THE QUEST FOR MEANING IN THE MODERN WORKPLACE
While existential philosophy has many interpretations, I have a favorite refrain that captures my interpretation: Life is a journey through reality and time in search of meaning.
If you think this existential concept is irrelevant to running a business, think again. In the quest to find the balance between the story and the spreadsheet, meaning is what matters. Employees who find work meaningful are highly productive, agile, and committed. They possess a positive story they tell themselves and others about their work, and even if they’re up to their eyeballs in data, they are not ruled by it.
As always, the key is finding the balance point between the human story and the data-laden spreadsheet. To understand what we’re balancing, though, we need to grasp what is meaningful about work.
People Work for More than Money, Titles, Perks, and Power
Most employees value money, titles, perks, and power, but it’s a mistake to believe that these are the only, or the most important, things they look for at work. Consider that as adults, we spend more than half our hours working. Consider, too, that time is the only real resource we possess, and it is limited and unrecoverable.
While some of us find meaning outside of work and settle for jobs that pay well (or not) but aren’t particularly rewarding, most people want fulfilling, satisfying work, especially given the amount of time they devote to it. Meaningful work offers purpose, self-improvement, and connection. The challenge today is how to find that meaning.
Our story is the path to meaning. The writer Joan Didion talked about how “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and that our biggest story is our interior narrative.1 At work, is our story one of tedium and rule following? Is it one where we do our jobs competently and receive regular raises and promotions, but we constantly dream of doing something else?
Or is the story about a journey of learning and growth, of stretch assignments and camaraderie, of temporal experiences—time passes without notice because you’re so wrapped up in what you’re doing?
Employees want to tell themselves these types of meaningful stories, but in our workplaces, the myopic emphasis on spreadsheets can get in the way. To a certain extent, this emphasis has existed for years—organizations have always wanted employees to produce as much as possible in the shortest time possible with the lowest costs.
What’s different today is our ability to measure input and output. We have become brilliant at measurement because of technology, and while this has critical benefits, it also (inadvertently) diminishes the importance of story. If you drive a vehicle for a living, sensors in the vehicle track every aspect of your route from speed to brakes. Your passengers use apps to rate you. All this data is collated and compared against the norm. At a certain point, you may feel like a cog in a machine, and that is not an existential experience by any stretch of the imagination.2
Different Ways Measurement Diminishes Meaning
If you write, the quality and quantity of your words are measured, but so is the number of interactions your article or blog generates. The number of readers, whether a post is shared and discussed, if a given piece makes the popular list—all this and more are often shared on screens. Interestingly, the most popular way to navigate the New York Times online is via the most shared list rather than through the home page. The numerical wisdom of the crowd is perceived to be a better guide than what the home page professionals feature.
As medical practices focus on business efficiencies and legal issues, we see data-driven medicine move from just the efficacy of drugs and procedures to how long a doctor takes to see a patient or whether protocols and checklists are followed. A number of hospitals have initiated a new way to measure doctors, called “relative value units,” as explained in an article in the Post and Courier:
The committee proposed a new plan, which would tie a percentage of each doctor’s salary to the amount of work each doctor does. Moving forward, their productivity would be measured in “relative value units,” or RVUs. More patients, more tests, and more procedures generate more RVUs.
But RVU targets aren’t universally popular, either.
