Module 3 SLP MGT 423 Job Redesign

7 Job Crafting In the days immediately following the birth of Bryan’s third son,

he and his wife, Amy, encountered one of their favorite people at

Poudre Valley Hospital. She was a member of the custodial staff .

Her name was Maggie; she was a middle-aged Latina whose job it

was to empty the trash, clean and restock the sink area, wipe down

surfaces, and mop the fl oor, among other such duties. They barely

noticed that she was doing these things, although she was eff ec-

tive, leaving her area immaculate in her wake. Instead, it seemed

to Bryan and Amy that her job was to dote on their new baby, to

share openly in their joy, and to express genuine empathy when

talking with Amy about her lingering pain from childbirth. Her

cheer was infectious, and she had a way of making them feel like

her visit to their room was the single most important event of her

day. She obviously had a passion for her job, despite the fact that

housekeeping is near the bottom of the prestige hierarchy at the

hospital—as it is within most any organization. No matter to Mag-

gie. “My coworkers are constantly giving me applications for trans-

lator positions at the hospital,” she said, “because I speak English

and Spanish equally well. But they don’t realize how much I love

the job I have now.”

Born to migrant farm workers (her dad from Texas, her mom

from Mexico) in a car (!) in Wyoming, Maggie Garza, now sixty-

two, has lived most of her life in Fort Collins, Colorado. After drop-

ping out of high school (“the worst decision of my life,” she says), she

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 2 . T e m p l e t o n P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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132 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

worked for a laundry service and later as a day care provider. For

the last fi fteen years, however, she has worked as an environmental

tech for the hospital. “They call it that to make it sound important,”

she said. “We just say we work in housekeeping.”

Can a housekeeping job be a calling? “For me it is,” said Mag-

gie without hesitation. “I believe God put me here for a reason.”

Ask Maggie for her job description, she’ll tell you: prepare her

cart; clean the utility rooms; check which patient rooms are occu-

pied and go to each one, knock on the door before entering, then

clean the sinks, tables, restrooms, and fl oors; take out the trash

and replace the trash liners; evaluate whether the walls need to be

wiped down; if they do, wipe them down.

Ask Maggie to simply describe what she does, though, and you

get a diff erent answer. She cleans, sure—and does so well. But she

also checks in with patients, assesses their needs, expresses concern

and care, and assists them where she can. She talks with them, gets

to know them, and helps them feel more at ease. Other hospital

staff members notice this. Sometimes pediatric nurses call Maggie

into a room to help soothe a frightened child or calm a patient who

is acting out. Consider this story: “There was a kid who the nurses

were having trouble with. They called me over and said, ‘Maggie,

maybe you can break the ice.’ So I went in, and to get his attention

I started crawling underneath the bed, from one side to the other.

Another nurse came in and saw me down there, and thought I fell

or something. ‘Oh Maggie, are you alright?’ she kind of yelled. She

really kind of ruined it, because I was crawling to the other side to

surprise the boy and make him laugh.”

That story illustrates how Maggie approaches her job. She

makes silly faces at children to coax a smile. Sometimes she dances

around the room while she cleans and meows quietly like a kitten,

invariably causing her child patients (indeed, she sees them as her

patients) to roar with laughter. Their parents, often swimming in

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j o b c r a f t i n g 133

stress and concern, see this and laugh right along with their kids.

It helps take the edge off . Maggie also provides words of encour-

agement, and she prays for patients in rooms where she cleans. As

an environmental tech, Maggie could say her job is fundamentally

about cleaning rooms. Technically, she would be correct. For her,

though, the job is much more than that. It’s ultimately about keep-

ing hurting people comfortable, relaxed, cared for, satisfi ed. “I like

to converse with people, see what they need, and see how I can

help them,” she said. “It makes them feel good. It makes me feel

good, too.”

