Application: The Relationship between Person and Job
Description: The Separation Illusion: Me and My Job
Author: Mr. Edward Muzio
July 31, 2007
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At the start of my professional career, I had a plan.  I would keep my personal life totally separate from my work.  By maintaining this clear boundary between the two, I would have an insurance policy: if things went poorly in one area, I could fall back on the other.

This sounded great on paper but turned out to be totally wrong.  No matter how much I try to compartmentalize, at the end of the day it’s still just me.  It’s me at home and it’s me at work.  Trying to push those two “me’s” apart is like shoveling sand against the tide: it wears me out without changing anything.

Now I know why…

At Group Harmonics, we are big on measuring useful things.

When we measure behavioral style, we can track whether a client is changing from his or her natural behavioral state at work.  Big changes are often an indicator of stress or dissatisfaction.

When we measure motivational factors, we can easily see how a client’s natural motivational needs compare with the rewards provided by his or her job.  Serious mismatches cause dissatisfaction, and reduce productivity over time.

And when we measure task type preference, it becomes immediately clear whether a client has the opportunity to do things at work that would otherwise come naturally.  Over time, off-balance work causes disengagement.

The reason all of this measurement is so useful for existing teams, and the reason it is so important in pre-hire screening, is the same reason that my compartmentalization theory was so misguided.

When it comes to my work and my self, integration, not separation, is the key.  The better the person embodies the job, the less friction and the more synergy in the “marriage” between the two.  That’s why Jim Collins says that great companies first get the right people on the bus, in the right seats, and then decide where the bus is going.*

What does this mean on an individual level?  It means that instead of creating different versions of ourselves, it is both easier and more efficient to find or create a world in which our one same self works everywhere.

This, by the way, is why books like What Color Is Your Parachute?** are so useful. They help us to define where we already want to be going.  It’s also why Dr. Deborah Fisher, Erv Thomas and I wrote our own book about making work better in the moment.***  Not enough people know how to do this, and it is a critically important skill for anyone who works and wants to be happy about it.

You can find a job that matches you, or you can create one.  Most people try to do a little of both.  Either way, a better match equals higher productivity and less wasted energy.

Personally, I am getting better at it.  Rather than building a brick wall between work life and personal life, I have learned over the years to find a work life that maps into my self.  I still have bad days at work, but I don’t find myself needing to “fall back on” a better life elsewhere. 

Instead, I fall back on the fact that although some days are difficult, on the whole I’m doing something that’s quantifiably and qualitatively right for me

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