Some patients argue that RVU goals force physicians to work more quickly, thereby spending less time with each patient and opening a window for mistakes. Doctors, particularly those employed by academic medical centers, worry that productivity targets offer no incentive for physicians to teach or to conduct research if they’re not generating RVUs in the classroom or lab.3
Meaning is necessary not just for the well-being of employees but to maintain healthy cultures and companies. A case in point is Wells Fargo, which has received a lot of bad publicity in recent years because of its “fake accounts” scandal. The company had a culture that rewarded volume-based outcomes, which were good for the bank but not for its customers. According to a Bloomberg report detailing the company’s problems,
The bank is seeking a federal judge’s final approval of a $142 million settlement with some 3.5 million consumers over its practice of “cross selling,” which pushed staff to open multiple accounts per customer. Some employees tried to meet sales goals by opening up bogus accounts. More than 5,000 employees were fired, and John Stumpf resigned as chief executive officer. That settlement, even if approved, won’t resolve claims by shareholders who say the bank touted the cross-selling program even after realizing it was a problem. Other investors filed derivative suits, on behalf of the company, against managers and directors of Wells Fargo, claiming they were responsible for the aggressive sales culture. Wells Fargo employees have filed an action for losses in their 401(k) plan, and some former employees say they were wrongfully fired.4
Too often, work is benchmarked against a norm: a row on a spreadsheet. What’s valued is your economic productivity—your ability to work faster, cheaper, and in high volume—and ethics aren’t valued because they’re so difficult to measure from a productivity standpoint.
It’s one of many intangibles—how innovative you are, your empathy, or why you’re doing what you’re doing. Purpose, self-improvement, and connection, especially, are not conducive to measurement. As a result, very little time or effort is devoted to ensuring that employees are learning and growing, are committed to organizational goals, or are enjoying a sense of affiliation and inclusion.
While human resources (HR) departments aren’t the cause of this problem, they contribute to it. Traditionally, HR has been in charge of data-driven processes. They ensure that evaluations are conducted, employee pay is managed and benchmarked, and the proper verbiage (from a legal standpoint) is used when appraising and terminating employees.
Today, HR receives a steady stream of employee data related to productivity, social media interactions, and much more. They use this data to define, categorize, and measure people. Rarely do they spend time trying to understand the people behind the data.
I’m not beating up on HR; they serve an important and necessary function. Ideally, however, they should serve two functions. The first is to ensure processes, laws, and systems are followed. This is a rigid, legal, and scalable function. The second is to help teach, grow, and retain talent. This is a fluid, flexible, and customized function.
In too many companies, HR devotes the lion’s share of their time to the former. Along with incentives that drive specific behaviors—faster, cheaper, more—HR contributes unintentionally to reducing meaningful work experiences.
The Link Between Meaning and Highly Productive People
People who feel valued by, proud of, and affiliated with their organizations perform better than those who don’t. This is a tough statement to prove with hard data, but it’s one that I and most leaders I’ve talked to would stand behind. Empirically, we know that the people who have contributed the most to our organizations are those who find their work to be meaningful. While I can cite many examples to illustrate this point, forgive a little civic boosterism and let me tout the culture of the Chicago Cubs.
As most people know, they won the World Series in 2016 and many observers attributed this victory after a century-long drought to the culture and character instilled by president of baseball operations Theo Epstein and his colleagues. While they were smart about developing players in their system, they also have been able to attract free agent talent and keep existing players because of the culture they established.
In a Wall Street Journal article, Jared Diamond examined the Cubs’ success in attracting free agents:
Tyler Chatwood thought he knew what to expect when he met with the Chicago Cubs this offseason to discuss the possibility of joining them as a free agent. He assumed he would hear plenty about the Cubs’ recent on-field success, their plan for him in the starting rotation and, of course, the boatload of money they could offer to lure him.
Instead, president of baseball operations Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer took the conversation in a direction that surprised and disarmed him: They recommended the best physicians and hospitals in the area for his pregnant wife.
“They had never met me or my wife, and they were giving me doctors’ names,” said Chatwood, a twenty-eight-year-old right-hander. “They were already going to put us in contact with the OB/GYN over there.”
He signed a three-year, $38 million contract with the Cubs shortly thereafter.
This is the secret weapon that enables the Cubs to practically hand-select talent: a compelling personal touch that goes beyond players’ value on the field. In many cases, that means appealing to the people most important in their lives—their families.
“We feel like all of those things are exceptionally important,” Hoyer said. “There’s more than just playing. There’s a whole life outside baseball.”
They are once again the favorites in the NL Central. As Hoyer put it, “We have something that we’re proud of here to sell.”
