The Humanizing Work Show

Is Humanizing Work a company? A community? A philosophy? In this episode, we delve into what Humanizing Work is and how it can help you create breakthroughs in how you collaborate to solve complex problems, both at work and at home.

The great Eli Goldratt once asked his daughter if he wanted work to be meaningful or easy; she couldn't have both. In this episode, we use Goldratt's own Evaporating Cloud technique to break that conflict as we share how greater ease and greater meaning are interrelated and core components of Humanizing Work.

We get into discussions of flow, its applications in music sight-reading and downhill mountain biking, and how "easy" might not be the right term here, and how growth is another key aspect of meaningful work.

Finally, we share out advice on how to create more ease and meaning in our own individual work.

In this episode, we share some of the research into what leads to motivation and engagement at work. Many in the Humanizing Work community will be familiar with Dan Pink's work summarizing the research here. We'll go more broadly here, all the way back to McGregor's Theory X & Y, Self-Determination Theory, Pink, Doshi & McGregor's Primed to Perform, and more.

And if you're thinking: "Wait, there's so much to focus on, what's really important here?", we'll help you out by drawing a few patterns across all of the research and, most importantly, what you can do to increase your own motivation, regardless of the context around you.

Growth is a core human need. We are built to grow. In this episode we look at research, discuss examples, and share stories about what growth means and why it's a core component of Humanizing Work.

In this episode, we examine the historical trends that are creating the need for the Humanizing Work movement to emerge today. We seem to have hit the limits of a mechanistic view of work, and are transitioning into something new, or more correctly, a restoration of a human-centric approach to work, but one that includes emergence and the benefits of technology and scale.

Great work, innovative work, impactful work is almost NEVER a solo effort. In fact, most important work is done by teams small and large. Unfortunately most of the work groups that people call a team aren't really a team. In this episode, we'll share our definition of a team and the key components that set a team up to be successful.

Peter's first career was as a musician playing trumpet in jazz and other groups. As his second career in Humanizing Work unfolded, he realized that jazz groups provided some amazing lessons for work teams on collaboration, listening, group creativity, and individual and collective growth.

In this episode, Peter reunites with some of his old buddies and a few new friends from the jazz community to play some jazz. Between tunes, we go behind the scenes to hear from the musicians themselves about what they're thinking about, practicing, and hoping for when they are part of a team called a "jazz combo".

There are a few factors that can kill a team that are external things, and hence out of its control. But almost all of the things that we've seen kill a team are related to individuals' capability to collaborate and lead effectively. In this episode, we share the things we've seen that are most toxic on teams, and the antidotes we've seen most effective in addressing those toxins.

Peter reunites with a few team members from the Adobe Audition team, the first Scrum Team at Adobe in 2005. We laugh, we cry, we dig into what made that team so memorable for all of us and how we've applied what we learned to future teams.