1. Conversation between a business professor/consultant (Dave) & a psychologist (Wendy),
2. Challenges faced by leaders & individuals: Finding why to sustain how of our daily living.
3. This book focuses on a simple question:
4. How do great leaders create, for themselves & others, a sense of abundance (meaning, purpose, hope, pleasure) that not only engages employees but also delivers value to customers, investors, & communities?
Consultant
1. helps organizations create value for employees, customers, investors, & communities.
2. coaches leaders on how to build corporate agendas, organizational capabilities, & human resource infrastructures to achieve their goals & objectives
3. Looks for simple patterns in complex phenomena.
4. Encounters leaders who formulate great strategies, structures, & processes but may overlook heart & soul that make organizations meaningful places to work.
Psychologist
1. Works to help people change & heal.
2. Helps clients examine patterns that have shaped their past so they can better choose their future.
3. Conducts change workshops for people with everyday struggles & people facing trauma or serious adversity.
4. Some people in each group see primarily senselessness & deficits of their lives, while others manage to find a sense of meaning & abundance.
5. Real change means institutionalizing, not merely individualizing, abundance & meaning.
1. One works with organizations, other with individuals.
2. One wants to help organizations serve their customers & investors;
3. Other wants to help individuals grow & find peace.
4. Both have found common ground.
5. Questions both leaders & those they lead wrestle with & answers they develop seem to overlap & connect around search for Why of Work— search for meaning, purpose.
6. Finding that why infuses organizations with a sense of abundance— having enough & to spare of what matters most.
1. Dave had a personal encounter with abundance a few years ago while we shared responsibilities directing a mission for our church in Canada.
2. One day he met with a poor African immigrant family living in subsidized housing with shoddy furniture & too many people for confined space.
3. Despite these “deficits,” this family had forged an emotional bond that emanated warmth & generosity.
4. They cared about each other & world.
5. They were curious & compassionate.
6. When it came to what mattered most, they had enough & to spare.
7. Later that day, we had dinner in an executive’s expensive, beautifully adorned home.
8. Although food was tasty & furnishings elegant, conversation & preoccupations of evening were superficial & sterile.
1. We both learned once again that meaning is tied less to belongings & more to emotional bonds, a sense of purpose, & using one’s skills to serve needs of others.
2. In organizations as well, meaning & abundance are more about what we do with what we have than about what we have to begin with or what we accumulate.
3. Meaning & abundance are more about finding resources to deal with our challenges than about having unlimited resources to make work easy or effortless.
4. Work will always be work—sometimes monotonous or routine, sometimes stressful to max—but we believe work can still contribute more than just money to our lives.
5. Leaders can develop resources to make employees work harder & to make work work for employees.
1. There is a strong business case for helping people find meaning at work.
2. As employees find meaning, they contribute to broadest purposes for which organizations exist: creating value for customers, investors, & communities.
1. This book distills from a broad range of literature & research a set of resources leaders can use in that process.
2. As we have worked with college students & young missionaries, we have been infected with rising generation’s passion for purpose around both ideas & ideals.
3. As we have worked with mature adults, we have learned that meaning seekers abound at all life stages.
4. We have seen that people find meaning not only in their personal lives but also through organizations where they learn, worship, socialize, & play.
5. Meaning can be discovered in friendships, families, neighborhoods, religious communities, schools, service clubs . . . & work.
6. On a more personal level, we seem to be constantly asking ourselves, “What will we do when we grow up?”
7. When younger we assumed this question would be well resolved by time we were 30, but it has lingered into our children’s 30s.
8. Is meaning found in taking vacations, learning, giving, serving our neighbors, or building a business?
9. Answer can be yes to each of these.
10. And it can also be no.
11. People find meaning in many places & activities, but for us & many we know, meaning itself is not optional.
12. It is object of a nearly universal search.
1. Work is a nearly universal setting for engaging in this quest.
2. Problems we face as a consultant & a psychologist, experiences we have had through serving others, & our personal meaning journey have occupied our thinking for a long time.
3. As we tried to figure out what meaning means, why it matters, & how to develop it, we realized we had embarked on a complicated journey.
