How to Job Craft as a Team
Many organizational experts and leaders criticize job crafting, struggling to find ways to make it practical across an entire team or organization. However, tensions between satisfying individual desires for meaningful work while meeting a team’s obligations to the organization need not be pitted against each other. Team job crafting is a three-step process by which leaders and their teams identify the strategic contributions the team makes to the organization, define the aspirations and capabilities of the team, and distribute work across the blend of passions, skills, and career aspirations of team members while ensuring the requirements of the broader organization are fulfilled.
Traditional job design theory proposes a top-down look at the distribution of tasks, authority levels, and resources to ensure organizations operate efficiently while making job satisfaction equally available. However, the shifting values of today’s workforce — including a desire for more work-life flexibility, purpose, and authority — have revealed substantial limitations to such an autocratic look at work.
Since its introduction two decades ago, job crafting has attempted to remedy this by allowing workers to influence the responsibilities of their roles to match their preferences and passions. With competition for talent intensifying, organizations are clamoring for ways to keep their best people motivated. Job crafting has been one solution companies have reached for to help optimize people’s satisfaction and performance by ensuring they feel a sense of purpose through their contributions.
Whether promoted by human resources or invited by a manager, people are increasingly finding alignment between their preferences and their work. This is undeniably positive. Research has shown job crafting is actually successful in improving individual performance, as well as employee satisfaction.
But many organizational experts and leaders criticize the practice, struggling to find ways to make job crafting practical across an entire team or organization. The tradeoff between individual satisfaction and overall efficiency feels, to many leaders, like a bad deal. We have seen this play out in our work time and again. Most recently, a client of ours was approached by someone on his team asking to “job craft” their role because they’d grown unchallenged and unfulfilled. In private, he lamented to us, “Should I just let everyone do what they want and forget about the company? And if I let one person do it, do I have to let everyone?”
Our client was describing to us what many leaders have described over the years: that job crafting appears to give employees an opportunity to focus on the things that matter to them at the cost of managerial influence and broader team effectiveness.
While the leaders we work with typically do acknowledge the benefits of increased loyalty and satisfaction, achieving that for an individual at the expense of the whole puts them between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Understandably, people in positions of leadership worry that by letting their team members cherry pick from the work they most enjoy, vital work that may not be desirable or falls outside an employee’s strengths won’t get done.
We believe the tensions between satisfying individual desires for meaningful work while meeting a team’s obligations to the organization need not be pitted against each other. Our approach to team job crafting lets leaders live in those natural tensions by allowing employees to choose the work that fulfills them while also satisfying the work obligations of the whole team. In fact, job crafting as a team gives managers a decided advantage. It provides leaders with a broader set of skills and a way to maximize a team’s collective remit to the organization, using their actual aspirations and passions.
In one organization we worked with, three months after implementing newly crafted jobs for her team, our client said, “It’s like night and day. People are bringing me creative ideas, the team’s energy has skyrocketed, and our case-close rate has nearly doubled.”
Team job crafting is a three-step process by which leaders and their teams:
This process makes the inherent tradeoffs normally seen only by the leader transparent to the entire team as well, allowing everyone to share ownership for managing them.
Step one: Identify your team’s strategic contribution. Each team or function adds distinct value to the strategy of the organization. Finance departments are watching Investor Relations while keeping budgets on track. Corporate Social Responsibility is analyzing supply chain impacts in international agricultural businesses. Marketing is trying to shape brand perceptions by engaging social media platforms. Depending on industry, stage of maturity, and competitive environment, every company needs something specific from its various teams and departments. Understanding your team’s strategic contribution is important because it ensures that your team members first understand how they contribute to the success of the whole organization. Starting with this inventory also helps prioritize the most important contributions of the team as the very work that will help them fulfill their greatest aspirations.
A leader we worked with spoke to this point. After doing individual job crafting with a small group of high potentials on her team, she said, “They left our one-on-one sessions after reviewing their newly crafted jobs feeling empowered, but there was no one left to do the dishes!”