More often than not, players buy it, rushing to join an organization where they believe they’ll be happy.
“Money can’t buy that,” Heyward said.5
The Four Keys to Retaining and Motivating the Best Talent
In decades of working with some of the most talented people across a spectrum of situations—from small to large companies, as well as staff and operational roles—I have extracted four keys to retention and development of talent.
A CARING, DEVELOPMENT-ORIENTED BOSS. Bosses foster meaningful work experiences. In fact, a great boss supervising someone who isn’t paid particularly well and has a mediocre job drives more employee happiness and growth than a bad boss supervising someone in a high-growth, high-paying position. Who is a great boss? While the personalities and abilities vary, most who fit this definition have the following traits in common: they celebrate the team more than themselves, possess integrity, are approachable, and recognize that their people have lives and pressures outside of work.6
If bosses use a spreadsheet-only mentality to manage people, they are unlikely to exhibit these traits. They focus on individuals rather than teams because it’s easier to measure the performance of the former rather than the latter; integrity and approachability are “soft” characteristics that aren’t measured or rewarded by most companies, and outside pressures don’t compute in a work- and data-driven universe.
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “People leave bosses more than they leave companies.” Bad bosses suck the meaning out of the work environment, and people who work for them can’t wait to get out of their jobs, no matter how well they might be paid.
COMPANY AND TEAM PRIDE. People care a lot about working for organizations with mission, purpose, and values to which they resonate. The litmus test is whether, in social situations, they are happy to tell others about where they work and why they work there versus shying away from mentioning their companies. They believe they have found the right company for themselves, that the company is a reflection of them and they are a reflection of the company. In many cases they also believe they work in special and elite teams.
Whenever I built teams I’d do everything possible to make people believe they were extraordinary—even in situations when people considered what we were doing as less important to the organization than what others were doing (e.g., direct marketing in a large advertising agency). A criticism I would get is that I was creating elitist teams. My answer? From the Marines to McKinsey to Goldman Sachs, everybody wants to be special and world-class. Why should I breed mediocrity?
QUALITY COLLEAGUES. This is analogous to why people like or dislike their colleges. Studies show that what makes students happy at universities are the quality of the professors and the quality of other students. Bosses and fellow employees are the organizational equivalents. What many employees find meaningful are the work relationships they make and sustain over time. Developing a sense of camaraderie and a belief that your team is smart, fun to work with, and successful means a lot to people, especially in increasingly team-oriented work environments.
Over the course of my career, I have cofounded three different companies within Publicis—Giant Step, Starcom IP, and Denuo—and each has enjoyed a great deal of success, primarily because we attracted high-quality people using the following criteria:
• Be careful of the first few hires since they will make (or break) the culture of the company.
• Ensure that nobody is hired without at least eight to ten folks in the company meeting and agreeing to the hire since, until the company grows past fifty people, that one hire can represent at least 2 percent of the workforce.
• Communicate your mission, vision, and values clearly. Even if these elements strike you as daunting, let people know. The individuals who are right for the job will self-select, embracing the challenge.
OPPORTUNITY TO ACQUIRE NEW SKILLS AND GROW. In a rapidly changing world, the ability to learn and grow is more meaningful than ever before—it helps people retain their marketability and it allows them to keep their skills current. I was able to retain the best talent—talent that could have been paid a lot more elsewhere—by leveraging their higher external offers as positive proof that they had the best job. I said, “This is proof that you have skills that are sought after and you are well-known outside.” I would then suggest, “Check in six months and you will be worth even more. Why? Because you are learning and growing new skills. The day you are not worth much more outside, you should leave. Until then, keep growing, and you can always monetize that in the future.”
Again, this doesn’t negate the importance of a good salary and various perks. To a certain extent, this is the ante to get in the talent acquisition and retention game. But meaning doesn’t come from the compensation data. It comes from the human story: the story of skills and growth, the story of great colleagues and bosses, the story of organizational pride.