One myth we attack whenever we can is that only specifi c types

of people, within specifi c types of occupations, can experience their

work as a calling. Although we readily acknowledge that far too

many workers toil in job situations in which a sense of calling is

thwarted, sabotaged, and otherwise blocked from nearly every

angle, we contend that most people have more potential than they

realize to transform their current work into a calling. The previous

chapter focused on the question of how a person might discern a

calling during the process of choosing or changing a career—both

privileges that are not extended to some workers, who may have

limited career options from the start, and who are inclined to cling

to a job they may not like because an unpleasant job is better than

no job. Others may dream of jobs other than the one they hold, but

due to geographic constraints, family responsibilities, aversion to

risk, or any number of other factors, do not see alternative career

paths as viable. This chapter addresses the challenge of cultivating

a calling in the context of one’s current job, when a career change

may be impossible, impractical, or for whatever other reason sim-

ply not on the table. People can take a range of approaches to cull a

stronger sense of calling from their jobs. Perhaps the most promis-

ing approach—the one we focus on in this chapter—is engaging in

a process known as job crafting.

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134 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

Job Crafting and Calling

The concept of job crafting was formally introduced to workplace

scholars in 2001 by management professors Amy Wrzesniewski

and Jane Dutton, who argued the basic premise that “work tasks

and interactions that compose the days, the jobs, and, ultimately,

the lives of employees are the raw materials employees use to con-

struct their jobs. . . . Job boundaries, the meaning of work, and work

identities are not fully determined by formal job requirements.

Individuals have latitude to defi ne and enact the job, acting as ‘job

crafters.’” 1 Stated most simply, job crafting refers to those things

that workers do to elicit a stronger sense of purpose, meaning,

engagement, resilience, and thriving from their jobs. In crafting

their work, employees might change their work tasks; branch out

into alternative work activities; build stronger relationships with

coworkers, supervisors, and customers; and reenvision the very

purpose of what they do all day. Such strategies ultimately lead to

changes in the design of a job, the social environment, or the job-

crafter’s perspective—and research so far seems to suggest that it

works. Scholars have found that workers across a variety of occupa-

tions (e.g., managers, teachers, salespersons) who implement job

crafting strategies become more engaged, satisfi ed, and productive

at work.2 Can job crafting transform one’s work into a calling? The

only study of which we are aware that begins to answer this ques-

tion suggests that the answer is probably yes. Based on in-depth

interviews of thirty-one employees who had “unanswered callings”

(that is, one or more callings not satisfi ed by their current job),

Justin Berg and colleagues found that workers were more likely to

experience the satisfaction and meaning that is usually associated

with “answered callings” in their current jobs when they used job

crafting strategies.3 In short, job crafting, even in jobs that are not

ideal, can help evoke the same psychological outcomes that typi-

cally accompany living out a calling.

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j o b c r a f t i n g 135

As in most other aspects of life, chronically dissatisfying circum-

stances at work are hard to just accept and live with; when we’re

deeply unhappy, we want to make changes. People are motivated

to craft their jobs when they want more control over their work,

when they feel isolated and want a closer connection with others,

and when they want to experience a greater sense of purpose and

meaning. When people are successful at job crafting, they feel more

engaged, satisfi ed, and content—the results of eff ectively imple-

menting one or more of three crafting strategies. The fi rst, task

crafting, focuses on redesigning the job itself, changing the array of

tasks in which the worker engages while still tending to the respon-

sibilities for which she or he is held accountable. The second, rela-

tional crafting, targets the social environment and seeks ways to

expand and improve the worker’s relationships at work. The third,

cognitive crafting, centers on developing new, more enriching

understandings of the very purpose of the work. We explore each

of these strategies in turn.

Task Crafting

For most people, task crafting is probably the fi rst thing that comes

to mind when thinking about job-crafting activities. In almost any

job, workers have formal responsibilities, a specifi c set of tasks laid

out in their job description that they are required to complete.

Sometimes the tasks for which a person is responsible feel like a

mismatch with that person’s gifts—one’s interests, abilities, values,

and personality. Task crafting refers to the process of altering those

responsibilities to better align them with the unique features of

one’s work personality. This change usually occurs by adjusting

how tasks are completed, attempting to add new tasks or remove

others, and potentially allocating one’s time or energy for tasks

in a diff erent way.4 How one goes about task crafting, of course,

depends on the amount of freedom or power a person has to change

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136 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

the tasks while still performing the essential requirements of the

job well.

