Meaning: why showing work matters has such an impact

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The next two podcasts I see as a piece with each other, today is about meaning the next one is about mattering. Collectively I feel they present serious answers about the foundations of good culture.

There’s some overlap – the authors today have done research with next week’s guest Zach Mercurio. One of today’s guests Tamara myles said one of the most powerful questions you can ask to measure engagement at work is to ask ‘does your manager care about what is going on in your life?’

Today is about meaning, and I feel it gets to grips with questions of purpose. Why sometimes purpose doesn’t seem to create an impact in an organisation – and other times really makes it hum.

The authors describe meaningful work as work that provides community, helps us contribute to something that matters, and challenges us to learn and grow.

There are some vital components to this (I’ve added the source research for each piece):

The authors say that leaders need to 1) build trust and 2) design shared experiences.

“To have happy employees and get good reviews, leaders need to interrogate how they are enabling people to build strong relationships with each other, to find significance in their tasks, and to reach their full potential”.

Full Transcript

Bruce (00:00)
Thanks so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could introduce who you are and what you do.

Tamara Miles (00:04)
I’m Tamara Miles, really excited to be here. I am a professor of leadership at Boston College, an instructor and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, mostly focusing on meaningful work and how to activate the sense of purpose and meaning in the workplaces and specifically how leaders can do that.

Wes Adams (00:28)
I said I’m Wes Adams. I’m the CEO of SV Consulting Group, where we do leadership development and org design work. And I’m also a researcher with Tamara at University of Pennsylvania, where we study meaningful work.

Bruce (00:42)
Now you’ve written a book about meaningful work and why I liked it is because quite often people say to me that the purpose of my organisation is this or this is how we think about purpose here. And there’s a lot of BS to it. There’s a lot of, I think, artifice to it that doesn’t always connect. And interestingly, I’ve been working with clients over the course of last few months. And what I’ve found is that when people have got context about what their job is about,

It seems to make it more connected. Your book really gets the heart of that. Do you want to describe to me what you see definition of meaningful work as? And maybe that will help us talk about this.

Tamara Miles (01:22)
Sure. So we found that meaning comes from three main sources and that’s how we define it. So meaningful work is work that helps you feel connected and a part of a community of shared values where you can show up authentically. That’s the first source, it’s community. It’s also work that helps you contribute to something that matters, something bigger than yourself. And that’s the second source, contribution.

And it’s also work that challenges you to learn, grow, and develop. And that’s the third source challenge. contribution, community, and challenge are the three sources of meaningful work that emerged in our research. And so when you talk about this purpose and people not feeling connected to it, this lofty purpose, know, purpose and meaning are often used interchangeably. But what we found is that purpose is a of meaningful work, it kind of falls under the contributiency, but it’s just having a purpose is not enough to activate the sense of meaning because of exactly what you said. It often seems lofty or theoretical and disconnected. And what we found is that when leaders connect people to that sense of purpose and there’s different practices we can dig into for that, that activates the sense of purpose and really creates meaning at work.

Bruce (02:47)
So organisations that set out to make employees happy might be then opting to do something which actually just doesn’t have a huge impact. You’re convinced that having meaning in our work is more effective than throwing perks at them or making them happy.

Wes Adams (03:04)
Absolutely. think happiness is of course important and we want to feel those moments of positive emotion and joy and delight in our work. As Tamara always says, it’s sort of like the sweets, know, they’re like the little candy bars of work, right? They’re really nice, they make us feel really good in the moment and they don’t last.

And meaning is really that thing that sustains us over the long term. It’s the well-balanced meal. It’s the nutritious meal that really helps us be energized over the long term in our work. It’s the fuel that gives us energy for the long race ahead.

Bruce (03:43)
You say, “expecting individuals to construct their own meaning rather than creating an environment that fosters meaning is like asking someone to build a house without providing with the necessary tools and materials”. How would you set about helping someone construct meaning? Maybe you’re a middle manager and your organisation hasn’t done this, or maybe you’re the big boss and you want to set about trying to create meaning for employees, but you’re in a company that isn’t changing the world. It isn’t putting shoes on homeless people.