The Danger of Measurement Imbalance
In some ways the common performance-measurement and rewards system brings out the worst in employees. Rather than encourage them to discover and pursue existentially satisfying work, the system pushes them toward short-term, superficial satisfaction.
Typically, organizations build their incentives around numerical goals such as sales and profits. Salespeople are still rewarded primarily for meeting or exceeding their quotas; other employees are rewarded when they achieve numbers-related objectives, such as finishing a project by a deadline or decreasing costs in their unit by X percent.
I’m not minimizing the importance of achieving these short-term numbers. I am suggesting that when they become the dominant or only incentives, employees become unbalanced—they are working only for the spreadsheet and are ignoring the story.
There is no question that organizations attempt to integrate team and long-term goals into incentive plans. Unfortunately, it is much more difficult to measure group dynamics and results over a period of years, so short-term, immediate results become the de facto, dominant measure, encouraging one-sided behaviors.
Having a lot of these unbalanced employees is toxic to organizations in the following ways:
• Breaks down teamwork. Teams require high levels of trust, cooperation, and sharing; they also need to prioritize company and customer goals over individual goals. When people are being measured primarily on quarterly, individual performance, however, they are dissuaded from adopting team behaviors. They develop a false idea of what’s meaningful.
• Loses the best talent. The employees who value meaningful work—who relish team interactions, honest conversations, and learning and developing—are alienated by how companies reward short-term results-producers and individual achievement. They feel their ability to grow is compromised and look for employment at companies that value meaningful work.
• Hurts company reputation. Glassdoor and other social media sites allow employees to tell the world how their companies are short-term thinkers unconcerned with helping people grow and develop. The word spreads quickly that if you are looking for a caring company that values development, you should look elsewhere.
Admittedly, it’s difficult for organizations to change their measurement methods, in part because of the previously stated point that short-term individual performance is easy to measure, and long-term team performance is not. But there’s also the question of whether organizations want to create a balanced measurement/rewards process. Public companies are under intense pressure for quarterly earnings, so they value people who can deliver great, individual results quarter by quarter. It’s tough to risk reducing individual results, and it’s even tougher to have a conversation with high performers and ask them to balance their outstanding individual work with teamwork.
Ideally, organizations will create a recruitment/hiring process that looks for people who have an inherently balanced approach to work and weeds out those who are just in it for the money. I absolutely believe you can recruit with an eye for people who value meaningful work. In fact, I’ve done so by asking the following two questions of job candidates:
1. How many of the people who used to work for you believe you aided and built their success?
2. Would your ex-bosses and ex-direct reports (not current ones who are unlikely to speak the truth) want to work with you again?
Finding Meaning: The Opportunity for Improvement
The first self-help book, Manual for Living, was written by Epictetus more than two thousand years ago. The desire for improvement is not only ancient but it’s hardwired into us. We want to lose weight, create better relationships, become more successful. Companies, too, mirror this desire for self-improvement. They live and die by their growth rates and comparable metrics—comparable to the previous year and competitors.
Through investment and incentives, companies try to help their people and their organizations improve. They make huge investments in training—$150 billion annually in the US—and incentivize improvement by offering promotions and financial rewards for those who meet sales quotas, generate revenue, and achieve other desirable outcomes that represent increases.7
Given this book’s theme, you probably can guess where all this is heading. The training and incentives are all spreadsheet-based, numerical, and quantifiable. While numerical measures of improvement can have organizational value, they’re also flawed in three ways:8
1. They may no longer be relevant. Measuring against past competitors or oneself tends to be insular and backward-looking; it’s often the wrong measure in a world of change. Improvement against the past or oneself might seem like a positive barometer, but what if other competitors are improving faster? Gillette may have benchmarked against Schick, but the real competitors were Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club. I once told General Mills that they were not behind their competitors but behind their consumers, and benchmarking and being slightly better than other pathetic competitors did not make one world-class. They didn’t forget that meeting for years.
