How leaders create value through meaning
By Prof Dave Ulrich (dou@umich.edu)
This morning, people all over the planet got out of bed and got ready for work. Some headed out before dawn in high-end cars to claim high-rise offices with high-tech computers and high-brow clients. Some headed out before dawn to walk barefoot, wares on their head, to claim a choice spot in the dirt near the entrance to the village market. Some people wrestled with the muses to create artistic masterpieces or solve perplexing scientific problems. Some wrestled with boredom to complete their shifts at cash registers, call centers, or assembly lines. Some pitched their resumes in business suits, looking for good benefits and a sure path to comfortable retirement. Some made their pitch in ragged jeans on street corners, looking for someone to rent their muscles for at least the day.
Some people in every one of these and many other categories by which we could define work found abundance – meaning, purpose, even delight in their labor today. Other people in every category found world-weary tedium, frustration, and a sense of despair.
Which were you?
Which were the people you work with?
People find abundance or meaning in many settings – in the privacy of our homes and the expanses of nature, in churches, ballparks, and community centers, in family and friendship circles. But work takes the lion’s share of our time and our energy. We spend more time at work than at play, at family gatherings, at religious meetings, or at hobbies. The organizations in which we labor are thus a primary setting for not only accomplishing assignments but for finding an abiding sense of abundance or meaning in life. Work is a universal setting in which to fulfill our universal search for meaning.
We describe this as a meaning-making, value-creating, hope-building process for individual employees and for the leaders who coordinate their efforts. In doing so we hope to structure the private conversations and inform the corporate decisions that shift deficit-driven thinking toward abundance at work. Meaning or abundance is not only a prerogative for rich people, smart people, prestigious people, successful people. Meaning or abundance is not only in short supply for poor people, mediocre people, struggling people, hurting people. Great leaders recognize the vital importance of the search for meaning or abundance to everyone in their organization. Including themselves.
Leaders have the task of creating a vision for their organizations that is charged with meaning – that resonates with not only the minds and hands but the hearts of those they lead. Ultimately the crisis of meaning is always becomes a crisis of leadership.
Leaders must not only understand and experience but also institutionalize the creation of meaning at work.
This discussion provokes the following questions:
– How does employee meaning affect business results and leads to important business outcomes of customer service, investor results, and strategy execution.
– What is the role of the leader in creating employee meaning? What is a clear definition of how leaders can and should create personal meaning in the workplace?
– How can leaders making meaning happen for employees?
– How can meaning be institutionalized in the workplace? How do HR practices secure and sustain organization results?
Leaders need to move beyond statements about “employees are our most important asset” to showing why employee meaning leads to business results and how to make meaning happen.
