HOW TO MAKE A BORING JOB EXCITING WITH INNOVATION?

If you are an ambitious professional, you wish you will have one meaty role after another. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. You will sometimes find yourself in a position that is drab, unglamorous, and undesirable. Many people bide their time during their tenure in such roles and thus miss the most significant opportunities of their career. Why bide your time when you can make a boring job exciting with the power of innovation?

If you find yourself in a drab job, you can use innovation to not only make the role exciting but also make a significant impact.

What is a drab role?

People often consider unglamorous and unchallenging roles as drab. They are seen as not challenging because they are heavy on implementation and fire fighting rather than analytical work. Sometimes people are afraid that being in a role like this can affect their image and their perceived skill set.

My Experience

Early in my career, I found myself in one such role. I started working with Citibank in financial control. The department was critical because it provided a dashboard to business managers. This dashboard allowed them to steer the business. Imagine what happens if the dash of your car malfunctions. You cannot drive the vehicle without making many mistakes. The same holds true for financial control. If it doesn’t work well, managers cannot run their business well.

Although the financial control department was of immense importance, the day to day work was not fascinating. Most of the work revolved around collating data from many systems into reports and passing them on to business managers. Due to a plethora of legacy systems, the reporting process was tedious and error prone. It required an immense amount of mindless corrections. Every mistake anyone made anywhere in the bank when processing transactions affected the reporting. They had to be fixed.

The days were long. I used to reach office at 9 am and leave work at 9 pm. There weren’t many rewards for such work either. Since most business managers expected the dashboard to work, there were no rewards for this work. The organization didn’t see the need to appreciate the herculean effort that went into keeping the reporting working. Yet, any error would be taken seriously and highlighted as a failing of the department.

It was not surprising that people wanted to get out of these roles as fast as possible.

Why do undesirable situations continue as status quo?

If you have stayed with me so far you must be asking the question “why would a dashboard not work correctly?”. If your car dashboard malfunctioned, you will get it fixed as soon as possible. You won’t just get by with a malfunctioning panel.

I asked the same question. I got reasons why things were the way they were. Lack of IT resources was the main reason. Moreover, the mindset was that it only took a little effort to correct mistakes.

Innovation to the rescue

After a month in the role, I was naturally wondering what was I doing there. At the same time, I began to visualize a future where the dashboard would function as it was supposed to. Flawlessly.

I figured if the analysts and managers were not busy fixing errors and collating data they could add enormous value to the business. They could be building valuable insights through analysis. This would help businesses make even better decisions.

18 Months of Bliss

Once I had the vision and a clear plan laid out, I was a man on a mission. Suddenly the work seemed interesting and worthwhile doing. After all, I was not doing mindless work but building something. I was creating capabilities to elevate how businesses use information.

Suddenly the work seemed interesting and worthwhile doing.

It took me some time to get the buy-in of the financial controller on this plan. A key issue was that he didn’t believe that it was even possible. But once the controller understood it was possible to do, he threw massive resources behind the project.

I quickly formed a team of contractors who could code . I designed a system, and we built it over the next several months. We did this in stages. Since every part of the system eliminated manual work, it freed up time. I used that extra time on subsequent stages.

I was on a high. Whereas earlier I used to have trouble waking up to go to work, I was hardly sleeping now. I found myself thinking almost all the time about how to make this system perfect.

Because of visible results every month, I was driven to do even more. Within 9 months, the system was completed and then I started building an analysis core.

Impressive Results

The outcome of months of work was amazing . Instead of closing the books in 30 days, we were closing in 7-10 days. Mistakes became almost zero and even if there were some mistakes, we had a lot of time to take care of them. On top of it, we could generate all kinds of cool reports and analyses on the fly. I regularly started leaving office at 6 pm instead of 9 pm.

When I look back at that time, I  see two key things.

1. There was a massive impact made on the business and organization. It was far more than what one can expect from such a role. This was possible with innovation.

2. Innovation changed a drab job into an exciting one.

Innovation changed a drab job into an exciting one

Lessons for the innovators

What lessons does it have for you if you find yourself in a drab role? How can you use this experience to do something similar?

The biggest take away is that you can transform any drab role into an exciting role.

But what is the process to do so?

Five steps to make a boring job exciting

The five step process of transforming any role from a drab one to an exciting one is as follows

• Understand what is the strategic importance of the role. No matter how mindless it seems, there is a reason why that role and that organization exists. Identify why the group exists. What is the goal of the organization in which this position exists?
•  Identify the biggest pain points for the customers of your group. Also visualize what new value your group can deliver to your customers. 
•   Between the pain of the customers and the potentially high impact output, identify which is more important at the moment. 
•  Design a way to either lessen that pain or achieve that superior organizational output that would make your organization more impactful. 
•  Connect that path to your position and see how your role can help achieve that path. 

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Once you have gone through this process, you will step into the role of an innovator. With this, you will not only create a high impact but will also transform a drab role into an exciting role.

And one more thing. You can use this process to make a bigger impact in your role even if you are already in an exciting job.

Who in your organization should be reading this post right now?