Berg, Wrzesniewski, and Dutton conducted a landmark study

designed to provide a window into the motives, strategies, chal-

lenges, and outcomes of job crafting.5 They interviewed thirty-three

employees, twenty of whom were employed at a for-profi t manufac-

turing fi rm and thirteen of whom worked for a nonprofi t political

agency. From employees’ responses to their questions, two types

of task crafting emerged: one that focused on altering the scope

or nature of tasks and one that concentrated on adding new and

diff erent tasks. Employees who used the altering strategy adjusted

their approach to carrying out their required tasks, approaching

the same activity in a novel way or directing more attention to

those components of an activity that they fi nd most engaging. “I

really enjoy online tools and Internet things,” reported one of the

study’s participants. “So I’ve really tailored that aspect of the writ-

ten job description, and really ‘upped’ it, because I enjoy it. I spend

hours exploring what else we’re paying for with this service. So it

gives me an opportunity to play around and explore with tools and

web applications, and I get to learn, which is one of my favorite

things to do.”6 This employee identifi ed a specifi c portion of her job

that struck a chord with her, and she devised ways to spend more

time and energy on those tasks. Doing so allowed her to use her

strengths more eff ectively, to satisfy her interests and values more

directly, and to simply be herself to a greater extent on the job—all

of which are characteristic of people living out their callings. If she

is able to maintain this focus while also fulfi lling the other duties

her job requires, her employer will be at least as happy with her as

she is with her job.

Adding tasks quite literally involves supplementing the tasks a

person is required to carry out with additional tasks that a person

especially enjoys or values. For example, another employee from

the nonprofi t organization stated, “We have an annual luncheon,

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j o b c r a f t i n g 137

and I have become the person who runs the registration table. It

would normally be something that a coordinator would do and was

before I got here . . . but I’ve taken it on myself because I’m good at it

and like the challenge and like being able to control it. I could have

just as easily set it up, and removed myself, but instead, I stay much

more actively involved.”7 This employee obviously doesn’t have to

do this task, but chooses to do it because of what the task off ers

her: a chance to use her strengths and satisfy her needs for chal-

lenge, control, and mastery. By running the registration table, she

is actively improving the extent to which her job fi ts with her gifts.

Berg, Wrzesniewski, and Dutton’s study highlights two key

points. The fi rst is that task crafting allows your job to be what you

make of it. All of us have a set list of tasks we have to carry out to

stay employed, at least some of which probably feel like they have

little to do with our calling. Even those living out their callings can

acknowledge that no job is perfect; virtually everyone has to put

up with demands for completing tasks they really can’t stand in

order to support the parts of the job they love. Nevertheless, to the

extent that external constraints allow, people in most any job can

potentially accentuate certain tasks (like learning about new web

tools and applications) or add in other tasks that are not required

(like running a registration table) to help bring their jobs into closer

alignment with their callings. The second point is that accentuat-

ing or adding tasks into your current job is almost always surpris-

ingly easy. It is probably natural to assume that adapting one’s work

tasks means an entire overhaul of the job, and for most of us, such

drastic and comprehensive change is impossible. In actual prac-

tice, though, eff ective task crafting targets the little things, like a

restaurant server or cashier spending a bit more time talking to

each customer, a teacher shifting more of his energy to individual

instruction as opposed to class lecture, or a counselor deciding to

run a grief therapy group once a week on top of her individual cli-

ents. Whereas task altering can turn one’s job from a fruitcake to

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138 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

carrot cake, task adding can serve as the icing on the cake. Either

way, the cake tastes better.

