Page 49 - Make Work Great

It Starts with You

In actually doing the work, you may have discovered new respon-
sibilities upon you, new relationships that have become important,
and new output that you must deliver. Recall from the Prologue the
defi nition of your role set: the small group of people who infl uence
your actions the most. They may or may not have had anything to do
with writing your job description, but they are the ones setting your
agenda and demanding your time. Determining what they expect will
go a long way toward discovering your workplace purpose.
Discovery of your workplace purpose is the fi rst step; expressing
it in a form that is memorable and meaningful is the next. This can
be tricky because you must conceptualize it at an appropriate level of
detail. You could, for example, express your purpose as a to-do list
of several hundred items. That might be accurate, but it’s not easily
memorable or describable. At the opposite extreme, you could express
your purpose as “keeping the boss happy” or “supporting custom-
ers.” Such statements are concise and memorable but not particularly
meaningful; they could easily apply to many different jobs.
A summary outputs list lies between these two extremes and allows
you to defi ne your workplace purpose in an abbreviated but meaning-
ful format. It’s a short statement of your overarching purpose followed
by a list of specifi c outputs you’re supposed to deliver. For each item,
you note how much of your resources you spend on it, whom you
interact with to deliver it, and how your success is measured. Limit
the list to between fi ve and seven items to help you achieve some level
of detail without creating an overwhelming inventory. You should be
able to read it aloud in about 90 seconds.*
Of course, there are many ways to craft such a list. Figure 2.1
shows two examples from individuals with different types of respon-
sibilities at different levels in the same organization. Notice that
there are some differences between the lists. The individual worker

*There is an analogy here to the “elevator pitch” concept employed widely by salespeople. The idea is
to be able to articulate the value of your offering in the time it takes to ride an elevator with someone
so that you and that person can rapidly determine whether further interaction is valuable. Here, the
value you describe is your workplace purpose.

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