2. They can be gamed. Once incentives are linked to outcomes, individuals and organizations may manipulate budgets, goals, and metrics to ensure they exceed the numbers they have to hit. The telemarketers at Navient who were supposed to help people who had taken out student loans had a “seven-minute rule”: they needed to complete a call in seven minutes. So guess what they did? They did not answer questions but said they would mail out information, and in many cases when the calls were going long they hung up, pretending the call had been dropped. The customers were irate, but the seven-minute rule—and the telemarketers’ incentives—had been met.
3. They rarely measure the intangibles. For growth, expertise, depth, and soft skills, most companies measure what’s been done but not the quality or service or experience delivered.
Meaningful improvement, however, can be measured in stories—the stories people tell within organizations about improvements in service, skills, and growth. When employees and their bosses share stories about how Eduardo solved problem X or how Maya capitalized on opportunity X, they usually are tales not of productivity speed but of depth of knowledge. More specifically, meaningful improvement stories usually are about the following:
ABILITY TO INCREASE SKILLS AND COMPETENCE THROUGH CONTINUOUS LEARNING. As the world changes, we have a reflexive desire to keep up, to remain on the cutting edge. As we learn and translate that learning into on-the-job achievement, we feel good about ourselves. We tell our colleagues about all the great knowledge we acquired at a workshop or how an off-site retreat really changed our thinking.
THE CHANCE TO INNOVATE. We can improve by connecting the dots in new ways. Out of these fresh connections come new realities and opportunities. People are amazing in their facility to link things in new ways—e.g., Lyft and Uber, where the traditional concept of taxis was linked with new technology and entrepreneurial individuals. Creating something innovative is tremendously meaningful; it feels like we’re using our brains productively.
BECOMING BETTER COMMUNICATORS. Perhaps more accurately, there’s room for improvement in emotional communication. Machines are great at reading data and terrible at reading human emotion. We need employees who can motivate and empathize, and there’s always room for improvement here. People who can make diverse, sometimes contentious teams work better together through emotional intelligence feel a great sense of satisfaction, especially in cultures that increasingly value collaboration.
As AI becomes a greater force in organizations, and the spreadsheet side of things becomes more effective and dominant, we’ll need improvement in the aforementioned three areas more than ever. Learning, innovating, and communicating will take all the great data machines produce and maximize their value. People will find exercising these three very human abilities highly satisfying in an era where AI will become a growing organizational force.
Finding Meaning: Self-Actualization9
This pop psych term probably isn’t the best descriptor of meaning in the workplace, but it does capture the idea of doing work in a way that is true to who you are. It has been said, “It’s never too late to become what you might have been.” You probably know people who have found jobs that allow them to be their best work selves (and perhaps you’re one of those lucky ones). These individuals experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed “flow,”10 a mental and emotional state that is equivalent to the sports term “the zone”—for example, basketball player Michael Jordan had games where it seemed he was making every shot he took. At work, flow means that you’re highly productive, innovative, and agile, and that you’re doing the work you were meant to do at the peak of your powers.
In spreadsheet-dominated organizations, self-actualization isn’t a big priority. Numbers can’t measure flow. They can measure the output of someone experiencing flow, but there’s little concern about creating work conditions that facilitate achievement of this state.
In companies where a good balance exists between the spreadsheet and the story, people are allowed, encouraged, and helped to align their passions and skills. They are then motivated to learn, take chances, grow, and communicate in ways that benefit not only their careers but their organizations—they become experts at what they love to do.
I am a good case in point. My company’s focus is marketing and communications, and we develop creative, media, and technology solutions for our clients. While I am familiar with these areas of expertise, I am not an expert at any of them. Instead, my success in the company is due to combining my skills and passion for foreseeing, forecasting, and forging change. I became the company’s futurist, change enabler, and reinventor, a role critical to our company’s and clients’ growth in a transformative age.
