I have a secret for you.  Somewhere in the depths of your company, someone is doing work that is interesting, challenging, and rewarding.  They are doing work that has real world implications that will reverberate for years.  All companies have someone(s) doing this, because your company is creating a product or rendering a service that  some people deem valuable.  If this were not the case, the company wouldn’t exist.

Better yet, you can become the person that does this meaningful work.

THE MERTON/MATTHEW EFFECT

In 1968, sociologist Robert K Merton observed something interesting about the scientific community.  A well-known scientist receives more acclaim for making a discovery or publishing a paper than a less famous collaborator.  This is true even if the contribution was equal (indeed, even if the lesser-known researcher was the greater contributor).

Colloquially, this is often referred to as “The Matthew Effect,” taken from the story of the talents in the eponymous book of the Christian Bible. 

In the story, a wealthy man goes out of town and leaves each of his three servants with a certain amount of money (5, 2, & 1 talents, respectively). He instructs the servants to be good stewards of the sum.  The first two invest and each double their money.  When the boss returns, he is pleased.  The third servant (with 1 talent) hides his money and returns the same amount to the boss when he returns.  The boss is upset, fires the third servant, and gives that money to the first.  The story ends with the familiar epitaph “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance.  But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

“For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance.  But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Matthew 25:29

It’s easy to debate the morality of this story or claim that the boss acted unfairly, and maybe that is the case.  But it’s also possible that the boss knew his servants pretty well. Perhaps the initial allocation of money was based on his level of trust in each that had been built up (or torn down) over months or years of employment.  Maybe the behavior of the third servant was just the final straw in an overall dismal career.

If you met the third servant in a tavern just after this took place, chances are he’d have some harsh words for his former boss.  He might even convince a few people that he had been dealt a great injustice.  But most likely, he was in a situation of his own making.

BUILD A REPUTATION OF TRUSTWORTHINESS

Before you are given five talents to invest, or an exciting new project to work on, you must earn your employer’s trust.  Why would anyone expect to be assigned anything substantial before proving themselves on more mundane tasks?

I’ve observed that many companies have work assignments that are passed around to new hires almost as rites-of-passage.  It’s the tedious work that no one else wants, so it makes sense that the newbies get it.  However, many companies do this intentionally as a way of testing the trustworthiness of new hires.  It’s like receiving one talent. Your employer is waiting to see if you just do the minimum to get the job done, or if you put in the work and come back with two talents.

Let me offer an example from my own early career.  Soon after being hired and trained in my normal job (monthly financial reports – very exciting), my manager assigned another project. It was a bi-annual project that involved filling out municipal assessment forms and paying the resulting invoices.  The local government billing offices weren’t quite current in their use of technology, so this involved printing and mailing thousands of assessment forms, and hours of manual data entry to process and pay the thousands of bills sent back to us.

All of this occurred in a compressed time period during which I also had to keep up with my other job. I was still learning not yet working very efficiently.  I didn’t want to ask for help, but I also didn’t want to miss deadlines.  In order to accomplish this, I added several work hours to each day.  I started early, worked through lunch, and stayed late to finish the assessments and bills, while working my primary job during normal hours.

It was not interesting, and was not what I pictured myself doing when I was still a naive university student.  But I finished the work, on time and with accuracy.  I showed that I could be trusted with a mundane but necessary task.  My manager could assign me work of this kind and not have to worry about it anymore.  Through my performance on this job and others like it, I earned trust. That trust led to increasing responsibility and a much more diverse array of tasks.

If you are frustrated with routine and boring work assignments, and the lack of trust shown in you, ask yourself what you have done to deserve better.  If you find your answer lacking, then look for ways you can improve your reputation.  Find a task that no one wants to do, something that gives your manager headaches, and take it on.  Become the person that makes the ugly jobs go away.  Do this, and before you know it, your boss will hand you five talents, instead of one.