Red Shirt Wisdom
Designing a role which fits your unique abilities and passions is the key to engagement and the minimisation of toxicity. It holds true whether you are an employee or an entrepreneur designing your own role.
The Early Bird Catches the Worm
About four years ago I spent the day shadowing a successful business person in the San Francisco Bay Area. We started the day at 5 am (ouch) and I was given a couple of hours to write about a topic I was passionate about and turn it into a script which I would use to film a clip later that afternoon.
No time to think and also no time to plan my wardrobe or to overthink being in front of a camera in a fairly professional film studio. The ideas and the concepts poured out of me and the red shirt, on sale at GAP was the only semi-clean item of clothing left, prior to me flying home the next day.
Conscious Design
The clip captures the essence of career engagement and how conscious design i.e. designing a role to take into account the human, the soul who will execute that role is one of the most powerful things one can do. It’s not about wedging a human into a flat on-paper role. It is about allowing that human to shape that role based on their strengths and unique gifts. Entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners can also be found guilty of wedging themselves into a flat on-paper role rather than building a job description for themselves that activates the use of their strengths 90% of the time rather than their weaknesses. I can still see myself a few years back, in my own business, thinking I needed to do my own IT Helpdesk role and spending 5 frustrating and very short-fuse hours attempting to trouble-shoot a laptop issue which would’ve taken an outsourced Geeks-are-Us service 15 minutes to fix.
Without conscious design we have trouble, struggle and ultimately burn-out.
Control
Underpinning conscious design and the benefits of applying a strengths-based model to our work, is the human need and rightly so, for control. Dan Pink’s best-selling 2009 book Drive reviews the dizzying array of different ways that control has been found to improve people’s lives. As Pink summarises the literature, more control leads to better grades, better sports performance, better productivity and more happiness. Cal Newport in his 2012 book So Good they Can’t Ignore You, cites an organisation applying the Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) model. In a ROWE company, all that matters are your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take holidays and how often you check your email are irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the important things done. No results. No job. That simple.
Entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners take heed too. Many of you will unconsciously make assumptions about what your role needs to be, hence you wedge yourself into a role and a working week that very few people would sign up for. Your preconceptions and your defaults are controlling you.
The Breakfast Club Model
Some of you are aware of the Breakfast Club 121 Mastermind sessions I have started offering via video call on Friday mornings AEST. The title is obvious given I offer them during breakfast hours. I also penned the title after writing my previous blog post where I explored the powerful themes John Hughes and his Brat Pack actors explored in that iconic 80’s movie, The Breakfast Club.
‘You see us as you want to see us—in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. – Brian Johnson. The Breakfast Club. 1985.
Without conscious design it is easy to default to someone else’s version of success. It is easy to shape-shift ourselves into society’s or a workplace’s definition of what our role and our career should look like. The Breakfast Club characters were all around 17 years of age and were in touch with their souls and their strengths. They were aware they were being wedged and moulded but they had not become ‘unconscious’. The Breakfast Club Mastermind sessions are about making the unconscious conscious and then actively designing and changing things to pull people from their struggle. It’s applying red shirt wisdom.
Red Shirt Wisdom meets the Breakfast Club
When I created this red shirt wisdom script and clip a few years back, who would’ve thought that the message would fit so perfectly today with my philosophy and the work I do with clients on Friday mornings? It’s a bit eerie but extremely affirming that I knew then what my best work would be now.
In Closing
Use conscious design to work as you want to work, to be seen as you want to be seen. Otherwise you will end up working as others want you to work and be seen as others want to see you. (Cut to Bender, final scene The Breakfast Club. Raises fist in defiance as he walks across the Chicago High School football field with Simple Minds iconic 1985 track ‘Don’t you Forget about Me’ playing in the background).
Don’t YOU forget about you.