Author: Allison Rimm

Sometimes we have to be shocked into seeing something that was there all along.

For a senior executive I’ll call Karen, one of those defining moments came most unexpectedly when her boss tried to give her a one-line performance review for the third year in a row.

Before Karen was promoted to vice president, her annual evaluations had included detailed comments that guided her professional growth. This year, she was determined to elicit specific feedback, especially since she had just endured a stressful year leading a major project that defined the company’s future.

But when she pressed for more specifics, the president simply said, “I trust you to continue doing what you do so well, and I expect you’ll ask for my help if you need it.”

In that moment, she realized something profound: He was telling her that she was free. She was in charge of her own considerable domain — and her own life. Somehow, amid the pressures to meet operational goals and balance budgets, she had failed to notice the full implications of that shift.

She wanted to make sure she understood correctly. “You mean to say that I can push the envelope as far as I want, as long as I believe it is in the best interest of the company, and you’ll tell me when I’ve gone too far?”

He nodded his agreement. She was buoyed by the possibilities that her newfound freedom presented, and at the same time, she felt the weight of the responsibility this change implied. Before she even made it to the door, Karen started thinking about how she could take ownership — and advantage — of this situation.

What opportunities are right in front of you that you’ve yet to notice? I had one of those “aha” moments a few years ago when my then eight-year-old son asked me to pour him a glass of milk. As usual, I reflexively rose to get it for him even though he was standing right next to the refrigerator. This time, however, I noticed that he could easily reach everything he needed to get it for himself and probably could have done so for a couple of years already. Now that I’d noticed, I told him he could get his own milk from now on. Emptying the dishwasher soon made its way onto his chore list too.

Once back in her office, Karen acknowledged to herself that she’d been getting little pleasure from her work in the past several months. An increase in regulatory scrutiny in her industry required her to spend a great deal of time on compliance matters that bored her. She thought about how she could experience more joy at work. It would clearly require spending more time on projects she enjoyed and less on efforts that left her feeling drained. But how could she pull that off?

As she considered her options, she remembered that one of her colleagues had once contemplated a legal career. She wondered if he would be interested in taking over her compliance work. To her delight, he was excited to take on this project, which would involve his working extensively with the firm’s in-house counsel. In exchange, Karen took on one of his projects, an initiative that played more to her strengths in operations and large-scale project management and involved working with a vendor to implement a new computerized business-support system.

Once she was aware of her freedom, she took full advantage of it. In the process of breaking free of her least-favorite responsibility, she helped a colleague find more pleasure in his own work. What’s more, this redistribution of responsibilities better matched their respective skill sets. Within a few short weeks, both initiatives had advanced much more quickly than they had in the previous months.

Like Karen, you probably have more latitude to define your work than you realize. If you were free to approach your work differently, what would you change in order to boost your satisfaction and effectiveness?

• Give yourself time to think about your professional experience. What can you do to increase the percentage of your time devoted to projects that bring you joy and fulfillment?

• Give careful consideration to what you and your teammates can do to boost your levels of engagement, enjoyment, and contribution.

A major reason Karen hadn’t recognized, until her moment of truth, how much freedom she had was that she had never received formal leadership training. She is not alone. That’s often the case for people who are promoted because they are great engineers or physicians, for example. But the qualities that made them exceptional individual contributors didn’t prepare them for the challenges they later faced leading teams or projects.

Along with the freedom that comes with being the boss is the obligation to know what you don’t know and secure the resources you need to excel in your role. Seek out the professional development opportunities that will give you the tools you need to lead effectively. Consider working with an executive coach if you don’t know where to start or if you feel that you would benefit from individual attention.

You may not have much latitude to define the kinds of tasks you do at work. But no matter what your role, it’s likely that you have great freedom to define how you accomplish your assigned responsibilities. It’s up to you to find those opportunities and make the most of them.

