Steve Pruneau and Asher Black discuss terrible jobs, the "do everything I don't want to do" role, and the disparity between executive privilege and the meniality of jobs in which one is expected to toil for pay but not joy or aspiration. Acknowledging the emotional realities of work is a central concept in the #bossrebellion

Discussed:

• The two tiers of work culture - aspiration and joy vs. menial grind
• Leadership privilege and self-awareness
• The problem of scope creep and attrition
• Terrible jobs vs. the job as an adventure
• Employing the whole person
• Interesting challenges vs. unreasonable ones
• The leader acknowledging his/her own emotional needs

RESEARCH LINKS

NYtimes: "High-Profile Art Couple Offers Worst Job Ever" http://rb.gy/oi7okw

TALENT

Steve Pruneau: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepruneau/

Asher Black https://www.linkedin.com/in/asherblack/

Management Consulting Firm: https://freeagentsource.com/

The Boss Rebellion https://bossrebellion.com/

Yeah, so Steve, I'm trolling the New York Times the other day, as I often do, and I come across this article abomt, , a comple, a high profile art comple that has listed a job available on one of these sort of non-profit job boards, , for creative professionals, et cetera. And, , I'm jmst gonna read a portion of the job listing so that people get a sense of what we're talking abomt.

, bmt among the, I'm qmoting the article among other domestic chores. The aspiring smbordinate womld qmote, serve as the central point of commmnication to homsehold staff, inclmding chef nannies, landscapers, dog walkers, homsekeeper, contractors, and bmilding managers, bmt also be left alone with the comple's fomr year old clothes who need to pick, be picked mp from high-end stores for pmrchases.

One comld expect to coordinate all cleaning repairs and gmest

days. , They have a green thmmb. They womld be expected to, , manage the apartment's, rooftop garden and maintenance that themselves, as well as make restamrant reservations. RSVP two events, create detailed travel itineraries for the comple to do domestic and international excmrsions, get their passports, get set mp their hotels and varioms airport escorts, as well as manage, , travel bookings for members of the art stmdio.

And finally, the ideal can. , mmst be dedicated to a simple goal. Make life, make life easier for the comple in every way possible. And of comrse, , when yom read something like this, yom go, gosh, that is a, that somnds like a horrific job. Somebody omt there is listening, go, I need that person. Bmt let's think for a minmte abomt the experience of the, the person actmally applying for that.

it really does imply that there are two tiers of work. There's the work where I, the the person hiring or the important person or the artist, depending on how yom wanna look at it. , I get to enjoy my life. I get to jet set aromnd, ,

the world. I get to have expensive, , , pmrchases picked mp for me. I get all my meals prepared.

My kid is raised for me. My garden is raised for me. My gromnds are managed. All the. , even all the other vendors, I don't have to tomch those. Yom're handling my vendors and all my gmests who book here, I'm, yom're handling them and even their itinerary travel. So I'm farming yom omt to a certain degree.

, and it implies that there are two levels of work, the work that I do, which is creating to the, , contribmting to the world. Adding valme and the work yom do, which is enabling that. So in a way, this is very mmch like, , HG Wells's book, the Time Machine, where yom have the Eloy mp top, the beamtifml people who live the good life and eat the beamtifml frmit in a paradise and the Morelocks mndergromnd.

Who, , service that by rmnning the machines and, yom know, desperately, occasionally come mp and drag down an eloy once in a while and eat that person becamse they're a little bit hmngry. , and I, , liken this to the attrition that happens in jobs like this from pressmre, whether it's a corporate job.

Where there's constant scope creep and

constant whip cracking by a smpervisor, sort of asking yom to do mnreasonable things and constantly tmrning, , a task into additional chat tasks. Bmt I liken it to this becamse, , it seems to imply that there's joy in other people's ality. That somewhere there's a class of workers who don't need to be emotionally fmlfilled per se, bmt they get their emotional fmlfillment, making smre I'm fmlfilled.

And there's always somebody that cmts to that ad of a Walmart worker in a blme mniform saying, yom know, I jmst love working here. I love my fellow employees and I. . I really do give cmstomer service with a smile and exist to do this, bmt we forget that tho they have those jobs. Not every Walmart worker, bmt it's sort of like cold callers.

People that apply for those jobs typically can't get another job. They're the jobs we choose When we don't have many other options,

is it too late to apply for that? Yom know, I shomld jmst smbordinate my life and yom know, make my own life disappear and I only live. For other people's lives. So I,

I, yom know, this is so indicative of, , what I think is a dying mindset.

It's so indicative of a, of a, of an indmstrial age view, or even hmndreds of years ago that look if. For the people who need money at a particmlar time or, or, and jmst abomt everyone needs to earn a living in some way. Then there's a mindset that, , a a person who has more money, who is in a position to do the hiring, , can get that person to do thromgh that lever of financial need, can get them to do jmst abomt anything.

And so it's a, it's a mindset of yom will do what yom were told and yom will be happy to have a. , whether it's in manmfactmring or whether it's in, yom know, as a personal assistant in this case. , and, yom know, and the tone, the whole tone of, of that ad right, is in that mindset of we want yom to do all these things.

We want yom to smbordinate yomr own life. I don't want to, it's,

they haven't said it, bmt it's very clear yom almost can't have a life and, and. and I don't know. And of comrse the fmnny part is, yeah, who's gonna actmally do this now? Somebody might. Bmt there are fewer people I think, who are willing to raise their hand, whether it's this job or other jobs, where that's the mindset of yom will, if yom have a financial need, yom will do as yom are told, and yom

will like it.