4. Psycologist has taught & supervised psychology graduate students, run workshops on personal abundance, consulted for a variety of organizations, & written books on forgiving ourselves & changing our mind-set.
5. Consultant has coached & trained countless executives & HR professionals on how to diagnose & build organizational capabilities & deliver value to customers, writing more than 20 books on these topics.
6. In each of these forums, we interviewed people to find out how they interpret sources of potential meaning in their lives.
7. We asked flight attendants, janitorial workers, bus drivers, homemakers, & executives what they liked about their jobs & what gave meaning to their personal & professional lives.
8. We looked for underlying patterns of individual & organizational meaning & success.
9. We also went to our respective literatures for research & theory on meaning & living well.
1. Many thoughtful people in many fields of inquiry have studied different aspects of how meaning & personal wellbeing are defined, experienced, & developed.
2. In spirit of taxonomy, we culled our experience, our conversations, & theory & research that informed our work
We identified seven disciplines, each of which looks at meaning making through a slightly different lens:
1. Positive psychology,
2. Social responsibility,
3. Marriage & interpersonal relationships (including high-performing teams),
4. Employee engagement,
5. Culture & positive work environment,
6. Growth & learning, &
7. Happiness.
1. Ideas & research from each of these disciplines contribute to model driving this book:
2. Seven drivers, questions, & tool sets that leaders may use to build meaning, in turn creating a strong organizational purpose & identity that create value for customers, investors, & employees alike.
Two caveats are in order.
1. First, we know we have not done justice to any of disciplines we synthesize.
2. Volumes of theory & research discuss positive psychology, social responsibility, marriage & interpersonal relationships (including high-performing teams), employee engagement, culture & positive work environment, growth & learning, & happiness.
1. We have tried to pare down these vast literatures into a set of manageable tasks for leaders who want to help employees find meaning in their professional lives.
2. Second, we realize we are writing about very personal issues within a professional setting.
3. Consistent with that agenda, we have used a lot of personal stories to illustrate how to define & determine meaning.
4. By personalizing meaning, we hope we can capture why & how leaders make meaning happen, build abundant organizations, & deliver value to stakeholders.
1. This brings us to issue of audience for this book: leaders.
2. Whether talking to executives of global companies or therapy clients who struggle with loss & grief, we have found search for meaning to be universal.
3. It affects rich & poor; young & old; American, African, European, & Asian; those in big & small organizations, publicly traded firms & public agencies; employees close to retirement & employees just entering workforce; those who volunteer in community organizations & those who lead large conglomerates; those who are unemployed & those who put in 80-hour weeks.
4. Given our professional interests, we could have written to individuals at large, to employees, or to HR professionals (who generally accept importance of meaning making & who build HR systems to sustain it).
5. We decided to write to leaders.
1. Leaders are meaning makers:
2. they set direction that others aspire to;
3. they help others participate in doing good work & good works;
4. they communicate ideas & invest in practices that shape how people think, act, & feel.
1. As organizations become an increasing part of individual’s sense of identity & purpose, leaders play an increasing role in helping people shape meaning of their lives.
2. Too many leaders focus on where they are going & how to get there, without paying much attention to how it feels to those on journey with them.
3. When leaders make work meaningful, they help create abundant organizations where employees operate on a value proposition based on meaning as well as money.
4. Meaning becomes a multiplier of employee competence & commitment, a lead indicator of customer share, a source of investor confidence, & a factor in ensuring social responsibility in broader community.
5. We find that even hardest-nosed leaders become interested in meaning when they realize its potential contribution to bottom-line realities.
6. When leaders grasp why of meaning, they then seek how.
We have written this book because we hope to …..
1. Synthesize & simplify mystical & complex approaches to meaning into focused questions and specific actions.
2. Further a serious discussion of nature of personal meaning at work.
3. Show leaders that attention to meaning will help them reach their financial, customer, organizational, community, & strategic goals.
4. Offer leaders specific ideas, tools, and practices for growing meaning and abundance.
5. Redefine leaders’ roles to include not only direction setting and structure providing but meaning making as well.
6. Promote for all of us who go to work day in & day out a sense of greater abundance because we have a clearer sense of the meaning of our labor.
7. Change conversations between leaders & employees to focus not only on what needs to be done but also on how it feels to do it.
