When Hating Your Job Advances Your Career

The tough part of dealing with job tasks that nobody wants to perform is that they are vital to keeping processes running smoothly – someone’s got to do them!

Action Item: Most Hated Tasks For The Job You Have

Identify the three least pleasurable tasks you need to perform, and why they are done.

Name Three Hated Tasks                                   List the Major Reason That They Exist

1) ______________________            ____________________________

2) ______________________            ____________________________

3) ______________________            ____________________________

It’s not just your current job, even the job you covet most has tasks that have earned the “Most Hated” tag. The quickest way to get that job, and then excel in it, is to figure out what those tasks are and learn to do them well.

Action Item: Interview Sheet for the Job You Want

Ask an incumbent in a position you want to list the 10 most important tasks for the job. Then ask them to rank them according to how pleasurable they are. You now have information on what is important, and what is most difficult/disliked.

Critical Job Tasks                                              

1) ______________________            6) ____________________________

2) ______________________            7) ____________________________

3) ______________________            8) ____________________________

4) ______________________            9) ____________________________

5) ______________________            10) ___________________________

Additional Action Steps

1.      Use your judgment - make sure that it is a critical job function and that performance tends to be low at this task.

2.      Create new processes to deal with the least liked tasks. You’ll find that in many cases you can improve performance and completely reverse the difficulty of the task.

3.      Reward those who perform well at this task.