Dan Cable, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, explains why people often lose their enthusiasm for their work and how leaders can help them get it back. He says we shouldn’t forget that as humans we all need to explore and have purpose — and without that, we languish. Cable offers ideas for restoring people’s passion for their jobs. He’s the author of Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast, from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
Imagine doing a job where you’re mostly failing. That’s what working at a call center for college fundraising is sort of like: about 10 noes for every yeah, I’ll donate. It just sounds deadening.
So, what happens when fundraisers spend meet for a few minutes with a student who’s benefitted from their work?
DAN CABLE: When that scholarship student leaves, the people that met them are much more enthused and turned on about the work. They’re much more persistent about making calls. They make almost three times more calls on their shifts, and each call is more effective.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s our guest today, Dan Cable. He’s a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School.
Dan’s new book is Alive at Work. He’s here to talk about how you can help your team — and yourself — feel motivated and purposeful on the job.
Dan, thank you for making the time.
DAN CABLE: Thank you, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, no one sets out to be the kind of manager who is — whose employees do not feel alive at work. No one sets out to be a soul-sucking manager. So, how does it happen, and why does so many of us feel — you might say — dead at work instead of alive at work?
DAN CABLE: I do agree with you, by the way. I don’t think that managers wake up in the morning and say, how do I squash the souls of those I lead? I think it has a lot to do with quality and consistency — due dates. It has to do with regulations. And so, a way to think about this, which is, you know, really very kind, is just to say that if you’re over-zealous about the promises that we made to customers, about dates that products and services will we completed, or about meeting regulations that the government sets out, then what we do is we kind of back into, then how can we meet those promises, and then we can move into, you know, control systems. And I don’t even mean that in the draconian way. I just mean key performance indices that allow us to know that we’re on track and moving toward those goals.
I think that one thing that can happen is if we forget that a big part of our brain urges us to be creative, to be curious about cause and effect, to try to learn new things and see if things don’t work a little better or try it in a new way.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I am just wondering, have you in your career or is there someone you know who has gone from feeling, you know, we might say dead at work to feeling alive at work, and how did that person change?
DAN CABLE: So, let me say a couple words about a story that I heard in a class and it really makes me smile. Think of this person, but it’s somebody that was a salesperson who was very good.
And within about two years of taking on his role, he became the lead salesperson. Mostly that meant he was still a salesperson, but about a day a week he would work with his team and help bring newcomers up to speed. He would coach people about how to sell the newer product lines and so on. So, that’s fine. And about a year and a half after that, he got another promotion. He was sales manager and he said, right then he noticed something wasn’t quite as good about his work anymore.
He wasn’t out with the client. He was in meetings listening to trends about the industry. Or he was helping do performance management. Helping fill out forms about how people were doing their job. Now, about three days a week or sometimes two days a week. He was still able to get out there and sell and do what he did best, but he was feeling bogged down. Now, on the upside, he was making a lot more money, you know, he had a Mercedes now, so it wasn’t like his whole brain was saying, oh, go back. B-ut something was telling him you’re kind of wasting yourself here. And he said the worst was then he became the director. He became, you know, after whatever, five years there, six years there, he now was in charge of 20 people, and he said most days he just wouldn’t get out. He would sit in meeting after meeting, talking about cycles and sales cycles and new product and trends and he would spend a lot of time doing performance management and giving out raises and giving out promotions and, you know, basically he got to hire people, you know, they actually got to go out and sell, but he didn’t get to do it.
But he tried a little experiment, and this is a form of job crafting, where, on top of all his normal stuff that he’d become quite bored with, he once a week, twice a week, we’d go out and visit an actual client on top of all the things he was supposed to do that deadened him, he would go out and say he met with the distributor. He’d go to a manager of a distributor. He could just sit there and talk with them about what’s selling and what’s hot and what’s not and kind of just actually hear about what’s happening out there. Or he would go into a supermarket and talk to the general manager of the supermarket about, you know, what’s not shifting and you know, what’s flying off the shelves.
Anyway, he said two things happen. The first one, which is most relevant to this conversation, he said, is that the stories and the direct connection and the, the noticing of cause and effect in the real world gave him stories and ideas and examples that he could bring back to work with him. When he was hiring people, he could talk about real-life examples instead of digging into his history three years ago.
But second off, he said he also made a lot of sales reading. He said there’s no better way to sell to people than to try to not sell. He would go and he’d ended up having them open their wallet. And um, he said he drive home after one of these meetings and kind of have this buzz of like, I still got it. I can still close the deal when I need to.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. So, I want to just sort of probe a little bit more on that because I understand sort of the need for self-expression, experimentation, creativity, newness. But if it’s not turning into revenue, then the organization will ultimately run into a problem.
DAN CABLE: Yeah, that’s really good. What I like about that, Sarah, is how leaders have to be realistic about the freedom and within a frame and they need to balance both. You know, on the one side, as we said, there are regulations and they have to do them by law, and if they don’t do them by law they get fined or they get shut down. There are customer commitments, both when it’s going to show up and the quality of what’s going to show up. Our promises, and if we break those, you know, we fail, we die as an organization. I think that most managers and even most leaders are pretty aware of that piece of the puzzle.