Not every organization would have allowed me to self-actualize. Mine did so because the culture and talent-development approach fostered the following behaviors:
• Live and work in your own mind, not in the minds of others. In many companies, people try to anticipate what their bosses want or what will impress their colleagues rather than what matters most to themselves. In highly politicized cultures this is especially true, as it is in companies where promotions and bonuses are basely solely on traditional productivity measures. Cultures that encourage authenticity help people work in their own minds. It may take them longer to be major contributors, but their passion for work motivates them to become experts in the long run.
• Experiment and iterate to find a fit. After some time in the workforce, people have a sense of what they like and their area of talent. They recognize that they are better than others in a given space. Companies should be aware of this intersection of passion and comparative advantage and funnel people into jobs and tasks that place them in this intersection. They should give them stretch assignments and incentivize them to take risks and develop their abilities.
I should also point out that self-actualization occurs increasingly within teams. When team members are aligned with each other as well as with themselves, they function at peak levels. Here’s how to foster this alignment:
• Ensure receptivity to diverse skills and perspectives. It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a range of individuals and talents to raise a great idea. Teams receptive to a range of employees’ voices provide them opportunity to be heard. Too often, participation on teams is an exercise in futility and frustration—the team leader or one member dominates the discussion and decisions. When people feel listened to and appreciated on teams—and when they manage to reach consensus after stimulating debate—the results are truly satisfying to all participants.
• Compensate and appraise based on team performance. Some companies persist in linking compensation only to individual performance. As a result, people who shine in team settings feel devalued, no matter how much they contribute to the team success. People need to know that their ability to support team members, manage conflict, and move the group to consensus is esteemed by their organizations. In this way, they see their team talents and participation as increasingly meaningful.
Finding Meaning: Deeper Connections
As everyone knows, we are living in a connected age because of technology: mobile devices, social media, group collaboration platforms, video sharing, and so on. These connections can be shallow and superficial, but just because they’re made by screens doesn’t have to preclude deep connections. Again, it’s all a question of how we use the technology. While Facebook is often seen as a platform for weak and trivial connections, it can foster thoughtful and emotional exchanges that influence behavior in profound ways. People come away from these tech interactions with a fresh understanding of issues such as white privilege and are more cognizant of the problems minorities encounter in some workplaces.
We should use all the means at our disposal—both digital and analog—to deepen our connections. Our relationships with bosses, direct reports, peers, customers, and vendors are what contribute to a meaningful workplace. More specifically, when we give and receive empathy and trust, we feel good about ourselves and our place within the organization. We relish being part of a culture that fosters these qualities, especially when we’ve had previous experiences in companies that were cold and distrustful.
When a boss empathizes when we make a mistake or struggle to meet a tough objective, we relish that empathy, even though we might beat ourselves up for falling short. Empathy makes failures and mistakes palatable. More important, it motivates employees to try harder, to learn more, to develop knowledge and skills that will help them succeed the next time they face a similar challenge. Tim Harris, who once worked with me, told me the story of when he was a newbie and he made a trafficking error that would cost the company a few thousand dollars. After berating himself up over the weekend, he went to his boss to tell her of the mistake, and he expected to be fired. Instead she laughed at him and said, “Don’t be a drama queen and think you are so special. We all make mistakes like that when we start. Now, be careful and get out of my office.” His then boss, Lisa Donohue, earned his lifelong allegiance and in time she became the CEO of the company.
Similarly, trust gives us the freedom to fail gracefully. When we trust that our boss won’t fire us if we make a mistake, we’re more willing to take a chance on a fresh approach or an innovative idea. As managers, when we demonstrate that we trust our teams, they are more willing to share diverse ideas and opinions that may run counter to the company’s (or the boss’s).
Trust and empathy are the glue of solid relationships—of relationships that make us look forward to coming to the office, to working with our colleagues on teams, to proposing ideas to our boss.
To create an environment of trust and empathy where connections are strong and deep, organizations should focus on motivating managers to display the following three traits and create “tattoo moments”:
INTEGRITY. Bosses earn trust when they are authentic, transparent about their intent, and open to feedback. People love working for and with executives who possess integrity. They feel they will be treated fairly and respected, which are meaning-creating qualities in business environments. This isn’t something you can fake or ignore. In a networked age, people are sharing things about you constantly, so if you lack integrity, everyone will know it. And in an age of #MeToo and corporate social responsibility, organizations are increasingly eager for their leaders to be honest, ethical, and fair.11 Integrity was always critical, but today leaders who lack it or lose it often take down their companies and not just themselves.
