How To Lead with Curiosity To Fall Back In Love With Your Job

Are you feeling a bit bored at work? Are you missing the growth and challenge you felt when you first started your role?
 
If you have been in the same role or industry for a while, these surges of lethargy are completely understandable. Your connection with your work is similar to your personal relationships. Both require energy to keep the relationship exciting and stimulating. 
 
How can you fall back in love with your job and your work? Lead with curiosity to invigorate what excites you most. Here are three questions to initiate your discovery of falling back in love.  
 
Question #1: What interested you about your role or industry in the first place? 
 
Many times, we get caught in our routines and forget what initially attracted us to our job. Make a list of the items that originally interested you about your role. Highlight areas you no longer are experiencing. If these areas bring you joy and excitement, create an action plan to integrate them back into your work. 
 
Question #2: Where can you become an expert in your field? 
 
Once you understand your responsibilities and how to effectively execute your projects, it’s easy to stay complacent. Becoming an expert takes work, dedication, and concentration. What more can you learn about your role? Are there courses that can provide you a deeper knowledge? Take this opportunity to celebrate your accomplishments, then ask yourself what else you can learn to continue to grow.
 
Question #3: How does your role give you purpose? 
 
In every job you take, it’s important to ensure you understand how your responsibilities tie to your overall mission or purpose. This exercise might appear to be easy for some roles compared to others. For example, let’s look at a teacher’s purpose. Their purpose could be to increase emotional wellbeing for future generations. What if your job is to deliver packages? Amazon does a great job of sharing their employees’ purpose, from the moment a package is ordered to delivered.
 
No matter what role you are in, ensure you see how your actions impact your final consumer and highlight each impact you create that energizes your passion and purpose. 

How Collaboration Creates Competitive & Cohesive Teams

I spoke at a Human Resources Leader Conference in Las Vegas last week. Pre-Covid 19, these events were overflowing. People polled said they liked the live events because it gave them an opportunity to network, helped them professional development, and gave access to new tools and technologies in the exhibition hall.

But this week, when the organizers polled the attendees, hands down, the number one reason stated was to connect with others.

Was this just a reaction to quarantine and zoom fatigue? It turns out that the leaders were looking to cross- collaborate with a diverse population. Collaboration was the goal.

When I was new to the airline industry, I got hired by Allegiant . They were expanding their fleet and bases daily, and my team needed to grow exponentially. Rather than panic, I leaned into what I knew. I leveraged my expertise in Talent Acquisition to recruit a team from various industries, including hospitality, entertainment, engineering, and customer service. My boss actually called my team, “the island of misfit toys!”

I grew the team from seven to seventeen quite quickly. We “misfits” from outside the industry learned from those with experience inside. But the opposite was also true. People familiar with hospitality and customer service standards brought their expertise to our talent acquisition strategy; the people from engineering brought industry insights to help us differentiate ourselves from our competitors, and the entertainment industry professionals provided recommendations on process to enhance our interview experience. The company grew to become cohesive and highly competitive. Within one year, Allegiant went from a poor rating on Glassdoor to receiving an award for being one of the best places to interview.

The challenges we faced, our diverse perspectives, and our ability to collaborate created a winning team, or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines as an “optimal experience” in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. We achieved flow as a team.

How has collaboration brought out the best in you and your teams? Challenges will keep on coming. Rather than having to figure out each answer on your own, collaborate to create. Your best solution might just be one misfit idea away!

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Rebecca Ahmed is an award-winning speaker, business consultant, and an Energy Leadership Index™ Master Practitioner (ELI-MP), which is an exclusive training in human energy and how we can experience, express, and expand it in ourselves and others. Rebecca is also a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation (ICF), 

first appeared on www.pickthebrain.com

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