Relational Crafting

In their infl uential article “The Need to Belong: Desire for Inter-

personal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,”

Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary discuss the ingrained desire that

humans have to socialize with each other, likely due to the benefi ts

people reap when they are in relationships.8 As we explored in chap-

ter 5, any person living in society by defi nition relies on the con-

tributions of others to survive, and those who engage with others

in consistently positive ways experience a wealth of psychological

benefi ts. This statement is as true in the workplace as in any other

sphere of life. Establishing stronger, more positive connections

with others around you at work will generate a greater degree of

meaning and on-the-job happiness. Positive relationships at work

also create more opportunities to engage in prosocial behaviors, a

critical component of calling. Like task crafting, relational crafting

entails both altering the nature or quality of one’s relationships and

creating new ones.

As we settled into our roles as professors at large research uni-

versities, both of us were a little surprised by the level of isolation

that can easily come with an academic lifestyle. Despite what may

be a common perception, we don’t enjoy buff et lunches in a fac-

ulty dining room, and friendly philosophical debate over drinks

at happy hour is a rare occurrence. Given the importance our uni-

versities place on maintaining productive, independent programs

of research, during some weeks our computer screens get more

face time than all of our coworkers and students combined. For

Ryan especially, the dynamics of his department reinforce a fairly

solitary existence. After his fi rst two years struggling with this real-

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j o b c r a f t i n g 139

ity, Ryan (who happens to be highly extroverted) had reached a

tipping point: Should he just accept the system as it is and check

out, or would it be worth the eff ort to craft a stronger relational

experience? Fortuitously, at the same time Ryan hit this point, a

colleague down the hall was reaching his own tipping point: after

three decades in the department, he had informed the university

that within the next fi ve years he would retire.

Though he and Ryan had never talked that much, he openly

shared with Ryan his feelings of sadness about putting an end date

on his academic career and pondered how he would be remem-

bered once he left, especially considering how little anyone talked

to each other around the department. The two of them quickly

formed a bond over their shared angst about the everyone-is-an-

island departmental culture. Ryan decided to ask, “What would you

say to grabbing lunch every couple of weeks or so?” Their biweekly

lunch meeting continues today, providing both of them with a

chance to share in the ups and downs of their respective profes-

sional careers, naturally often spilling into their personal lives, too.

This kind of relational crafting is obviously very easy, and for Ryan,

it has provided an enormous return on the very minimal invest-

ment of time and energy the lunches require.

Improving the interpersonal climate of the workplace is one

important outcome of relational crafting, but not the only one.

Another participant in the study by Berg and colleagues, a customer

service representative, established relationships with coworkers

who could teach her new skills and knowledge that enhanced her

ability to do her job well. “I have taken initiative to form relation-

ships with some of the folks who fulfill orders,” she explained.

“That’s not my area, but I was really interested in how that worked

and wanted to . . . learn. . . . I have learned a lot from them, and

that’s helped me in my job. I know more about how the ordering

process goes so now I can explain it up front to customers.”

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140 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

Of course, eff ective relational crafting does not always require

expanding one’s social network or investing more in already-

existing relationships. Sometimes decreasing relational involve-

ment in strategic ways can have a positive eff ect. A senior manager

in Berg and colleagues’ study provided an example: “I’ve tried to

limit some interaction with my supervisor because sometimes she

wants a really high level of . . . kind of pre-work. For example, we’ve

had meetings before where it was literally . . . like a two- or three-

hour meeting for something that I think we could have discussed

really in a half an hour. . . . I enjoy working with her overall and we

can have fun together, but there are certain types of interactions

that I try to limit. Like for instance, sometimes if it’s a meeting that

I know could be much shorter, and I know it will go longer, I may

schedule another meeting like an hour after that meeting starts so

that we have to finish it up.”9 People are able to more consistently

sustain their callings when they can alter relationships in both

directions where appropriate, increasing positive interactions and

decreasing negative interactions. The goal, obviously, is to maxi-

mize the overall quantity and quality of positive interactions they

have with others at work.

