Happy February from the Inside Job team!
It’s already been a helluva year, and it’s only mid-February!
The two of us have been very busy working with our clients, running our businesses, and helping organizations develop their leaders and improve their cultures. But we’ve missed our conversations on the Podcast, and we miss engaging with all of you! We’ll be bringing a new season of the Podcast back this summer, and in the meantime we thought we’d use our Substack platform as a way to re-engage with you on conversations about our relationships with work.
Recently, we’ve noticed a trend among our clients — many of them are spending a lot of their energy thinking (and talking) about how other people are doing their jobs; others are engaging with side projects to keep them “motivated”, “engaged”, and/or “less bored” that extend beyond their scope of responsibilities. What all of these situations have in common is that the core work isn’t getting done, or isn’t getting done with excellence. Simply put — not enough people are doing their jobs.
It’s worth noticing how much time we spend concerned about how other people are spending their time and how their work is going, so we decided to talk about it ourselves. We recorded a live podcast episode and embedded it here. You do need to be a paid subscriber to listen, but we think it’s worth it! During our discussion, we ask our listeners to consider:
How and why it’s so tempting to worry about what’s happening in someone else’s sandbox.
What kinds of stories or assumptions are we making about what’s important to other people, or how motivated they are. (Hint: we don’t know what’s happening in someone else’s mind, or what they’re thinking.)
How being pre-occupied with how hard other people are working might be a masking strategy for our own anxiety, boredom or ambition.
The importance of making sure your house is in order before stepping onto someone else’s property.
We talked about watching out for self-righteousness and indignation as we comment on other people’s work. And of course, we reference Marky Mark and his character in
The Departed:
We hope you find the episode to be helpful, and if we can support you or your organization, please contact us at info@insidejobthepodcast.com
Talk with you soon,
Nayla and Eric
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