Good morning. Most jobs aren't designed. They accumulate — a task here, a leftover there — until there's nothing left in them worth caring about.
Leadership.
The Job Rebuild
Take the job of the person you've stopped expecting much from, and list what has actually changed about the work itself in the last year — the decisions they now make without you, the number they can now see for themselves. If the list is empty, whose design problem have you been treating as a character problem?
J. Richard Hackman, then at Yale and later a professor of organisational psychology at Harvard, and Greg Oldham, then at the University of Illinois, published Motivation through the Design of Work in Organizational Behavior and Human Performance in 1976. Their claim was structural rather than inspirational: how much a person cares about a job is largely a property of how the job was built. Five dimensions decide it. Skill variety, task identity — whether someone completes a whole piece of work or a fragment of it — and task significance together determine whether the work feels meaningful. Autonomy determines whether the person feels responsible for how it turns out. Feedback from the work itself, not from you, determines whether they know how they are doing. Then comes the arithmetic that does the damage: the first three average, and that average is multiplied by autonomy and by feedback. A job with no autonomy scores near zero however varied and important it is. The trap is reading a design problem as a character problem. You can raise your attention indefinitely without moving a single one of the five scores, and the score is what the person has been responding to all along.
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