How do you set about creating meaning in just a normal organization?

Tamara Miles (04:17)
Yeah, so that’s actually a big misconception about meaningful work is that meaningful work is only reserved for those that are saving the world and work in healthcare or teaching, helping professions and things like that. And what we found is that meaning can be found in every job, every day. And it comes down to those three C’s. And this part about providing the tools and the blueprint is really important because our research found that our sense, our individual sense of meaningful work comes directly from what our leaders do and don’t do. Our leaders are responsible for half of our experience of meaningful work. Before our research, everything just looked at the individuals, like what can I do to increase my own sense of meaning? But really we operate in environments and we have managers and leaders who lead us. And so to create that context, leaders can focus on building community, connecting people to their contributions and highlighting their impact, and then challenging them and believing in their potential and giving them opportunities to stretch and grow. And we can go into specific

Bruce (05:30)
So let’s go into those. Let’s jump into the community part first. So why would that give someone a greater sense of meaning?

Tamara Miles (05:37)
So relationships, our relationships, positive relationships are central to our sense of meaning in life, right? There’s a quote by a researcher in Meaning That’s Beautiful that says, are the ocean in which individuals find meaning. And we spend more waking hours working than doing anything else. And the relationships we build at work are critical.

to providing a sense of meaning and wellbeing. Those are the connections we made, the collaborations we build, and a simple way to do that, the most powerful question we asked in our study that predicted a sense of community was, does your leader care about what’s happening in your life outside of work? Right, so if you’re a manager, if you’re a colleague, just asking people about things that are happening in their lives outside of work, seeing them as

as whole humans, whole beings with full lives beyond what’s happening at work is really important to help create this sense of meaning. And that’s something you can do in your next meeting, in your next interaction. And it doesn’t take that long and it doesn’t cost anything.

Bruce (06:47)
You say 70 % of workers say friendship at work is the most important element to a happy work life. So easy to neglect that, isn’t it? So easy to forget that this is the defining experience of work for us.

Wes Adams (07:01)
It’s so interesting, you know, in our research, we obviously spent a lot of time looking at this and, you know, that sense of belonging, that sense that you can show up authentically and be valued for who you are, bring your full self and your full ideas to the table is so important. You know, it really unlocks your ability to kind of do everything else. Other research found that you only need really one person that you feel like you connect with.

to mitigate feelings of exclusion or that you don’t belong or anything like that. so one of the, I think that’s so powerful. You really just need that one connection. as Tamara said, one of the things that we recommend is for leaders to be that person, right? You have the ability as a leader or really anyone, anywhere in an organization to reach out, to connect with someone and really kind of open up that space for them to fully show up.

Bruce (07:59)
You quote John Amici, British guy who’s not known here because he’s a basketball legend. But I love the quote because it’s directly related to what you’ve just said. As a leader, you don’t have a choice in being a role model. The only choice is whether to be a good one or a bad one. And it goes into one the most memorable parts of the book, which was the story of the bride who it rained on her wedding day. Tell me that story because that story stayed with me and I found myself trying to tell that story to someone. over a glass of wine and I suddenly realized this is not what they’ve come out to hear a business case study. Go on, tell me that story.

Wes Adams (08:37)
This is one that we interviewed Rob Waldron, who’s the CEO of a company called Curriculum Associates, and they make the education software for about a third of US grade school students. it’s kind of a small company, but it has this huge scaled impact in the US. And it’s a very values-driven organization. One of the things that we found was it’s critical for leaders to walk the talk, to role model values, not just have them be words on the wall, but actually deliver those things, act in a way that’s aligned with those values. And we were asking Rob about that and he said, when I think about that, I always think follow the bride. And we were like, well, what does that mean? Follow the bride. And so he told us the story of his wedding day. It was in New England, like very beautiful church on the side of a cliff walk, just amazing setting and hundreds of people flew in for it. the day dawned and it was miserable. It was like the rainiest day in the history of that area of the country and pouring down rain and he and his soon to be wife were kind of in a panic and they were talking to the wedding planner and they were like, what do we do? It’s gonna be terrible. It’s like all muddy and slippery out there. And the wedding planner said to his fiance,

If you panic and if you make a big deal out of this, then everybody else is going to panic and have a bad time also. But if you lean into it, if you laugh and dance and do whatever you’re going to do, they’ll follow you because everyone at a wedding follows the bride. Because the bride is sort of the de facto leader of the wedding. The bride is the role model of the wedding. And so his fiance leaned into that and just, you know, dance in the rain, that wedding dress got all muddy.

