For more than a century, employers have led employees to believe that the thing that we’re compensated for, the job, is the real work.
Not so.
Daily we're inundated with superfluous goals and arbitrary project timelines. We’re kept bleary-eyed and distracted with SOP after SOP, spreadsheet after spreadsheet, personal development plans, HR policies, DEI training, thinly veiled sociopolitical agendas and generic yet loudly proclaimed, staunchly unpracticed corporate values that run together indiscernibly into a nonsensical amalgamation of catch phrases and mission statement table scraps.
The result is a metaphorical incongruous collection of glass kittens like the one on your grandmother's bathroom windowsill. Gramma may love them and they look pretty when the light hits them just right- but they’re otherwise useless. The now ubiquitous narrative that is employer/employee social contract has led generations of workers to believe that they are paid to produce or provide goods and services.
We say again, not so.
TRW for employees and companies isn't figuring out how to manufacture, package, or distribute goods better or faster. TRW isn't building things, inventing things, writing code, making, or enforcing laws, performing open heart surgery, or baking bread. We humans can do all of that and much more really well. So well in fact that we run out of things to do and have to make more stuff up to hold our attention (check out Eukonkonnan ..I mean, WTF on many levels). We learn, innovate, adapt, and are genetically coded to do everything we can to know the unknown, control the uncontrollable, constantly trying to manipulate the world around us in our favor.
So no, the TRW for an Amazon employee is not shipping me the Crocs Unisex-Adult Classic Clogs in black I just ordered. TRW is doing it with another +1.5M bodies around without feeling or acting on the urge to cry, punch or kick a co-worker or inventing expletives that more accurately express the way they feel about the work, their boss, pay, schedule, co-workers, your lunch etc. more granularly than the 90 or so tried and true options already part of the English language while getting me the Crocs (FYI, the Crocs part is purely hypothetical) .
TRW for the typical McDonalds team member is not making 5,000 hamburgers, presented in 14 equally delicious, gastronomically and emotionally satiating configurations of sauces, cheeses, pickles, onions, meats, and plant materials available to 2,000 customers between 11 am and 1 pm every day. TRW is somehow finding a way to finish the day with a reasonable state of physical, emotional, and mental wellness while at the same time feeding the ravenous masses their super-sized SSRI pill.
TRW is the daily endeavor we each engage in when doing our job around, with and for someone else.
TRW is developing the emotional intelligence, coping skills and resilience that allows us to find sense, meaning and purpose where others cannot so that we can make a difference where others cannot. Doing TRW will help you to develop reliable, authentic, high utility, and mutually beneficial working relationships (we’ll talk more about what that means and why it is in no way a pejorative way to think about on-the-job relationships in the workplace). TRW requires elevated (compared to what most of us are use to) levels of candor, trust, respect, and consideration even (especially) when it may not always be returned in kind. TRW acknowledges and prepares us accordingly for the fact that that no one… not you, me, them, or us… is perfect while at the same time finding the will and the way to be better, help others be better and enjoy all of it that much more.