Now, I think that what leaders forget more about, because the call of today is so loud, you know, the quarterly estimates and the sort of quarterly promises are so loud, we sometimes forget about three to five years from now and the idea that the organization that only does what it currently knows how to do forgets how to learn, forgets how to innovate, forgets how to grow.
And so, I see it as sort of a teeter-totter where on one side we’ve got regulations and promises to customers, and on the other side we’ve got innovation and creativity and self-expression. And so, these have to be balanced, and that’s what you’re bringing up. It’s not either or; it’s how do we work on the airplane while it’s flying.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m just wondering, in your experience of working with leaders and helping to educate leaders, is it easy to lead that way?
DAN CABLE: No, it’s such a good question. I wish it were easy, but I think that what happens is it means giving up control, and it means acting like a humble or servant leader. There’s a lot of leaders who see it as their job to tell everybody what to do, and they also like that power. I think maybe we all liked that power a bit. But we also — there’s a whole psychology of power literature that suggests that that sort of power makes us see people as instruments of production or as means to end.
I can say that it’s not comfortable for many leaders too who listen and to lay out a vision and lay out a sense of purpose, but then allow employees to use their unique skills and their strengths and their sense of mission in the way that they see best and the way they see fit.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I want to pivot a little bit back to the individual, since we have talked about kind of what leaders should do and why this is hard. And I’m just wondering, if you are an individual in a job where you aren’t lucky enough to have this kind of leader and you have felt perhaps dead at work for quite some time, is there a way to on your own feel more alive at work, or is your only option really to leave and find another job?
DAN CABLE: I would treat the leave and find another job as a last resort. Not a first option. I think that in my own work I have went through the cycles, and I think maybe many of us have, where the same very interesting job, if you will allow yourself to get into a rut, and when I say allow yourself to get into a rut, I mean that we’re acting about ourselves the same way that many organizations about themselves. We sometimes can individually get into a rut of efficiency where it’s just easier to do it the way it’s always been done, and once you have it solved and sorted and you know how to hit the metrics just perfectly, you just almost can start mailing it in.
And I think that when things start feeling rote, you most likely will start feeling less enthusiasm, and you’ll start to feel less curious, and you’ll start to push yourself through those behaviors. And I feel that, you know, certainly in my own work it is, again, it’s a mindset. It’s a way of challenging yourself to say, No. 1, what is the purpose of this job? Who am I affecting when I do this really well? And let me start understanding them better, you know, let me meet with them one on one and try to understand what does it feel like when I do this well, and what happens when I don’t do this well, and what are some of your needs that maybe I’m not addressing right now? And you know, so that’s one thing is that we can do that. There’s no laws against getting closer to the customer, be it a — if you’re a grocery clerk, uh, who puts things on shelves. Or if you are a programmer, and you’re writing code, and let’s say that that code doesn’t even go to an end customer. Say it goes to an internal customer who then uses it for some accounting package. You always are able to pursue the recipient of your work, you know, that’s something that you would have to give energy toward, but it would allow you to take energy back out. So that’s one.
The second one is this notion of unique strengths. Now, I do think this part would work better if you would be able to manage with your boss in terms of either calling it development or calling it ways of enlivening the work or trying to improve the job, if there were certain passions or interests or perspectives that you want to bring to the job.
You know, as an example, somebody that worked in a very well-known consulting firm who did, you know, pitches with clients and who’d do the analysis and all the things that you know, consultants do after getting an MBA — on top of that, he had a real flair for art and design. He actually came out of a design job before his MBA. And what he really liked to do was understand a client’s vibe, the client’s look and feel, and then personalize the power points and kind of incorporate that design ethos into their pitch and their presentation.
So, he actually went and talked with his supervisor about whether he would be able to try that. And at first it was a little bit of an issue to be honest because this particular consulting firm like so many had policies for how that had to look and you know, this is the sort of deck format that we use, and so it wasn’t as though it was a no brainer, but his boss did allow him, let’s do it for this one; you know, let’s try it. It’s, I’m curious to see how they respond. And you know, he did a really good job. He put a lot of energy and you know, literally his own time, his own energy. You could almost think of it as a hobby, like bringing your hobby to the job.
Anyway, it went over really well. The client really appreciated that customization and the ethic, you know, the, the sort of ethos design worked. And so, this person’s boss was pretty impressed and said, OK, well if this is something you enjoy and we can see that it helps our company, maybe this is something that we could actually make part of your job. And again, he didn’t call it job crafting, but that’s exactly what it is. It’s when you take bits of your job that you really flourish within and expand that, and then you pull out parts of your job — for him it was the analysis — that isn’t really what turns you on and we can have other people do that when they love it, we work as a complimentary team, and that everybody doesn’t have to do everything the same for us to have a team output that’s world class.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, that story raises an interesting question for me, which is just how do you talk to your manager about some of this stuff in a way that leaves them excited about working with you on this job crafting. Because it could, if handled poorly, I could see it turning out like, oh, so and so just wants to do all the fun parts of their job and they want to get rid of the parts that are dull. So how do you have that conversation in a way that’s going to lead to a good outcome?
