Leading for Meaning

A model for the modern workforce

I have been kicking around a model of modern leadership in my head for some time, so I thought this week I would start to try to articulate that model. I’d appreciate feedback. 

If you’ve been reading FITW for a while, you know I have been talking about my model of meaning being made up of 3C’s: Competence, Contribution, and Connection. Central to my argument is that the relationship between these components is multiplicative rather than additive, which results in forcing each component to have a value greater than zero (because anything multiplied by zero is zero). So:

Meaning = Competence x Contribution x Connection

(I’ve written about the components in RWL #291 and a few times since, so I won’t repeat that here. At some point I will revisit the definitions, but not today.)

My model of meaning is not just meant to apply in the workplace, but as a component of an overall view of a worthy life. However, today I want to focus on it as a component of leadership in organizations.

Let me start from the end and work backwards. 

Organizations exist for some productive purpose. Factories, hospitals, retailers, etc. But I would also include clubs and churches - they just have different things they are producing. The majority of these organizations operate on team effort. As we all know from group projects starting in grade school, it is always easy for one or more members of the group to free-ride on the effort of the rest of the group. Modern workplaces also operate much more on intellectual work rather than muscle work, so it is harder to evaluate the effort of any one individual, as most of the effort is happening inside the person’s head. The task of the modern organizational leader is to elicit discretionary effort from the workers in the organization. 

For this purpose, I would define discretionary effort as anything over the bare minimum to keep from revealing total disengagement, such that a manager could detect non-compliance and take action against the employee. The phenomenon of “quiet quitting” where an individual did just barely enough to keep from being fired fits this. It’s just enough effort to keep HR from letting the manager fire the employee, but no more. 

The quiet quitter tries to live just north of the fireable dividing line. The quiet quitter is useful for illustrating this model because what is implied in this understanding of quiet quitting is that the quiet quitter is sufficiently competent to do the job at a higher level, but chooses not to. Why not? Because the work lacks meaning. Something is broken in the 3Cs such that the quiet quitter chooses to provide the minimum effort required, rather than offer discretionary effort. 

Each of the C’s in the meaning column are both objective and subjective. One must be objectively competent, as I was describing in last week’s newsletter (Talent, Performance, and Fit), where talent is sufficient to achieve a level of performance necessary to cross the threshold for professional performance. That is the objective component. But just as importantly to achieve Meaning, one must experience competence when performing the work. That is the subjective component. I may be able to do a task perfectly well, even to a high degree of competence, but it may not fill me with the experience of competence. Objective competence is the necessary but not sufficient precondition for subjective competence. 

The first job of a leader is selecting members of the team. The first question a leader needs to ask as they select a new member is whether the person can be objectively competent. Does the prospective team member have the necessary skills, abilities, and attributes to be able to cross the threshold of professional performance? 

We, prospective teammates, also have a duty in this process. We self-select into organizations. We also have to ask, do we have the objective competence to do a job? But also, will we experience competence when doing a job? A high level of experienced competence is often captured by a sense of flow (a good explanation here if you are not familiar). 

So in this model, I include self-selection as an exogenous component. Leaders first have to select for competence, but can also help build competence. 

Contribution is also both objective and subjective. Contribution can be measured at the micro and macro level. At the micro level, can you see how your actions contribute to your team? Do people rely on what you do? Can you see the impact on others of your work product? At the macro level, does your organization’s product contribute to the world? For me, the classic example of this is the janitor in a children’s hospital. A janitor can sense contribution at the micro level because he can see his work and its contribution to ensuring safe care. At the macro level, he is contributing to the mission of the children’s hospital of improving the health of children in the community. For me, as a finance leader in a healthcare system, I almost never interacted with patients. But I could see my work at the micro level was ensuring resources got to where they were most needed in our organization, and the macro level I knew my work was impacting the well-being of my community. Subjectively, one has to perceive the work as important for it to be a contribution. For me, healthcare is an easy yes. Yes, of course my work is a contribution. 

Leaders impact the subjective experience of contribution. They can reinforce the connections, remind the team of the importance of their contributions at the micro and macro levels. I don’t buy the argument that bullshit jobs exist. A leader should always be able to explain the downstream impact of an individual’s work. Or the leader should eliminate the job. 

Individuals have a duty of self-selection here as well. If you don’t buy into the mission of an organization, you shouldn’t choose to work for it. If you don’t think what the organization is doing is important, you are not going to experience meaning in your work and you will live a pointless and less worthy life.

Finally, connection is the sense of belonging. Do you feel included and welcome? Do the people you work with care about your well-being? Do you care about theirs? Connection is a two-way street: you have to care about the people you work with and have that sense of caring reciprocated. Leaders have a duty to help people feel connected, but we also have a duty of self-selection here as well. Not every organization is going to be a good fit for each of us, and that does not mean the organization is flawed. Let’s set aside obvious flaws like cultures of racism, sexism, etc. What I mean here is some organizations may have a high level of individual competitiveness, while others are much more collectivist. We each thrive in different environments. Within a range, leaders can help individuals fit in and create inclusive cultures. 

When all three “C’s” are met, an individual will experience a high degree of meaning, which will result in a desire to offer a high level of discretionary effort, which will result in a high level of productivity. The literature on employee engagement supports this assertion. My argument is people who find meaning in their work are going to be engaged. Leaders can influence this engagement through the three C’s. We also bear responsibility for our own sense of meaning by self-selecting into organizations that we fit with. 

So that’s an initial effort at this model of leading for meaning. I would be interested in your feedback.