What’s your Purpose? Laying Bricks or Building a Cathedral?
There’s an old story about a traveling merchant who saw some new construction. He approached one man and asked what he was doing. “I’m just laying bricks” was his reply. The merchant went to another and asked the same question. “I’m building a cathedral. Won’t it be magnificent when it’s finished.”
Same job. Two different perspectives.
When we understand the higher purpose of our work, we are more satisfied and happier. Hackman and Oldham studied how to make work itself more motivating. Instead of using external rewards like money, they studied how to make the work itself more intrinsically rewarding. Their research on job enrichment found that these five aspects of a job made people more motivated: Task diversity, skill diversity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback.
People value their work when they know it’s helping a higher cause.
Making a meaningful contribution prompts ASTD Golden Gate Chapter members to volunteer to work with the Community Outreach Project. COP recently finished conducting three community meetings for the Japantown Task Force. We needed 15 volunteers to help us with this large project. Some volunteers facilitated. Some were recorders. Some sorted the public’s input as the community discussions continued. Some worked on more than one meeting.
As the In-Service Manager, I designed and conducted the training sessions for our volunteers. I put Paul Lord, the Senior Planner for San Francisco’s Planning Department, on the call. Paul has been the champion for getting citizen input for neighborhoods rezoning. He truly believes in bottom-up planning; nothing imposed from some distance central office.
Paul’s contribution to the call was inspiring. A good leader makes sure that each person knows the mission of his work. He did just that.
Paul explained why these meetings were so important to the Japanese community. Residents, merchants, people who come for ikebana lessons, kids who play basketball at the gym, are all interested in their new neighborhood design. They have ideas to contribute about what they would like to see that would create a vibrate place for the next thirty years.
COP Volunteers
Jason Lai, Joyce Lavey, Carla Kincaid-Yoshikawa, Pi Wen Looi, Bruce Gross, Kris Schaeffer, Christy Vaille – with Paul Lord at the Japantown community meeting on July 31, 2012. Other COP volunteers who worked behind the scenes or at different meetings – Wendy Sterndale, Bev Scott, Jenny Niec, Angella Bernal, Jay Cataudela, Lindy Marzo, Terry Barton, Hallie Sinor.
COP volunteers were impressed. As Bruce Gross said, “Of all the projects I’ve worked on, this will be one time where I can say that ‘I helped in a small way to build this.’” He put into words what we all felt – we were helping to build a community, not merely scribing notes on a flipchart.
Get others fired up by letting them see the big picture and understand the impact of what they do.