Job Sculpting
The Art of retaining your best people by Timothy Butler and James Waldroop
Summary
Hiring good people is tough, but as every senior executive knows, keeping them can be even tougher. Indeed, most executives can tell a story or two about a talented professional who joined their company to great fanfare, added enormous value for a couple of years, and then departed unexpectedly. Usually such exits are written off. “She got an offer she couldn’t refuse,” you hear, or, “No one stays with one company for very long these days.”
Hiring good people is tough, but keeping them can be even tougher. The professionals streaming out of today's MBA programs are so well educated and achievement oriented that they could do well in virtually any job. But will they stay? According to noted career experts Timothy Butler and James Waldroop, only if their jobs fit their deeply embedded life interests--that is, their long-held, emotionally driven passions. Butler and Waldroop identify the eight different life interests of people drawn to business careers and introduce the concept of job sculpting, the art of matching people to jobs that resonate with the activities that make them truly happy. Managers don't need special training to job sculpt, but they do need to listen more carefully when employees describe what they like and dislike about their jobs. Once managers and employees have discussed deeply embedded life interests--ideally, during employee performance reviews--they can work together to customize future work assignments. In some cases, that may mean simply adding another assignment to existing responsibilities. In other cases, it may require moving that employee to a new position altogether. Skills can be stretched in many directions, but if they are not going in the right direction--one that is congruent with deeply embedded life interests--employees are at