If the parameters for job crafting are not situated within the critical work of the team, managers can be left holding a bag of work no one wants. The power of team job crafting is that it creates greater visibility and insight into how the whole team’s work combines into their shared contribution and fits into the broader story of the organization — dishes and all.
Step two: Map your team’s individual and shared aspirations. With an understanding of what the organization expects from your team, the next step is to ask people what they want to achieve and why.
Satya Nadella famously began his leadership at Microsoft by asking his team to describe what they each believed their purpose was and how Microsoft was a platform for them to fulfill that purpose. Following Satya’s lead by hearing from everyone, team job crafting ensures that it is not just the most proactive, vocal or favored employees who have opportunities to align their work and passions.
In this step, each person on the team should first write down, then share what they believe their greatest gifts to be, and what work they believe most fulfills their sense of purpose. Next, ask them to identify the things they want to achieve together. Simple questions like, “What do we want to accomplish together in the next 18 months?” or “Imagine the all-hands meeting later this year. What are we getting an award for?” opens up minds to not just what is required of the team, but also what is possible through the team.
Team job crafting becomes a tool for increasing both individual and team purpose. As each person shares their individual and shared aspirations, colleagues ask questions to better understand and learn how support them. As a result, this part of the process amplifies a sense of connection and belonging as everyone feels a personal stake in one another’s aspirations.
It’s also important to remember that every team has some tasks that feel like “doing the dishes.” Still, someone has to do them. The power in this approach is that you raise the odds of discovering those who can do those tasks more creatively or effectively, or who don’t mind doing them. In some cases, the process also reveals superfluous activities that should simply be eliminated, freeing up capacity that can be redirected to more critical activities.
In other cases, you may discover mismatches between an individual’s purpose and passions and what the team is chartered to do. When this happens, it’s important for you to have a private conversation with them about their career, one aimed at helping them look for opportunities on a team, or sometimes even another organization, more suited to their ambitions.
Step three: Craft jobs that match individual skills and passions with strategic commitments. Armed with a shared understanding of the team’s strategic commitments to the organization, and an inventory of the team’s individual and shared aspirations, you can now craft jobs that span both. This is an iterative process to ensure work is distributed equitably, and that the jobs you create are realistic. Keeping these analyses side by side, facilitate a conversation with your team to help them identify obvious places where individual skills and passions match their obligations.
In one client organization with whom we did this, the process revealed that too few people had been dedicated to the greatest strategic commitments while too many had been allocated to far less important work. They discovered that there were more people who wanted to, and were capable of, doing the more strategic work than the manager had assumed, allowing them to craft jobs that tapped vital skills aimed at mission-critical work. Ultimately, the bulk of every crafted job should connect strategic work to the skills and aspirations of those who will do them.
You’ll need creativity to make necessary tradeoffs in places where more than one person has passion and skill for work that needs less people than there are who want to do it. Innovative approaches like quarterly rotations, job sharing, or shadowing for those who want to learn new things can be very useful in such cases. If there is a set of tasks akin to your team’s “dishes,” the team can collectively find ways to take responsibility for that work. They are usually far more willing to take it on having crafted jobs they are now more excited about.
It’s also important to have your Human Resources partner participate in the process to ensure that you remain within the guidelines of your organization’s compensation bands and position ratings. In some cases, newly crafted jobs may need to be re-graded.
Our experience with team job crafting is that individual engagement and satisfaction is maximized because it is directly aligned with organizational success. For leaders of teams whose work is highly interconnected, making it difficult to allow one member to job craft, team job crafting is a way to practically manage the tensions between individual and collective success and meaning, achieving higher levels of both.
Ron Carucci is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He is the best-selling author of eight books, including the recent Amazon #1 Rising to Power. Connect with him on Twitter at @RonCarucci; download his free e-book on Leading Transformation.
Jarrod Shappell is a partner at Navalent who specializes in helping leaders effectively manage themselves by cultivate deeper leadership and relationship skills. He has over 15 years of experience coaching leaders in start-up, non-profit, and Fortune 500 organizations.
How to Job Craft as a Team
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