HUMOR. Meaning isn’t always associated with serious stuff, and connections don’t deepen just when you share your most heartfelt emotions and secrets. When leaders and managers use humor regularly to diminish tension when dealing with tough issues or to create a relaxed, friendly atmosphere, they add to the story side of the equation. Environments filled with laughter and smiles encourage expressiveness and risk taking. It shifts the perspective on negative events, making them seem less like the end of the world and more like a bump in the road. And it helps people relate to each other in a way that’s highly enjoyable.
At a major industry conference a few years ago, when everybody was calling advertising agencies dinosaurs, I said that we were not dinosaurs but cockroaches. For like cockroaches, we may be looked down on with disdain, but we scurried around and found ways to survive and outlast everyone else. Everybody laughed, and rarely did people call us dinosaurs after that. Rather, industry analysts noted we would thrive like cockroaches!
VULNERABILITY. To understand someone, you must be able to be understood. If you want your people to share their feelings and challenges, you must share your own. This doesn’t mean just saying to an anxious employee, “Sometimes, I get anxious too.” You have to tell the story of your anxiety, to make it come alive in ways to which people can relate. Personal stories about vulnerabilities resonate a lot more than facts and figures. If you’re trying to encourage someone to take a risk, don’t send them a study about the benefits of risk-taking; talk about a risk you took in your career and how it paid off. This is how you build meaningful relationships.
I often told the story of when I had started the Interactive Marketing Group and we had a single client, McDonald’s, who had hired us for one project: a test of Time Warner’s Full Service Interactive Television in Orlando. I soon determined the technology underlying the project would not work, and the project would therefore fail. I went to the client to tell them not to move forward, knowing that the only revenue—and therefore my job—was dependent on what I was recommending we shut down. The client looked at me and said, “Don’t you feel vulnerable for your career?” I said yes, but I was sure the test would not work, even though Time Warner said it would and other clients were signing up. The client decided to withdraw from the test and continue paying my team the fees to help them come up with other ways to do interactive. Some months later McDonald’s began working with America Online at our recommendation, and McDonald’s became a very large client.
TATTOO MOMENTS. Deep connections occur because of all the previous factors, but emotion is a key component. Typically, a leader or manager reaches out to an employee with a gesture or words that imprint themselves, not just cognitively but affectively. I call them tattoo moments because they are indelibly marked in our memories like a tattoo is on the skin. They become part of our identity and mark our future days.
Years ago, I worked for a man named Jack Klues, who oversaw billions of dollars of business, was a member of Publicis’s board, and was the number two executive in the entire organization. We were working together on a new business pitch, and because of bad weather, I was forced to take a train to Urbana, Illinois, where I would meet with Jack the next morning and then fly to our destination. I had never been to this city before, and I arrived at midnight, disembarking into a gloomy, near-deserted station. This was before Uber and smartphones, and I had no idea how I was going to find my way to a hotel.
But then I saw Jack, seated by himself on a bench. “Welcome to Urbana,” he said. “I thought you might need someone to drive you to the hotel.”
That a leader of a huge organization would do this for me was astonishing. I never forgot his gesture, and I worked for Jack until he retired. I would have done anything for him. That one gesture was far more motivating than any bonus or other perk he might have offered. I loved working with him and helping achieve goals—our deep connection made all our work together meaningful.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• We spend a significant part of our lives at work, and to be productive and happy we seek relevance, affiliation, and purpose in our jobs.
• Meaning is found in some combination of growing and building new skills, finding work that resonates with oneself, and establishing nourishing human relationships.
• The best workplaces foster self-resonant, relationship-rich environments and prevent math, machine, and motion from diluting these healthy attributes.