PRESENTING PROBLEM
A tech writer attending one of our strengths-based management workshops was considering leaving her job. She spent her days converting technical specifications and product images into product manuals and other user support materials. She loved to write and loved new technologies, so she had expected the job to be a perfect fit. Over the previous year, however, she’d found herself falling behind on her work and lacking the motivation to catch up.. She wondered if something was wrong with her or if she’d chosen the wrong career. She asked for help identifying her strengths to determine whether she was in the right profession.
ANALYSIS & INTERVENTION
We administered the Strengthscope™ assessment and gathered a career history, including career paths she had considered and discarded; why she had chosen technical writing; and her highs and lows since entering this particular technical writing job.
Her Strengthscope profile revealed that the majority of her energizing strengths were in the area of relationships – relationship building, empathy, and communication. When she saw this, she panicked. “OMG! How could I have chosen the completely wrong career. I sit alone in a cubicle all day writing. No wonder I’m unmotivated and feel drained.”
She immediately assumed she would need to return to college to pursue a different path. She dreaded telling her parents. We encouraged her to pause and consider an alternative possibility – what if she could change how she performed her current job, finding ways to leverage her relationship-building talents that would be good for both herself and the organization? She agreed to try.
When we dug a little deeper into her motivation for pursuing tech writing, the client remembered that she thought it would be a way to use her writing talent for good, specifically to make things better for technology users like her friends and family who were always complaining “these instructions make no sense!” A clear example of her empathy strength in action.
Then we asked her to walk through a typical day, focusing specifically on her interactions with coworkers and customers – the most obvious starting points for relationship building. After we had the outlines of a full day, we reviewed it step by step, working together to brainstorm options for doing each step differently. Our goal was to identify opportunities for her to exercise her relationship-building strengths and reconnect with her original motivation to help others.
We identified several actions she was willing to try and agreed to check back at two week intervals.
RESULT
Within a few weeks, the client had initiated several changes in how she did her work that resulted in her feeling more motivated and satisfied with her work and feeling more connected with her coworkers. Two actions in particular had changed not only how she did her work but increased her value to the company.
- She obtained permission and support from her supervisor to increase her access to customers, talking with the people who would actually use the manuals. Besides increasing the amount of human contact in her work, interacting directly with customers made her target audience feel more real than just a persona on a page and motivated her to do her best to meet their needs.
- She also started working in more public spaces at the office, such as the cafeteria, coffee bar, and open seating areas, for some part of each work day. It gave her more opportunities for informal interaction, including with the other tech writers. Over time, a small group of writers developed a mid-afternoon routine of moving to a particular lounge area where they would sit around a large table, each doing their own work. They found they were more productive and felt less drained at the end of the day.
The client concluded that she wasn’t undisciplined or in the wrong career, she was just lonely! By making small changes in how she did her work, the company got a higher level of productivity from her (and several coworkers) and retained an experienced employee who was now satisfied with her job. The client, meanwhile, increased her visibility and gained a reputation for having initiative.