As a professional, you have a responsibility to use your talents wisely — and a right to enjoy yourself while doing so. But many people fail to meet that responsibility, and they don’t claim their right to take pleasure in their work.

Consider a CEO I’ll call Michael. His life isn’t much different from the lives of many CEOs. From the outside, it looks busy but rewarding. From the inside, as I learned when I was hired to help him, his life included a string of disappointments.

He’s an enormously talented and accomplished manager: Just before he landed this coveted position, he had successfully overseen the construction of a $100 million building project and masterminded the relocation of nearly a thousand employees into the new space. But when I first got to know Michael, there were so many demands coming at him he could barely get through the day in one piece.

New to his role, he felt he needed to be personally involved in everything under his purview — which was everything. He was consistently overbooked, even though his assistant tried to convince him not to accept every meeting request. He was always running late, and he began to develop a reputation for being unfocused and unreliable. The day he failed to attend a meeting with a trustee subcommittee, the chairman of the board insisted he get control of this problem. That’s when we started working together.

In our first meeting, I asked Michael why he had pursued the CEO position and how it compared with what he’d hoped it would be. He confided that while he was in the trenches, he’d often believed he had a better handle than the former CEO on what the company needed, and he relished the chance to be the chief decision maker. But he wasn’t comfortable letting go of the details, so now, as chief executive, he showed up at meetings where he wasn’t needed and missed meetings where his input was required.

When he disappointed his colleagues, he disappointed himself. Where he once felt the pleasure of daily victories, he now lived under a cloud of dissatisfaction with his work and home life.

The last thing he needed was to be reminded of yet another responsibility, but the truth was that he wasn’t fulfilling his key obligation to use his talents wisely. What’s more, he was standing in the way of his staff’s ability to fully utilize their own gifts. He needed to trust his people and let go of trying to control everything.

He needed a strategic framework for setting priorities, and he needed to assure himself that he had the right people on his team so he could stop micromanaging and concentrate on his own work. We first performed what I call a Time and Emotion Study, reviewing how he’d spent his hours and assessing how well this aligned with his objectives (not well at all). We then created a task map of what needed to be done and matched his team members’ skills to the required work, reassigning some tasks and filling skills gaps.

Finally he agreed to back off and let his VPs lead their initiatives independently. That allowed him to reclaim dozens of hours for tasks that were clearly in his domain — one of which was making it home for family dinners at least twice a week.

This simple framework helped him get his priorities straight, and in the process, claim his right to joy on the job.

Joy? Does any busy executive really have a shot at finding joy on the job? We usually think of high-level professionals as attaining a certain level of achievement-related satisfaction and getting external rewards such as raises and promotions. Rarely, if ever, is their happiness given serious consideration. Joy certainly isn’t in the core curriculum for most MBA programs.

But achieving joy at work is not only possible; it’s a necessity. I’ve come to appreciate that happiness on the job is a leading indicator of an individual’s ability to sustain high levels of passion, performance, and productivity over the long run. If we can uncover our true gifts and find work that makes regular use of them, we’ve fulfilled our responsibility to use them wisely and we’ve optimized our chances for claiming our right to enjoy the process.

When I work with people, I track their joy quotient, which is a measure of their joy-to-hassle ratio during any given situation. In fact, I keep a joy meter in my office. When I worked in the executive suite at Massachusetts General Hospital, countless people — even world-famous doctors — would come into my office, close the door, and move the dial toward hassle or joy, depending on what had happened to them recently.

We can’t always control what assignments we accept at work. But regardless of our position, the choice we make about how we approach our work is up to us. Consider examining your business priorities — the goals you’ve promised to meet — then conducting a Time and Emotion Study to see how you’ve spent your time over the past few months. How well has your use of time fit with your objectives? Follow that up by making a task map and examining how well your responsibilities are aligned with your talents.

If the fit isn’t as close as you would like, try talking to your colleagues to see what you can do as a team to reassign some responsibilities. The goal is to move the dial on your meter closer to joy. It’s your right.