Cognitive Crafting

The third form of crafting is cognitive crafting. Cognitive crafting

involves redefi ning one’s perception of the kinds of tasks or rela-

tionships involved in one’s job, or of the extent to which one’s job

is meaningful. At its core, this type of crafting involves a change

in the way a person thinks about the job, regardless of whether

any change takes place in the job itself. In its most basic form,

cognitive crafting involves a simple attitude adjustment in which a

worker adopts new and improved ways of thinking about the job’s

nature, purpose, and impact. This strategy has some key advan-

tages, particularly for individuals in highly structured jobs (e.g.,

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j o b c r a f t i n g 141

production worker, toll booth collector, truck driver) who may have

little latitude for proactively changing their required tasks or their

workplace relationships. Before we explore this further, consider a

few examples of cognitive crafting from the participants in Berg,

Wrzesniewski, and Dutton’s job crafting study.

One brand manager talked about how she defi nes the tasks she

is responsible for carrying out on the job: “I’m . . . passionate about

beauty. I love it . . . because in marketing, you can try to influence

the way people think about beauty. You can have people think about

it diff erently, because there’s more than one standard of beauty. For

example, I might ask, ‘Well, is that all that’s beautiful or are there

some other images that we can think of that are beautiful?’ . . . I

see it as a chance to change the way people think about beauty.”10

We are willing to bet that this brand manager’s contract says noth-

ing about changing the way people think about beauty. Yet for her,

all the eff ort she devotes to creating logos and ads, and designing

marketing campaigns, is fundamentally about infl uencing what

people see as beautiful. Another customer service representative

stated, “I’m passionate about . . . just doing a good job and doing

my job well and going above and beyond what basic thing that I can

do, not just giving an average phone call, going above and treating

the customer well. . . . Technically, [my job is] putting in orders,

entering orders, but really I see it as providing our customers with

an enjoyable experience, a positive experience, which is a lot more

meaningful to me than entering numbers.”11 Here again, the job

description focuses on one set of responsibilities—handling phone

calls with customers and entering orders—but she sees those tasks

only as means to a more important and meaningful end: providing

customers with a positive, even enjoyable experience.

Think for a moment about these two employees. Who do you

think experiences work as more meaningful, the brand manager

who thinks of her work responsibilities as a pathway for promoting

beauty, or a brand manager who focuses solely on accomplishing

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142 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

what is spelled out in the job description? The customer care rep-

resentative who thinks of her work as a way to give customers a

pleasant experience, or the representative who focuses exclusively

on fi lling her weekly quota of answered phone calls and completed

orders? Now think about this from the perspective of an employer.

Which employees from among these pairs would you prefer to have

working for you?

Whether redefi ning a particular task or redefi ning what is mean-

ingful about a job altogether, these strategies can help people alter

the perception of what they do at work. Such alteration is prob-

ably most powerful when it helps workers view their jobs as more

meaningful, more prosocially oriented, or both. Because these com-

ponents tie directly into a calling, crafting one’s job to have these

components is critical.

Remember Maggie Garza? Maggie is a shining example of all

three types of job crafting. While engaging in the essential duties of

the job, which center around cleaning and sanitizing, Maggie adds

other tasks, such as asking patients if they need anything and then

fi nding a nurse, a meal menu, the TV remote, or whatever else they

require. She expands the relational boundaries of her job descrip-

tion by interacting meaningfully with patients and their families—

encouraging them, joking with them, making them feel welcome

and cared for. She also thinks of her job as consisting of far more

than the discrete tasks that technically defi ne it; for her, the job is

about providing high-quality care to sick and suff ering children.

Maggie’s approach to her job also conforms to what Jane Dutton

and colleagues found in their interview study of twenty-eight mem-

bers of a hospital cleaning staff .12 An analysis of the interview data

revealed two groups of employees. One focused rigidly on the job

requirements as described; they punched in, punched out, did the

minimum number of tasks necessary in between, and limited their

interactions with others as much as they could. This group dis-

liked cleaning, described the skill level of the job as low, and were

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j o b c r a f t i n g 143

generally unwilling to do anything outside of what was articulated

in the job description. The other group consisted of cleaners who

adopted an approach like Maggie’s. They took on additional work

tasks; freely conversed with patients, visitors, and medical staff ;

and planned their days in ways that made the whole system work

more smoothly (e.g., by timing their regular duties in ways that

made the work fl ow maximally effi cient). They considered their

role as critical in advancing the broader goal of healing patients.

