Leave it to Pamela Slim to help me fine-tune something that I’ve been playing around with for a while. As I aim to keep all the various parts of my professional life in some sort of harmonious symmetry, I find myself struggling to define what I am doing. On a near daily basis I ask myself questions like:

How does my career path relate to my current job?
How does my current job relate to my graduate work in business anthropology?
How does my graduate work relate to Bailey WorkPlay?
How does Bailey WorkPlay relate to my career path?
…and so the cycle continues.

Much of the confusion lies in that word ‘job’. I often wonder how the work I do daily relates to where I’m going in my professional life. Don’t get me wrong…I enjoy what I do. Yet, there’s little of the business anthropology that I’m being trained to do and the employee engagement that embodies the focus of Bailey WorkPlay. How does all of this integrate? Or is that just the technicolor dream of a guy who is often accused of being a crazy idealist?

Let’s start with the whole notion of a job. It’s a word that carries some fairly crappy baggage…and more often than not we help pack its bags. By taking the small view of a job, we easily lose sight of our greater professional purpose. Pamela smartly points out:

When you focus first on the perfect job, you automatically narrow your opportunities to jobs you are familiar with. Jobs are temporary things, often enticing on paper until you realize that as soon as you get comfortable in your position, it will change, your boss will change, your team will change or your organization will change. That is just the nature of business. Therefore if you go into a job excited by the position or the person you will be working for and not the work itself, you often set yourself up to be disappointed.

Instead, she encourages us to think about our ‘life’s work’ instead. I’ve been mulling over my own life’s work (or what I tend to think of as a calling) ever since I left college. There are days when I think I have it all figured out only to have something happen that puts my idea of a calling in doubt. Thanks to Pamela I think I now know what happened: I focused a bit too much on the job details of the calling. I know…strangely paradoxical.

Now I have the beginnings of a new perspective on the question of my own life’s work. Where the core of Pamela’s life’s work is transformational, I believe mine is relational. You can see this in the questions I pose to myself above. It’s one of the reasons I chose anthropology since so much of it involves intensive study of human relations. I love taking ideas and seeing how they relate to each other. I love bringing people and ideas together and then helping them see the relationships. I love working in organizations and helping leaders better relate to their employees and customers. This is the core purpose behind my work in business anthropology and Bailey WorkPlay.

And knowing this, I too can be in occasionally rough situations in my job and still remain focused on my core passion of relationships. Even when I’m not actually doing business anthropology or employee engagement, I am helping to generate relationships between people, ideas, and actions every day.

So…here’s a gentle challenge for this week. If you’re struggling to figure out how your job, career path, and life’s work relate to each other, take some time and reflect on the exercise at the end of Pamela’s post. Then come back and share what you believe is your life’s work. I’d love to hear about it and know what I can do to support you.

For the Connection Cafe blog this month, I wrote about the need to use a balanced qualitative and quantitative approach to learning about constituents. Here’s a teaser of my latest post…the full post is at the Connection Cafe…

Mixed in with the work that I do at Convio, I’m also pursuing a Master’s degree in business anthropology. If you’re like most folks, you may be wondering what that is exactly. This field is somewhat new even though anthropology as a social science has been around for long time. Basically, business anthropologists work with organizations to help them understand things like staff culture, customer relationships, and product design. That’s fairly broad but at it’s core, we study people and their patterns of behavior. What I most love about it is that we are trained to help non-profits and businesses understand the deeper meaning of what seemingly appears ordinary and everyday…then take what works and amplify it.

For an example, let’s apply a business anthropology approach to a common issue among non-profits: how to better engage constituents. Hopefully you have plenty of metrics showing your email open-rates, donor conversion rates, website flowthrough rates, etc. You may also have survey results and graphical analysis. (And if you haven’t recently done this type of quantitative data collection, no worries…hopefully this post will reinvigorate you.)

Now take it one step further. Most businesses and non-profits commit to collecting quantitative data but usually neglect the qualitative data. The reason for this often rests with some common misperceptions that collecting and analyzing qualitative data is difficult, unmeasurable, and overly time-consuming. But, the fact is that every organization that is committed to developing better relationships with its constituents needs to employ a balanced data collection plan. Strict number crunching usually fails to get at the heart of the things that matter most to non-profit organizations which are people and their emotional connection to your cause. It all comes back to understanding the deeper meaning of things which numbers can only hint at.

In addition to your quantitative measurements, what types of qualitative data collection techniques should you consider? It depends largely on what you’re trying to learn. Start with the big question you want to try to answer. Here are two familiar scenarios:

1. If you host events like walks, pet adoptions, or volunteer pledge drives and want to know why individuals are giving their time (always a highly prized commodity) to your organization, consider a participant-observation program. You’ll be actively participating alongside your constituents, learning about their passions and why they believe your cause matters. Your aim is to see your organization’s relationship through the eyes of others and find the commonalities that they share.

2. If you want to know what exactly will help convert individuals from one-time donors to recurring donors (an even more prized commodity in these economic times!), consider an interview program. This is not just a survey in a different form…think of it as a semi-structured conversation guided by your big question. You’re trying to dive deeper into understanding the major themes of the relationship between your constituents and your organization.

One significant caveat to note here…these qualitative approaches are only effective when performed with a curious objectivity. If you think you already know the answers to your questions, you might want to consider employing another impartial staff member to do them or hire a consultant (a business anthropologist, perhaps?).

This is just a thin, surface-level slice of what a balanced quantitative and qualitative approach can deliver to your organization. My hope is that it sparks some dialogue inside your organization about how to best discover significant patterns and meanings within your constituency; then use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of your actions. If you’re interested in learning more about the field of business anthropology shoot me an email at cbailey@convio.com chris@chrisbaileyworks.com, leave a comment below, or follow the business anthropology tag on my own blog.