8. Turn deficit-laden thinking into abundance metaphors and actions that will make a better world for our children, their children,& yours.
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WHY OF WORK
The Case for Meaning:
1. The Abundant Organization
2. The Market Value of Why
3. Leaders as Meaning Makers
4. Recessions of Meaning
5. The Prevalence of Deficit Thinking
6. Leaders Who Focus on Meaning Create an Abundant Response
The Making of Abundance
1. Wrestling with Paradox
2. From Turnaround to Transformation
3. Discovering Meaning
4. Why These Outcomes?
5. Seven Questions That Drive Abundance
a) What Am I Known For? (Identity)
b) Where Am I Going? (Purpose and Motivation)
c) Whom Do I Travel With? (Relationships and Teamwork
d) How Do I Build a Positive Work Environment? (Effective Work Culture or Setting)
e) What Challenges Interest Me? (Personalized Contributions)
f) How Do I Respond to Disposability and Change? (Growth, Learning, and Resilience)
g) What Delights Me? (Civility and Happiness)
6. Organizational Application
What Am I Known For? (Identity)
Signature Strengths and Capabilities
1. Help Employees Define and Grow Their Personal Strengths
2. Define and Build Organizational Capabilities Required for Success
3. Meld Personal Strengths and Organizational Capabilities
4. Determine Customer and Investor Expectations
5. Connect Both Personal and Organizational Identities with the Needs of Customers and Investors
Where Am I Going?(Purpose and Motivation)
1. Places to Go: Four Categories of Purpose
2. Self-Awareness for Leaders, Employees, and Organizations
3. Find the High-Abundance Version of Your Quadrant
4. Expand into Other Quadrants
5. Find the Right Fit
6. A Leadership Agenda
Whom Do I Travel With? Relationships and Teams That Work)
1. A Relationship Playbook
a) Make and Respond to Bids
b) Listen and Self-Disclose
c) Navigate Proximity
d) Resolve Conflict
e) Make Amends
2. Abundant Relationships
How Do I Build a Positive Work Environment? (Effective Work Culture or Setting)
1. Attitude Toward Success: Arrogance Versus Humility
2. Attitude Toward Value and Values: Implicit Versus Explicit
3. Attitude Toward Service: Self-Interest Versus Selflessness
4. Attitude Toward Ideas: Criticized Versus Invited
5. Attitude Toward Connections:Impersonal Versus Personal
6. Attitude Toward Involvement: Hands-Off Versus Hands-On
7. Attitude Toward Accountability: Enfeebling Others Versus Empowering Others
8. Attitude Toward Communication: Reduced Versus Increased
9. Attitude Toward Conflict: Run and Hide Versus Run Into
10. Attitude Toward Physical Space: Haphazard Versus Chosen
11. Positive Work Environment in Action
12. An Exercise
What Challenges Interest Me? (Personalized Contributions)
1. Understand What Outcomes Matter to the Employee
2. Create a Clear Line of Sight Between Actions and Outcomes
3. Help Employees Find the Intrinsic Value of Their Work
4. Shaping Work Conditions to Offer Abundance to Each Employee
5. Abundant Work
How Do I Respond to Disposability and Change? (Growth, Learning, and Resilience)
Learning
Principle 1: Generate New Ideas
1. Self-Reflection
2. Experimentation
3. Continuous Improvement
4. Boundary Spanning
Principle 2: Generalize Ideas
1. Talent
2. Incentives
3. Information Systems
4. Personal Resilience
5. Social Resilience
6. Organizational Resilience
7. In Conclusion
What Delights Me? (Civility and Happiness)
Creativity
Pleasure
Humor and Playfulness
Civility
Customers and Delight
An Unexpected Lesson in Delight
Implications for Executives,Human Resources,and Individuals
1. Two Cases
2. The Why of Meaning at Work
3. The How of Meaning
4. Leadership Implications
a. Boards of Directors
b. C-Suite Executives (C for Chief, as in Executive, Financial, Technology, Marketing, or Human Resource Officer)
c. Leaders as Models
5. Human Resource Implications
a. People Practices
b. Performance Practices
c. Organization Practices
6. Employee Implications
7. A New Value Proposition
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