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Ikigai

Ikigai is a Japanese word that means something like "reason for being".

Under one interpretation, if:

➕ The thing is useful, and
👍🏽 You are good at it, and
😃 You enjoy doing it

Then that thing is your Ikigai.

People produce more value if they spend more time doing things that are their Ikigai.

One of your key goals as a manager is to help people find their ikigai

Why?

It's obvious that people should do useful things.
It's pretty obvious that people should do things that they are good at: they'll tend to do them faster and/or at a higher quality standard.
If people do things they enjoy, then

Most importantly, they're more likely to obsess about the thing, spend hours and hours thinking about it. And that will make them better at it. The world is complicated, and obsession is needed for excellence.
This obsession is also more likely to be sustainable: they're more likely to be able to continue doing the things for the long haul.
They'll be cheerful as they do it, encouraging others.

People's ikigai is not normally the same as a standard job description

People have unique skillsets that rarely overlap with a standard role description. There isn't yet a factory for making accountants or engineers or AI researchers.

Similarly, people's interests are generally quite idiosyncratic.

It's hard to change peoples' ikigai, so you might need to change their role instead

People can change somewhat. For instance, if people are smart, interested, and have access to good training, they can often pick up new areas.

But often not that much: if someone is not interested in a type of work, or if they consistently struggle with a type of work, it's likely that it's not going to be a great fit. This is particularly likely if they've been given lots of training on the task or if they're later in their career.

This means that it's somewhat unlikely that you can change someone's ikigai to overlap with a standard job description.

So you might be better off changing their role to be closer to their ikigai instead.

The costs of doing this is:

There are more "edges" between people's roles - more coordination cost
There's more of a need to sync up about roles and responsibilities - everyone's role is a bit unique

Tailoring people's role to their ikigai

Tracking strengths

Openly communicate about strengths and weaknesses, and assess their work
Make blame-free adjustments, test, and adjust again. The problem is with the jacket, not with the length of the wearer's arm.

When to make adjustments

You then need to think carefully about whether they should keep doing that type of work or not. You also need to think about how much they should aim to improve at that type of work (vs. other types of work).

Sometimes they're really good at task A, and spend 80% of their time on it, but doing task A means that they have to spend 5% of their time on task B as well, and they suck at task B.

But often there are some ways to decrease the percentage spent on task B, or to automate task B, or to have someone else (who is a good fit for task B) take it on.

How to make adjustments.

Fit/wheelhouse + real responsibility mode (see 📊Empowering people
Jigsaw not value judgement
Be OK with having different strengths to your colleagues