Improvement Insights Blog
The Antidote to a Soul-Sucking Job
Feel like you’re working in a Soul-Sucking Job? Here’s what to do about it:
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“My wife and I were talking, and a lot of people talk about how they don’t want to work in a soul-sucking job… a soul-sucking job. And I will tell you, the only soul-sucking jobs I ever had were working for a manager that I just couldn’t get along with, or I was being forced to do something, that was contrary to serving the customer I was supposed to be serving. You know, in software, we could do things the hard way or we could do it the easy way to get the result that the customer wanted. ‘Oh, no, you must do it the old, difficult way.’ No, stop that, all right?
“I believe that if you’re in a soul-sucking job, number one: find a better job. But number two: I have found that helping people do Quality Improvements is like a magic elixir to get people engaged with improving their work, right? So they no longer push out bad product to somebody who has to deal with it. They hate that. We all hate that. That is soul-sucking. I don’t disagree. But if you get people engaged in Quality Improvement and making things better, faster, cheaper all the time, guess what? They become engaged. They become excited.
“So that’s my improvement insight for this week. Quality improvement is the antidote to a soul-sucking job. If they won’t improve what you’re doing, go find a job where they will. The world will be better for it.
“Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
