Rewording your job description in action

- So to give a little examples of how this works, we'll start with maybe a case study. I think this might be close to 15 years or so ago. Disney was having problems with their custodial staff. As I'm sure almost everyone knows, Disney prides themselves on an amazing guest experience. That's what they want to deliver. It's just, they want everyone who comes there to have a magical experience as a guest. And what was happening was the custodial staff was getting all of these complaints about how they were being rude and they weren't being helpful, and it just kind of degraded from the experience of Disney, which of course was a huge problem for them. So they put a lot of energy into trying to resolve this. And what it turned out, they figured out what the problem ultimately was was the job description. The job description read, your job is to keep the park clean, you need to keep the bathrooms clean, you need to keep the trash looking neat, you need to keep all the walkways clean and tidy. So think about this, if that's your job description and you see guests walking around throwing trash all over the place, you view the guest as your enemy essentially, right? This person's makin' my job really hard. And so when a guest who just threw trash on the ground came up and asked the custodian, hey, where is the Dumbo ride, the custodian would say I don't know, I'm just a janitor. And that was the response. So they decided, well, they do more than that. They're part of our team, they're part of delivering happiness to our guests, why don't we let them know that? And they changed the job description. They said your job is to create happy guests, to contribute to the happiness of our guests. How do you do that? Well, you provide them with directions when they need it. You give a kind smiling face when they ask you questions. And as a collateral duty, you pick up the trash, you clean the the bathrooms and blah blah blah blah blah. And guess what happened? All the complaints went away. Janitors were motivated, inspired to come to work because they had a noble cause for coming to work, which is to serve people and bring happiness to people, which is something we all want to do. And the guest satisfaction scores went up, and the job satisfaction for the janitors went up. Everybody wins. I don't know if there's any neuroscientist that can explain this perfectly, but I think what's happening is, from my limited understanding of the neuroscientist friends that are in my circles, is that we have a portion of the brain, and a lot of people attribute this to the reticular activating system or the reticular formation, that's its job is to filter out that which we don't think is important. And we've all had the experience of, you buy a new car or you meet a new friend with a unique name, and then all of a sudden you start seeing that car everywhere, you hear that name everywhere. And we know intellectually that that car just didn't magically multiply all over the place because we bought it, or that name just didn't magically slap at everyone just because we heard it. What happens is our brain starts telling us that it's important so we start to see everywhere this thing that we've never seen because our brain didn't allow us to see it. And my guess is, this is what's happening is when you start to tell your brain over and over and over again, this is what's really important to me, you start to see opportunities to serve others and to love well. You start seeking out opportunities to improve in that area. You start to eliminate activities that degrade your ability to love well. Why, because you've simply shifted your focus. And again, I think the easiest way to do that is to just change your job description, and read it every day for a while until you really start feeling that I can't believe this, I believe that my core job description is to help the people around me to thrive.