Here again: Which group do you think derived more meaning from

their jobs? Which group would you want working in your hospital?

How to Craft Your Job

Are you ready to give job crafting a try? You’ve seen the advantages

of crafting the tasks, relationships, and cognitive appraisals of a job.

Crafting may seem very appealing and (deceptively) simple. Still,

we advise you to prepare yourself before you jump in. The most

important component of job crafting is, without a doubt, your mind

set.13 Embarking on the job-crafting path with skepticism and half-

hearted reluctance is likely to sabotage its eff ectiveness and leave

you more discouraged than before you started. Believe that your job

is not set in stone but is malleable enough to be changed through

your own eff orts. Be on the lookout for opportunities to engage

in crafting, and be willing to experiment and make at least small

changes to your normal work routine. Then prepare yourself to be

persistent and patient, seeking small wins that will accumulate and

result in bigger changes in due time.

The job crafting pioneers—Berg, Dutton, and Wrzesniewski—

developed the Job Crafting Exercise, a tool designed to help work-

ers identify and plan ways to put into practice some of the strategies

they have uncovered through their research. Readers interested in

completing Berg and colleagues’ formal exercise, which we strongly

recommend, can purchase the materials at www.jobcrafting.org.

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144 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

Below, we summarize a more informal approach, a teaser of sorts

that we’ve adapted to help you begin exploring opportunities for

crafting your current job.

Outline Your Job Tasks

To begin, take inventory of the tasks for which you are responsible

in your current job. In a journal or on a separate sheet of paper,

write “Current Job” on the top of one page, and create three col-

umns, labeled “Low,” “Medium,” and “High.” Under each of these

columns, create lists of the various tasks you are required to carry

out in a typical workday, organized according to the level of time

and energy they require. In the Low column, list fi ve or six of those

little things that don’t take much eff ort; in the High column, list the

major tasks that require a considerable amount of eff ort; and list

the in-between tasks in the Medium column. As an example, if you

are an elementary school teacher, you might list “arranging desks

and chairs” in the Low column, “developing a lesson plan” in the

High column, and “teaching that lesson” in the Medium column.

Try to list fi ve or six tasks under each column, although obviously

the number of diff erent tasks depends on the job. When you’ve

fi nished, take a moment to evaluate the chart. Does this look like

your typical workday?

Outline Your Gifts

On the top of a second sheet of paper, write “Gifts.” We’ve used

the term “gifts” broadly, to describe interests, abilities, personal-

ity, and work-related values. We broaden the term further here

to include the three personal characteristics that are the focus for

Berg, Dutton, and Wrzesniewski: motives, strengths, and passions.

Under “Gifts,” create three more columns, this time using “Motives,”

“Strengths,” and “Passions” as the column headings. In the Motives

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j o b c r a f t i n g 145

column, create a list of fi ve or so specifi c outcomes you hope to

attain by working in your current job—things like fi nancial secu-

rity, happiness, meaningful relationships, or making a diff erence.

In the Strengths column, write down lists of strengths that you

can apply in some way to your job. [Refer back to the “you at your

best” exercise in chapter 4 (pp. 78–79), if that helps.] Examples

include making connections with people, computer program-

ming, problem solving, mediation, and public speaking. Finally,

in the Passions column, create a list of your strongest areas of pas-

sion—those things in which you are most interested or that you

most value—that apply in some way to your current job. Examples

might include helping people learn, mentoring, creating order out

of chaos, persuading people, or being creative.