And Rob said it was the best day of their lives. Everybody just went for it. And so he just always thinks about, when he thinks about being a role model, how are people going to follow the bride in this situation?

Bruce (10:39)
think there’s a line in there along the way, which is the only person who could ruin your day today is you. It makes us think really intentionally about the impact that we all have on other people without us even realizing. Now, I wonder if we could go to the next of your strands, which was connecting people with the impact that they’re having. And I’d love to dig into that. How would connecting people with the impact they’re having make work more meaningful?

Wes Adams (10:44)
Yeah.

Tamara Miles (11:06)
You know, so often, so many days, we are so busy going from task to task, from meeting to meeting, and at the end of the day, we’re exhausted and then we wake up and do it all again, right? And often we don’t understand why what we’re doing matters, how what we’re doing matters, and what it even adds up to or amounts to. And so when people, colleagues, leaders take the time to highlight the impact that we’re having and connect us

to our contributions, it really brings to life the purpose of our jobs, the purpose of the organization, the impact that we’re having. And one simple way to do this, because we often assume that, like leaders often assume that people already see their contributions clearly. But the reality is that most of us don’t. And a simple way to do this is to…

Tell them, let people know their work matters and why. Saying things like, that presentation was a game changer because of you. The team had exactly what they needed to move forward, right? Things like, because of you we did this, or I noticed how you handled that call today. Thank you so much. You turned a frustrated call into a loyal customer. So noticing people, affirming them, telling them that because of them something happened can really

Let us know that what we do matters. And so that’s one way and research finds that thanking people, getting a thank you from a manager once a week is enough to cut disengagement and burnout in half. Just one thank you once a week that’s thoughtful and meaningful and specific to that person. So that’s one way to fake the sense of contribution.

Bruce (12:55)
Making people feel seen. really loved exactly the slightly different wording you use one leader use in the book. He used the phrase, if it wasn’t for you, which is such a lovely way to spotlight exactly what someone’s done. And I’ve mentioned that we don’t have huge following for basketball here, but I do remember a Steve Kerr clip where he was caught on a hot mic talking to Steph Curry. And he was doing this soothing to him, he saying,

The great thing about you is you do this and the great thing about you is this. I think it was in a moment where Steph Curry wasn’t scoring a lot and it was exactly that. He was saying, if it wasn’t for you, if it wasn’t for you, I see you, I see what you’re doing. And you’re exactly right. think leaders often read things like this and think, well, what can I take to my job? And that just felt like something you could lift immediately and say, I’m going to try that three times this week. I’m going to see if that lift, because there’s an incredible stat in your book, which said that

10 % of people feel like they get praise and gratitude in their jobs. Gosh, that’s such a low number. 60 % said never only or only occasionally. It’s such an easy void for anyone to can step into here.

Wes Adams (14:07)
It’s such an easy thing to do. You don’t have to build a program around it. It doesn’t cost any money. It doesn’t take any budget. Anyone in any part of the organization can do it. And it’s so powerful and so underused. That’s one of the first things that when we’re working with companies doing leadership development work that we talk about, because typically it’s low-hanging fruit. It’s a big area where people can leverage these tools to make a big difference.

And that, if it wasn’t for you, is actually our research partner at Colorado State, Zach Martirio. So yeah, we’re big fans of that.

Bruce (14:45)
I love it. I really loved that. It’s one of the things, know, as I annotate things, if something goes to the top of the annotations, it’s like that’s a halo position. Let’s complete the trifecta then. If you could just talk about why pushing people, giving people challenging work matters. Why breaking a sweat might make work more meaningful than having a sustainable level. Talk me through that.

