The Good Work Life

Work isn’t what a lot of healthcare people want work to be.

So today I’m introducing a framework that intends to help make work what we want work to be. It’s for reclaiming agency and meaning. I call it The Good Work Life.

The Good Work Life is the practice of shaping your workplace experience through thoughtful professional growth. It’s grounded in a simple truth: a meaningful workplace experience doesn't just happen—it's purposefully nurtured.

And it rests on a simple premise: very few of us will luck into perfectly meaningful workplace experiences for the entirety of our careers.

So instead:

• we take our agency,

• accept we work in an imperfect world,

• pursue a practice of shaping our workplace experience through professional growth, and

• decide not only to work in the system(s) (do our jobs),

• but work on the system(s) as well (toward our preferred workplace experience).

Here’s how it works:

First, we need to know what we’re after. The Good Work Life pursues two objectives that most of us quietly desire but rarely articulate:

• Personal satisfaction—finding genuine contentment in our daily work and professional pursuits

• Professional fulfillment—contributing to something meaningful through our work while at the same time seeking mastery that makes a difference

Then we gotta be able to know where the opportunities are. Three interrelated dynamics determine how we experience work—who we are, the environment we work in, and how people work together (or don’t). That’s self-discovery, workworld exploration, and social study.

• Self-discovery—developing deeper awareness of who you are, what moves you, and what matters to you, especially at work

• Workworld exploration—seeing the systems and structures that influence work environments and discovering possibilities to leverage them effectively, navigate them skillfully, and change them when necessary

• Social study—understanding how workplace relationships and social patterns shape both individual experiences and organizational culture

Then we have five catalysts to shape our workplace experience:

• Powered Perspective combines a clear-eyed view of workplace realities with the confidence to shape your experience within them, rather than simply accepting circumstances as they are.

• Enabling Conditions recognizes that your environment profoundly impacts your ability to thrive, focusing on the human-centered practices that provide the necessary means to succeed.

• Prudent Congruence moves beyond traditional work-life balance to create thoughtful integration between your professional aspirations and what matters to you personally.

• Social Support is your network of relationships, both professional and personal, that nurtures your resilience and success at work.

• Worthy Work is work that is worthy of your care—your time, your energy, and your creativity—because it has been designed, by yourself or with others, to be worthy.

And it all flows through meaningful progress. Meaningful progress is experiencing tangible forward momentum, both in our day-to-day work and in our longer-term aspirations. It's the force that energizes The Good Work Life.

Meaningful progress is about movement that matters to you. Those moments—finishing a difficult conversation, meeting a goal, designing a task, helping a colleague, completing a project, learning something new, setting a boundary, going after the promotion—shape your workplace experience.

So why not approach them with intention toward The Good Work Life?

These objectives, dynamics, catalysts, and meaningful progress together form a professional growth practice that cultivates the knowledge, skills, and abilities to transform your workplace experience into what you desire.

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

“Talk to strangers. Make everybody not a stranger. Come home every evening with a story about somebody who is no longer a stranger.” Steve Bryant

“The world's always been unpredictable. What's new is how aware we are of just how little control we actually have.” Why Life Feels Out of Control—And How to Take It Back

“Your camouflage let you dodge and avoid conflict as an individual. But as a part of the management team, your job is to surface risks, to push back on decisions that won’t work, to counter-propose, to represent the perspective of your team.” Where Are The People-Pleasers?

Thanks for reading. Hit reply and let me know your thoughts.

How To Work is healthcare-focused work design inspiration (from the experts!) to nudge your perspectives and practices into better alignment with the world of work as it is, and away from what it was. Here’s my take on what we’re working through.