Leading People To Do the Sh!t Work

I talk a lot about high performance. But what about the people who find themselves doing relatively mundane, repetitive, or low-skilled jobs?

We tend to imagine occupations like cleaners, fruit pickers, and production line workers when we think about mundane jobs. But many people in your team could also be doing some mind-numbing work, to fulfill the less-glamorous requirements of their role.

As a young software developer, for me that was documentation. Because coders were so negligent in this task, it spawned a whole new job category – technical writers. They would do the job that the coders couldn’t (or wouldn’t).

In Ep.151 of the podcast, I spoke about the documentary film, American Factory. It demonstrates the massive contrast in how different cultures approach what we would consider to be repetitive, low-skilled (albeit critical) work.

Like with many things, it comes down to the differences in leadership approach… the range of standards being set… the difference in expectations… and the different mindset adopted by leadership and workers alike.

This prompted me to create my 6 top tips for leading process workers.

1. Show the people that they matter. No matter how mundane the job, it is still a human being. There are lots of ways to show people they matter, but start by being really clear that you care about their wellbeing above anything else. And when they talk, make sure you listen to them.
2. Show people how they make a difference. It’s important that people see how they contribute to the overall purpose of the organization, and low-skilled workers are no different. 
3. Give them an external focus. Don’t let your people become insular in their thinking. As long as people are focused on making improvements to compete against something or someone else, they can’t help but shift their focus away from their normal egocentric view of the world. This can relieve the boredom, and keep the sense that they don’t matter at bay.
4. Provide visibility of Information. I think it’s preferable to give people as much information on business performance as you possibly can.If you can get as close to open-book management as you feel is sensible, you’ll get people’s buy-in to the overall performance of the company, not just the immediacy of their role.
5. Give people some self-determination and choice. With less educated or low-skilled workers, it’s much easier to fall into command-and-control mode. Don’t just tell people what to do, even if their work is relatively straightforward. As with all good leadership, you need to make it clear what result you need, but to give your people some say in how that’s achieved
6. Rally them around a compelling goal. An external threat can sometimes be a rallying point for your people, regardless of the type of jobs they do.

We need to recognize the nuances of leading people to do boring work, and give them the best leadership we possibly can. Just because their jobs might not seem that exciting or high-value doesn’t change the fact that, like anyone else in the workforce, they deserve competent leadership – it’s a right, not a privilege.