Tamara Miles (15:12)
Yeah, so there’s research on burnout that shows that people actually don’t burn out from hard work alone. It’s when we work really hard without seeing our own personal growth and development or without understanding why what we’re doing matters, right? And so if you think about a time at work where, you you were really

push by somebody who believed in you and you had this really hard project and maybe you were working really hard, but you were energized, right? That’s mostly what came up in our research, that people loved when leaders saw something in them that they hadn’t seen it in themselves yet and believed in them and challenged them to do something that they hadn’t done before. That really kind of fuels our own motivation and helps us reach our full potential. We are wired as humans for learning, for growing, for personal development. And so these challenges, when leaders see something in us and give us belief-driven feedback, like, you’re ready for this challenge. I believe in you. This will be hard, but I know you can do it. How can I support you? That really ignites. this sense of meaning in us and helps us learn and grow. But a critical part that we found is that it’s not enough to just push people and give them these high challenges without also offering support. it’s this place where high challenge, high expectations meet high support is what we call the zone of possibility. in that zone is where meaningful work really gets activated when we have the resources we need to take on the challenges ahead.

Bruce (17:01)
You know, what really struck me about that? I worked in McDonald’s when I was in college. The great thing if you work in a fast food restaurant is that a lot of people from the outside might superficially say, are these job theses? But what you find is when you work in a fast food store, obviously there’s a lot of people who are doing this as a transition thing to pay for something. think 70 % of people who work in fast food are studying for something, but there are some people, this is their lived experience. The thing that makes those jobs better is that a lot of those people. are getting promoted, they’re developing, they’re building careers. think some of the recent chief execs of McDonald’s have actually started on the shop floor and worked their way up. And so it speaks to a societal thing. If we feel like we can improve and get better and our work gives us the hope to develop, that’s a really important thing. You give that example, and I’d love you to try and solve this for me. You’d give that example of a dog walking firm and they had this challenge where

People would turn up and they would do the job, but they couldn’t graduate out of it. They couldn’t go to something different. It led to them feeling demotivated, think there was probably a high employee turnover. Okay. That’s a really interesting conundrum, right? We know that if you make a job feel like it’s going somewhere, you’re developing, you’re improving, you’re on a route somewhere, then actually you can get the best out of people. But clearly there are some jobs.

Either by design, you’re a warehouse worker in a big shipping warehouse and they don’t want to promote you, they don’t want to build a career, or by accident where people feel like they’re not improving. How do we set about solving that and what lessons can we draw for our jobs otherwise?

Wes Adams (18:46)
We’ve done a fair amount of work with frontline businesses, frontline workers, folks who are working in fast food, in dog daycare centers, retail, that sort of thing. And this is a huge challenge in service, retail, hospitality, the level of turnover, the churn that companies go through. The example that we use in the book is a dog daycare company. And they were experiencing 200 % turnover every year.

which meant every six months you’ve got a brand new set of employees. And that’s really difficult to run a business in that case. And when we investigated, we found that that challenge C was really missing. And it was one of the things that was driving that turnover because people would show up, you know, these are, you know, relatively low wage jobs across the board, right? And they’re sort of interchangeable, right? You could work at McDonald’s, you could work at Doc Daycare, you could work at.

a grocery store and it’s all kind of equivalent. And if there’s no path forward for you, if you’re just doing the same thing over and over again every day, that doesn’t get you really excited to keep coming back. You don’t have a path to learn more. You don’t have a path to make more money. And so one of the things that we did that ended up being pretty successful was we charted out several different growth paths. So,

At the dog daycare company, when you came in, we created three separate paths. One, if you wanted to be an expert dog handler. One, if you wanted to sort of work your way into a manager role, a people manager role. And a third, if you wanted to be a trainer, because the business also trained, you know, puppies and stuff like that. And then, most importantly, we gave people a choice, you know, we said, which one of these do you want to do?

