Job Crafting
Redesign your job around your strengths, not just its description.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Job crafting, from Wharton professor Amy Wrzesniewski, means thinking of your job not as a fixed description but as a vehicle for exercising your strengths and values. When you deliberately add tasks that let you express humor, creativity, curiosity, or kindness, you become more likely to see your work as a calling, feel happier, and — surprisingly — get rated as a better performer by supervisors. Wrzesniewski studied it in hospital janitorial staff, some of whom brought humor or creativity into their work and drew energy from it. Santos frames the journey of work as an ongoing opportunity to execute the values that make you feel alive.
Origin
Santos cites Wharton Business School professor Amy Wrzesniewski's research on 'job crafting,' famously conducted among hospital janitorial staff who reshaped menial work around personal strengths.
Core principles
- 01Reframe your job around the strengths and values it lets you exercise, not the job description.
- 02Injecting your virtues (humor, creativity, kindness, curiosity) into work makes it feel like a calling.
- 03Crafting raises both your happiness and your supervisors' rating of your performance.
- 04Any role — even the most menial — has room to bring in personal strengths.
How to run it
- 1
Identify your signature strengths
Name the values you most want to express at work — humor, leadership, bravery, curiosity, love of learning, kindness, social intelligence.
- 2
Re-describe the job around them
Stop framing your job as its official description; frame it as the set of chances it gives you to exercise those strengths.
- 3
Add strength-expressing tasks
Deliberately build in small activities that let you use those values, even if they aren't in the job description.
Pro tip The core duties get done better because the added strengths energize you.
In the wild
Wrzesniewski studied janitorial staff mopping hospital floors. Some brought in humor to chat with patients, or rearranged plants and paintings to express creativity — tasks not required by their job.
→ Those workers wanted to come to work, felt their job was a calling, and did the required duties better.
Common mistakes
Waiting for a better job description
People leave real opportunities to express their strengths on the table, assuming meaning has to come from a different role.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who can't easily change jobs but can change how they do the one they have.
Not ideal for
Roles with zero autonomy where no discretionary tasks are tolerated.
From the transcript
“Thinking of your job in terms of the way it allows you to exercise some of your like strengths, some of your virtues.”
“You wind up more likely thinking your job is a calling, you wind up happier at work, and your supervisors think you're performing better.”
From the episode
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