to connect with us on social, go ahead and head over to LinkedIn or on Twitter at LifeLabsLearn. And make sure you share this episode with at least one other person so we can all benefit from better energy management. And if you need training for your team, head on over to lifelabslearning.com.