Integrate Tasks and Gifts

For the third step of the exercise, write “New and Improved” on the

top of a third sheet of paper. Your goal now is to combine your job

tasks with your gifts in a way that refl ects how you most want to use

your motives, strengths, and passions in your job. To accomplish

this, begin by creating the same three columns you have on the

Current Job sheet—“Low,” “Medium,” and “High.” Then transfer the

tasks from the Current Job sheet onto the New and Improved sheet,

but this time put them in the column that refl ects how much time

and energy you wish you were devoting to each task. For instance,

if talking with parents about their children was in your Low column

before, but you would like it to be a bigger part of your job going for-

ward, write it in the Medium or even High column this time. Strive

to be both ambitious and realistic as you do this. If developing les-

son plans simply takes an enormous amount of time for you right

now, it won’t make sense to write it in the Low column. However, by

adjusting your strategy (e.g., adopting a higher-quality curriculum

with excellent preplanned lessons, identifying and revising your

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146 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

favorite plans from among those you’ve used before), your planning

eff orts could become effi cient enough to warrant its placement in

the Medium column.

While reorganizing your job tasks to refl ect your preferences,

you will probably notice some themes emerging. Circle clusters of

tasks that illustrate those themes, and give each theme a name.

For example, classroom instruction and tutoring students one-on-

one might be grouped under a “Directly Helping Students Learn”

theme; creating lesson plans, meeting with parents, and consulting

with other teachers might be grouped under the theme “Behind-

the-Scenes Student Support.” Try to identify at least three themes.

Once you have transferred your tasks onto your New and

Improved sheet in a way that refl ects your ideal job, start incorpo-

rating your gifts. Focus on the themes that emerged from your task

list. Look back to your Gifts sheet (where you listed your motives,

strengths, and passions), identify the gifts that support those

themes, and write them near each other on the New and Improved

sheet. For example, your motive of wanting meaningful relation-

ships might map well onto the overall theme of Behind-the-Scenes

Student Support, which includes the tasks requiring you to interact

with parents and other teachers with whom you could foster mutu-

ally supportive working relationships. Similarly, your strength in

problem solving and your passion of helping people learn would

fi t well with the theme of Directly Helping Students Learn. Keep

in mind that the same motive, strength, or passion may support

more than one theme; do not hesitate to use them more than once.

When you complete this process, you have a visual representation

of what your job could become. This visual representation, ideally,

also converges well with what you understand to be your calling.

Take Action

The fi nal stage of this process is to develop an action plan for mak-

ing your hypothetical New and Improved job more of a reality. Task

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j o b c r a f t i n g 147

crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting come into play

at this point. You don’t have to do this on your own. We suggest

inviting a counselor, one or more members of the personal board of

directors we invited you to name in chapter 4, a trusted colleague,

or your supervisor (if you feel safe in doing so) to look over your

New and Improved sheet and help you brainstorm some realistic

approaches for crafting your job in ways that bring it into closer

alignment with your calling.

After identifying specifi c job crafting opportunities, however

small, make a commitment to engage in at least three of these

behaviors per day for a trial period of at least a week. Write about

these behaviors in a daily diary, evaluate your eff ectiveness in

executing them, record their consequences, and check in with

your counselor, friend, coworker, or supervisor about your prog-

ress. Challenge yourself to take some calculated risks, stir the pot,

and change the status quo, because the very nature of job crafting

requires you to do something diff erent in your work tasks, your

relationships at work, or the way you think about your job. This

can be a scary proposition for anyone, even (and perhaps especially)

people who are highly dissatisfi ed with their jobs. Developing the

necessary level of commitment, attention to possible opportunities,

and willingness to take the risk of trying out these strategies may

be the most challenging step in the job-crafting process, especially

for those who are naturally risk averse. If this applies to you, don’t

worry. Your initial experiments with job crafting do not, and proba-

bly should not, involve big changes or jumps. Rather, experts in job

crafting suggest that small steps are the best way to start, because

small steps result in small successes, which accumulate and become

larger successes. As this process moves on, you’ll feel encouraged

to take slightly larger calculated risks later.