And that, autonomy piece of that, giving people a choice is another thing that we talk about in the book and is such an important part of creating meaning is for people to grow and develop in a direction that they’re interested in and something that’s meaningful to them. And so by giving them a clear path for moving forward and setting out the, if you accomplish X, Y, and Z by the end of the year, you’re eligible for promotion into this next role. And that moves you forward. That really gave people a vision for how they could learn and grow.

and apply themselves in a way that was important to them. And so that over time helped turnover go down pretty significantly.

Bruce (21:09)
There’s a couple of things I’d love to ask you about that are covered in the book, but aren’t necessarily the core theme, but really stuck with me. One of them is that you talk about values and hiring for values and you say that independent work has been done assessing people’s values. And it’s been found that they, after a certain moment in their life, and I don’t know when that is, maybe you tell me, people’s values tend not to change. We sort of become wedded to what our values are. And so you talk about the importance then.

of knowing what your company values are and hiring for them. I’d love you to talk a little bit about that because that was really interesting for me, that notion that we need to think about these things because the culture is going to be embodied by people who either share our values and so they do it well or don’t share our values and maybe fail us on it. I’d love to understand a bit more about that.

Tamara Miles (22:00)
Yeah, that was something fascinating that came up in our research, this idea that beginnings matter. How we start a relationship with a new employee, a potential new employee, carries significant weight on how meaningful their work becomes over their entire tenure at the organization. That’s something that we were not expecting to find that wasn’t really present in much of the meaningful work research before us, and it was really exciting.

that we want to hire people that care about the same things that we care about is really important. So for example, Patagonia is a company that we highlight in that chapter. One of their values is around activism. So they really want to hire people who care about activism in their communities. And so they’re not necessarily trying to hire clones, people who only care about this kind of activism, but

during their interview process, they ask, oh, how do you activate? What kind of activism have you been involved with? And so I might be involved in my kids’ schools or the school committee, the local town politics and activating that way. Wes might be activating around the environment and you Bruce might be activating around something else, but we all care deeply about this activism being involved. And so they ask questions.

around that specifically to understand, you know, how is this part of your values? Well, the way we define character, part of our characters are values in action. Because I could care about activism at a theoretical level and think it’s a good idea, but unless I’m actually activating and doing things to promote the things I care about in my communities, for example, then activism is really not part of my lived experience. And so during the interview process, understanding

you know, what is a person’s work values? How do they show up at work? And really specifically asking for times when. So tell me a story about a time when you did this. Zappos is another company that does this really well. And we tell the story in the book of being a little bit weird, right? That they want to hire people that are a little weird and have fun and a little, so they’ll ask like on a scale of one to 10, how weird are you and why?

And they don’t care about the number you give, but they hear about the why. Tell me a story about a time when you had fun at work, because that’s really part of their culture. And we find that if you hire people that are high performers that have the right skills that you’re looking for, it’s a really short-term play, because that person might come in and fill a gap right away, but over time, they can really harm your culture and cause other people that were there that care about the same things to

start seeing, you know, you as cynical, not believing in the values anymore, and then it can over time really cause turnover and cause your high performers to leave.

Bruce (25:03)
conclude, I’d love to ask you something a bit more subjective. How would any of us make work more meaningful for ourselves? How could someone listening to this, maybe they can’t change their organization, but what could they seek to do to make their own job feel more meaningful?

Wes Adams (25:23)
This is a question we get asked a lot. I think if you think across the three C’s, those apply to all of us. We all want community contribution and challenge. And one of the things that we’ve found and that’s shown in the research is one of the most effective ways to make work more meaningful for yourself is to help someone else find more meaning in their job. So using these tools in the book that help make other people’s work meaningful will also have the effect of

helping you find meaning in your own. And so we really encourage folks, regardless of where you sit in an organization, to use these tools because it’s sort of a win-win.

Bruce (26:03)
I’ve loved talking to you today. I get to read a lot of these books and it’s a measure of the book of how many notes I make and how many times I think I must go and check out that research actually. And my notes were overflowing for this. So best of luck with the book and I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk.