Want to Feel More Empowered at Work? Do This One Thing

Key Takeaways:

Job crafting is a term coined in 2001 that explains how employees can make small tweaks in their day-to-day duties in order to maximize their happiness and achievement in the workplace.
The dual-growth mindset builds upon the idea of job crafting, arguing that those who couple job crafting with a self-growth mindset find even greater levels of satisfaction.
In the era of remote work, the dual-growth mindset has become even more accessible for office workers.

In the era of “lazy girl jobs” and “quiet quitting”, finding a way to feel empowered at work feels almost impossible. But researchers seem to have a rebuttal—and that rebuttal is one that incorporates both a “dual-growth mindset” and “job crafting”.

What Job Crafting Really Is

Both the idea of the dual-growth mindset and job crafting comes from the work of Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale University. Her work on job crafting dates back to 2001, when she coauthored a paper with Jane E. Dutton at the University of Michigan.

The idea was simple: allow people to make adjustments to their roles so that their jobs can help them realize their own personal goals. This can be done by changing the types of tasks employees work on, the relationships/teams they have to build, and/or changing the “cognitive boundaries” of their work (giving their work new meaning).

Here’s a concrete example: say a line cook feels their job is monotonous. They go to work every day to execute the same recipes over and over again, just to perform their routine cleaning tasks and go home.

However, various job crafting techniques can help said line cook feel better and more empowered in their work. For example, an employer can “change task boundaries” (adjust the line cook’s role) to allow the cook to incorporate more menu writing and creative exercises if they so choose. Additionally, the cook can implement a cognitive shift to start seeing themselves as an artist and craftsperson.

The "Two-Pole Strategy"

Over twenty years later, Wrzesniewski has revisited this idea of job crafting in a new paper co-authored by Justin Berg at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Adam Grant at the Wharton School, and Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle at Google. This new article, published in 2022, argues that a “two-pole strategy” can have huge impacts on happiness at work.

The first pole is job crafting, while the second one is more akin to self crafting—or adopting a self-growth mindset.

The idea is that the two poles are stuck in the ground and ultimately tied together. So even if you start moving one pole, you won’t get very far if the other is still stuck in the ground.

“If what job crafting does is lift the job pole out of the ground and allow you to move it around, then moving the self pole can introduce the possibility of bigger or more dynamic changes to the design of the work,” Wrzesniewski said during an interview with Yale University.

The authors ran an experiment for the paper examining how participants responded to one of three different growth-mindset interventions: one that only focused on the self, another that only focused on the job, and a third combined the two concepts (the “dual-growth” mindset).

The paper found there were immense benefits to the participants’ long-term happiness when adopting a dual growth mindset. Additionally, participants’ new habits that formed during the experiment stuck around much longer than their single-growth mindset counterparties.

“The nature of the changes people in the dual-growth mindset group were planning were just different,” she added. “That’s what we believe explains the longer-term benefits. It seems to be that mindset drives happiness through what you’re able to do because of the mindset.”

How Those With Remote Work Might Have an Advantage

The best news is that in a post-pandemic world, the opportunities for job crafting and adopting a dual growth mindset are ripe for the taking.

“Because of the pandemic, more people are working remotely now, and part of what that does is automatically loosen a lot of the strong scripts and cues that surround people in the job, what the routines are, and so on,” Wrzesniewski explained during the interview. “That becomes a really rich opportunity for job crafting.”

For example, being able to do a job from the comfort of your own home may make you feel more like yourself when you’re doing it. Therefore, being able to turn your professional self “off” between calls means that you can connect yourself more deeply with your work. This will allow your self-growth and job-growth to become interlinked.