One last piece of advice for the potential job crafter. Properly

choosing the types of job-crafting activities in which you might

engage will almost certainly infl uence your level of success with

these activities. For this reason, we urge you to remember your

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148 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

gifts, and choose crafting strategies that align closely with your

motives, strengths, and passions. If you are a mechanic with a pas-

sion for German imports and strengths in creative problem solving,

consider crafting opportunities that capitalize on those gifts, such

as working with your shop’s boss to design a marketing strategy

intended to bring in more Volkswagens and BMWs. If you have

strong interpersonal skills and value positive relationships, focus

on strategies that strengthen your network of relationships at work,

such as organizing a monthly happy hour, lobbying management

for funds to celebrate birthdays with a cake at lunchtime, or garner-

ing support for a workplace mentoring program. The bottom line

is that aligning crafting activities with the unique features of your

profi le of gifts will, in time, turn the job you have into more of the

job you want, one that resembles your New and Improved sheet,

and ultimately, your calling.

A Job Is Like a Marriage

To better imagine how successful job crafting might unfold, think

of a job as similar to a marriage. For more than fi fty years, research-

ers have studied how happy people are in marriage and how their

level of happiness changes over the course of the marriage. Results

from these studies are not particularly encouraging: on average,

the longer people are married, the more unhappy they tend to be

with the marriage.14 This conclusion seems like a real downer, but

buried in this research is another fi nding to consider. Although

on average, people who are married become less happy in their

marriage over time, a subset of people stay consistently happy or

grow even happier as the marriage endures. What do these people

have in common? The common thread is that, one way or another,

they have learned that being happy in marriage is not just about

marrying the right person, it is about working really hard as the

marriage goes on to build and maintain happiness. They focus on

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j o b c r a f t i n g 149

learning to communicate better, to spend quality time with each

other regularly, to learn more and more about each other, and to

stay enmeshed in each other’s lives. They are active and vigilant

about addressing and readdressing the strengths and weaknesses

of their marriage over time.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of how commitment,

hard work, and persistence translates into happiness comes

from research on couples in arranged marriages, still practiced

in some cultures in South and East Asia, Africa, and the Middle

East. According to a Scientifi c American article by Robert Epstein,

couples in arranged marriages often report that their level of hap-

piness has increased over time, the opposite of what is found for

most couples in “love marriages.”15 Epstein speculates that couples

in arranged marriages focus less on maintaining happiness and

more on building it, and therefore work harder at investing in the

relationship in ways that lead to long-term happiness. If you fi nd

yourself in a work environment that wouldn’t have been your fi rst

choice, or that ends up seeming less perfect than you assumed it

would be—as is inevitably the case in a marriage—you can choose

to stick with it and be miserable, to give up on it and leave in the

hope that the next job will be the right one, or to work hard at

improving the fi t, adapting to it, making it work. Job crafting helps

you carry out this last option.

Viewing your job as a calling is likely infl uenced by a combina-

tion of factors that may include a transcendent summons perceived

either directly or indirectly through that job’s degree of fi t with your

gifts, as well as the extent to which that job provides a strong sense

of purpose, meaningfulness, and a means of contributing to the

greater good. This chapter has focused on the challenge of turn-

ing an existing job into a calling by improving its fi t with what you

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150 d i s c o v e r i n g a n d l i v i n g a c a l l i n g

perceive to be your calling. Task crafting, relational crafting, and

cognitive crafting individually and together off er avenues for shap-

ing your current job into closer alignment with your ideal job. Will

job crafting turn any job into the perfect job? Of course not, but if

crafting is done eff ectively, it moves things in the right direction,

making your work a better fi t for your gifts, providing you with a

stronger sense of meaning, and establishing new pathways for serv-

ing the greater good. As we have maintained throughout this book,

a calling is best approached not as a thing to be discovered once and

for all, but an ongoing process of evaluating and reshaping work

in ways that continue to use your gifts meaningfully, in service of

others. Indeed, one of the most important lessons we have learned

from interviewing workers with a calling is that actively striving to

keep their passion alive is every bit as critical as discerning their

calling in the fi rst place. Job crafting provides a useful set of strate-

gies for molding your work over time in ways that continue to sup-

port a sense of calling, even—indeed, especially—when work tasks

or the work environment starts to shift in ways that threaten your

opportunities to live it out.

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