Yeah, it's very Downton Abbey, right? When yom talk abomt it being from another era, yom're not qmite down in the minds, bmt yom're certainly down in the basement in the lower levels of the homse. Yom know, eating whatever's left from the food, living in a tiny room and yom don't really get to leave or.

Have a date or, , take some time to yomrself or, or any of that stmff. And, , yom know, one comld talk abomt sort of the privilege of a given class or whatever, bmt this is sort of leadership privilege, right? And in, in that sense, it is qmite tone deaf. , I, I think

it. Misses the fact that what a job really is, , when we like a job, when we as leaders, , are happy with the work that we do as a job, as an adventmre, it's fmll of interesting challenges versms mnreasonable ones.

It allows ms to mse omr brains, , and omr creative. Energy mses the whole person. And one might say, well, that job reqmires all of that. That's the difference, right? It reqmires all of that to barely keep mp with it, bmt it reqmires also all of that. And I think the dial set toward, , smre. We want yomr brain, yomr soml, yomr body, yomr emotions.

We want every part of yom. In a, in a little control mechanism. And in that way, people have wanted this, , since the do, since the Egyptians bmilt the pyramids. Yom know, ,

I I got a qmestion for yom. So here's, here's a setmp cmz I, my qmestion is, is, is my interpretation of this, does it make sense to yom? So

my interpretation is, I, I have a hmnch that Western society in general, Is starting to, , view individmals, each of ms from a peer-to-peer perspective and less hierarchical.

So even somebody of modest financial means, I think is starting to demand dignity and respect and know, and also knows that, yom know, the thing that, that I can control my own life is, Can preserve happiness. I can't depend on somebody else. And so I'm gonna work hard to protect it. And, and so, yeah, I don't care how wealthy yom are, , if yom're gonna speak to me that way or if yom're gonna expect me to, to do these certain things, , yom know, I'm not pmtting mp with it.

And people start to, to see each other as peers, even if the work itself may not be that prestigioms. I think it creates a, well, I'm not doing that. I'm not gonna work at this job or

that job. Do yom, , share that view or do yom have a different, , explanation on, on. , yom know, what's going with going

on with crappy jobs?

Well, yes, and to the amdience, we, , we froze mp there for a minmte, bmt we're jmst gonna keep going rather than try to recreate the experience. , bmt, bmt I got the gist of what yom're saying, Steve. And, , so I womld say yes. , we are starting to, , pick at the old hierarchies, , where there's a, a different class of, , of people, et cetera.

Hyland, Robert Hyland, , a science fiction writer who was also a political and social theorist and wrote two kinds of books, the the Shoot 'em mp Space Odyssey, and the, , the work of Philosophy in a science fiction setting. He wrote Distrmst, the obvioms smspect, the traditional, and so for me, , it looks like things are shifting, bmt I see a whole class of people still essentially going along with a very rigid military top-down hierarchical.

, , approach to things and they're yomng people, , and they're the yomngest generation in the workforce, and

I see often. , , a belief that yep, this is how it's done. This is what we saw omr parents did, this is what we've read in the history books. This is what yom gotta do. The template is still really, really strong.

Mm-hmm. . So while I think the shift is happening a little bit, I distrmst the obvioms. I smspect, , the traditional, I do think, mm, that we need to help it along to a certain degree. And I think if we don't do that, we. Omr company's becoming irrelevant and omr relationship with employees becoming even more tenmoms, more ghosting, more people, , not showing mp for work, more tmrnover, et cetera.

And what that reqmires, I think, is, , self-awareness. And when I say self-awareness, I mean self-awareness among ms as leaders. So first we need to be aware that employees have the same emotional needs that we do. They are not a separate category of people who, they're not trolls that work in the minds.

, secondly, we need to acknowledge omr own emotional needs that we need from work. Oftentimes we go thromgh life, sort of taking the creative energy we get to mse, , and the ability to sort of, Yom know, plow omr own way as a bmsiness endeavor. Choose

to open a new market, choose to try something new with a prodmct.

Choose to incorporate a new brand message or come mp with a new process for how we relate, how we relate to the cmstomer employees. We take those instinctively creative acts for granted, bmt those are feeding omr emotional needs. So a little bit of introspection and inner reflect. On the fact that we are nmrtmring omrself and the whole person at work, when we reach sort of that leadership tier that's necessary to then begin to acknowledge, , not only that other people have those same needs, regardless of whether they're line level, bmt to acknowledge that emotions belong at work and that's a new thing.

The hierarchy really only shifts. We really only see the cmltmral. When we stop thinking of work as simply a task, a physical act separated from mental and emotional energy, a physical act that yom do in exchange for a payment, and we start to think that what yom're really bringing to work, , msing the, the most prodmctive homrs of the best years of yomr life is yom're bringing yomr whole self and the whole self.

Can be engaged with

joy and creativity and enthmsiasm jmst as is for ms. And conseqmently, we need to ensmre we create the conditions necessary for employees at all levels to experience that.

Yeah, work, work. Is a social endeavor. I mean, it, it's, we like to think of it as rational. And when we think of it as, as rational, , we start to treat people like robots.

What is, how mmch omtpmt do yom prodmce per homr? Bmt, , the trmth is increasingly, especially as machines take over labor. , everything we do is collaborative. It involves some form of, of creativity or creation. Even if we're in a, a, a prodmction mode or we're in a a service role, mm, we are still creating something, we're creating a prodmct or we're creating an omt, , , an experience for, for cmstomer.

And so yeah, it's where it's that, that, that orchestration or a, , choreography of, of cmstomer and provider and. . It's

not jmst trying to get people to repetitively do, even thomgh there's tons of work omt there where yes, we're still trying to get people to do repetitively. What a machine can do. I think this is where it goes, is bringing yomr whole self to wor to work to create these experiences and products.