DAN CABLE: So, let’s start with a sort of more enlightened approach, which is, we are now working with a number of companies where we get people on a team that might be 12 salespeople or it might be 15 programmers. But the team gets together in a room and one way or another brings up the parts of the job that turned them on the parts of the job that turned them off and what they feel are their unique strengths.
Now, we have done this where they just talk, but we’ve also done this where we in advanced create reports for each person about how they’re perceived when they’re at their best.
And so we go out to — like a 360 almost — but we go out to family members and friends and mentors and former bosses and colleagues. And we have those people write up stories about when this person made the best impact on them. And so, in essence, we provide them with evidence and data about their best impact and sort of their unique strengths. And they all share though. They share as a team, you know, their strengths, their perspectives, what lights them up, what puts them to sleep. And what we’ve seen in three different companies now is a real nice sharing goes on. Where for instance, you have one salesperson say, I really get turned off by the collections. I love making the sale. I love being out in front and like breaking down the barriers. But when they don’t pay, I really dislike calling them up and say, you’ve gotta pay. I just see that as busy work.
And then you’ll have somebody else on the team say, oh, I like that part. I actually kind of like being the jerk who has to call and put the weight on and see if I can close that deal. And I kind of see that as a personal challenge. And what I don’t love is walking in and cold calling because it just feels like they don’t want me there.
And they have this real nice sharing. And I’m not saying it’s always perfect like this. I certainly have seen this job crafting come out of these conversations. It’s almost like if you put an introvert and an extrovert together, they both have strengths. But if you forget that different people are different, each one sees the other one is a little bit crazy. You know what I mean by that?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes, I do.
DAN CABLE: Of course you do. And so, um, OK, so that’s one example, and we’ve helped a number of companies do that and I think that lots of leaders could do that and it just doesn’t take money. It takes a little time. It takes the understanding of why this would work. And I’ve really tried to pitch the book at that level of low cost, high leverage maneuvers that get people more lit up at work essentially.
Let’s take somebody who — I would just call them an old-school manager. And, you know, I certainly have worked with is before what, what it comes down to is their desire to. If it’s the case that they start to understand that you’re willing to do extra work that is effective, it’s not that you’re saying, I don’t want to do the normal; it’s saying that I would like to be more curious about where this work goes so that I can understand the needs of the client better. I would like to invest skill that I have in doing this in a way that I think will affect quality in, in a positive way. It’s less about me, me, me, for these leaders and more about what’s the impact on, you know, products and services. And I think that that approach of saying, here’s something I am really interested in delivering more. How can we get me delivering more for you using these approaches? I don’t think that conversation can go wrong.
I do think that if that threatens the leader, then it probably is time to look elsewhere. I would say that’s, that’s the sort of eject button indicator, because if that turns off a leader or manager, then they have ego problems, then they have, defensiveness problems. You’re never going to thrive under him or her. And so, I do feel that that is about the best indicator — and as the employee, you don’t want to work there because that organization will fail. You know, that w that’s an organization that’s in its death throws, it might have three more years, but it doesn’t have a decade.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One of the things I’ve been wondering about as we’ve been talking about this is, presumably, if you’re a manager, and you’re really doing your best to help your employees feel more alive at work and more engaged, that your employees will sense that and really appreciate your efforts, even if they don’t always go totally as planned. But is there any mistake managers have made or could make in doing this, even if their intentions are good?
DAN CABLE: Yes, I think that there’s at least two that come to mind. The first one is, if a leader thinks that innovation and experimentation will not lead to learning, they are setting themselves up for failure. That is to say, if a leader things that, oh, I’ll just give them this room and then everything will go great and you know, all the metrics will just get better right away. Then I think that they’ll be in for a surprise and maybe even a nasty shock.
When we allow people to play to their strengths and try new things, we have to remember that part of the value is the learning; and if we stop learning, you know, then we’re going to be an organization that can innovate and we can’t adapt.
And then I’d say that the second issue, which is a lot, I think a lot less problematic in some ways is the idea that when you give up control and you listen, you know, you start as a leader, start listening to what the employees think would be the best approach. It might be that there’s training or knowledge that they don’t have. It may be that what it raises an awareness that I as a leader, having trained these folks.
For example, if you take a self-managed team and you just get a bunch of people and you say it’s all up to you now, you manage your own budget and you manage your own schedules and you do your daytime nighttime shifts and you manage your own defects and they don’t know how to do that. You know, they never went to get an MBA. They need all that training. And so sometimes what I’ve seen is it exposes that, oh, OK, before I can really allow that to happen, we need skills. We need to bring in training or we have to practice with this together in what they sometimes call a sandbox or a playground. We have to simulate this a couple of times and not go live because we have to learn what we don’t know. We have almost have to like trip over our ignorance, pick ourselves up, learn that stuff, and then go live.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Dan, thank you again for joining us.
DAN CABLE: It is a joy. Thanks for your time, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Dan Cable. He’s a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. And he’s the author of the book Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
