The Science of Meaningful Work and the 3 C’s of Flourishing with Dr. Tamara Myles

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host, and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. Tamara, it's so lovely to have you on the Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for joining us today and sharing some of your amazing work and insights in the field of meaningful work.

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here and excited for our conversation.

You know, we are such kindred spirits, which is we spend so much of our time at work. And I, most people just think about it as work. They don't think about it as life. They just think, yeah, I work so I can live my life. And I'm like, but you are living your life. Most of your life is being spent at work. And so if you are not thriving at work, if you're not flourishing, if it's not helping you grow into the best version of you, how are you not wasting your life? Right. Or a big chunk of it? And I know that's what you're passionate about. I know my journey and I've talked about it quite often on how I got onto this path and made this my life mission to fix work and ways of working. But I'm curious, share a little bit of your origin story and how you got to make this be your life's work.

Yeah, I kind of started my career working in advertising, and in the span of about 10 years, I worked at three different agencies in three different cities. So St. Louis, New York City and North Carolina. Well, North Carolina is not a city, but Durham, North Carolina. And you know, I, I was doing the same thing at all three jobs, but the experience felt very different. I was doing client service work, strategy development, all of that. But in some, you know, in two of the agencies, I experienced that work as deeply meaningful. I had leaders who believed in me, saw my potential, gave me opportunities to develop that potential. I had colleagues who I could share positive experiences with and who I felt were there for me when I needed help or when I just wanted a friend. And I could see the impact of my work clearly because the leaders and my colleagues helped me see the impact, whether it was just a thank you or whether it was by sharing customer success stories. And in one of the agencies that that was not the case. I Was completely bored. I had no opportunities to develop. I kept asking for more work, asking for special projects. You know, I had extra bandwidth, and it just was stifling, even though I was doing the same work. And so I was really curious to know, like, why was my experience so different? Is it just the one person? Is it the environment? What shapes that? And I was, like, fresh, you know, out of college, and then 10 years after. And then I started my family and took a step back from advertising and actually started some consulting work, which started as strategy consulting for advertising, but then became more productivity consulting because I discovered that I was really good. It was one of my strengths was time management, seeing the big picture, prioritizing effectively, and that actually not everyone has those strengths. And so I started coaching leaders and helping them develop systems that enabled productivity. I ended up publishing my first book back in 2014 called the Secret to Peak Productivity. And I really developed this consulting practice based on productivity improvement. And what I noticed when I was doing this work is that as people became more productive, as they had more systems in place to get more of the more important things done, you know, they had more time to really focus on the things that truly matter. Right. Because productivity is about doing what matters most first. And when they were working on those things that really mattered, they felt energized and engaged, and they were even more productive. So there was a virtuous cycle in place, and I was really curious. So between my experience in advertising and now, you know, 15 years of coaching and seeing this in action, I decided to go back to graduate school and study this cycle and understand. I didn't even know it was, like, meaningful work or what it was, but that's what I found out. It's the science of meaningful work. And then did the research, and now I get to really kind of pull the curtain and peek behind and really understand the mechanisms of how this all works.

Yeah, I love it. Right. I think it's such a beautiful story, by the way. I think you're very lucky that two out of three of the workplaces actually. And I'm glad for that. Right?

Yeah.

Most people. That is not the case. One out of ten or two out of ten.

I know.

Especially early career. Right. 15% of people find meaning at work. This was the research we were doing at McKinsey, especially the frontline. And so for you to have two out of the three where you could actually lean on the positive, hey, work can be meaningful. Why is it not meaningful here? Because otherwise you might have taken the first one out of the, you know, and if two were bad. Oh yeah. That's just the way it is.

Right. Just advertising oddity. Yeah.

Advertising sucks. And so many people say that. Right. I work even today and people think about all the advertising agencies and it really befuddles me. We know if you're not flourishing, you can't do your most creative, innovative work. And yet the agencies that are actually saying, we'll help with creative, innovative ideas, people are miserable.

Yeah, it's amazing. But when you look across industries, you know, in, in work that you think is going to feel really meaningful. So healthcare. Right. You know, doctors that are saving lives or people who work in social justice or nonprofit work that are literally solving some of the world's biggest challenges. Right. You think, of course that's going to feel really meaningful. And actually that's not the case. Even people when these quote unquote, meaning driven types of jobs that you think of as meaningful are not experiencing work as meaningful. And so really what we find in the research is that meaningful work is a lot less about what you do and a lot more about how you experience what you do.

Yeah. And that is so beautiful. I'll repeat that for our listeners. I think it's deeply profound. Right. It is not about what you do, but it is how you experience work.

Yes.

Right. And I think that's where the both your responsibility in it of how you make meaning. But also I think when people don't find meaning at work, I think it's a failure of leadership that we are not helping people find meaning at work.

Absolutely. And that was the question that my co author and research partner and friend Wes and I had was what, what is the role of leaders? Because a lot of the research on meaningful work, including by our very dear friend and mentor Jane Dutton, really looked at individual factors. Right. And so the job crafting research and all that is like, how can I as an individual impact my own experience? And that's really important. But we suspected that leaders played a big role and that's what we investigated. And we actually found that leaders are responsible for 48% of our experience of meaning at work. And so we really can only get halfway there alone. We need leaders to do, you know, the other, the other half, the other 50%. And so, and it makes sense. It makes sense because the leaders create the containers. Right. They create the environment that either foster or kill meaning.

Yeah. I'm surprised it's only 48%, really.

I, I guess because so much of the research had been done from the individual perspective, we we were surprised that it was as high as 48% at first. But yeah, based on my, you know, n. Of one of my own experience. I agree with you.

Like, leaders have something I think about, I think about, you know, I just think about. You differentiate between purpose, meaning, mattering. Right. And as I think about, as you said, our experience is shaped by are we appreciated, our leaders telling us the story. You might be, you know, I worked for a client. They're one of a large. They make tractors and chainsaws, et cetera. Right. That person who is in the front line putting the tires onto the tractors and that's what they're doing all day long. They are so far removed from the person enjoying the tractor and mowing their lawn and feeling a sense of pride. They're so far removed from being recognized as a human beyond just the person on that job. He has dreams, they have aspirations. I think that's where as I think about the impact, I'm like, oh my God. If we connected as humans, if we appreciate it, just the words you used in your two jobs versus one. Right. And we help them connect to the real impact they're making. I think it can be so transformed because I'm with you, letting individuals just say, go find meaning in work. They'll find meaning at places other than work that come more naturally to them.

Exactly. And they should too. Our meaning shouldn't come exclusively from work. You know, that's some of the pushback that we get. Well, what if. What if I have meaning in my community and my family and my faith and I don't need meaning at work? And my answer to that is great, you should have meaning in all different areas of your life. And you do spend more waking hours at work than anywhere. Yeah. Anywhere else. So I'm not saying meaning should come exclusively from work, but wouldn't that be better? Or, you know, if that. That big chunk of time is meaningful? Because what we know also is there's research on social contagion that if we experience meaning at work. Right. We're happier at work. We bring that home with us and that affects our families, it affects our friends, our entire community. And so I truly believe that our workplaces are our biggest levers to impact. Well, being at scale globally is reshaping the experience of work.

Yeah. That's the reason after 25 years, I decided, Tamara, to like, really go into. I quit my job like you. I didn't drive productivity in a different way. I had large scale operations, transformations. Right. As a way. And I decided to Shift to this, to fixing ways of working. Because I think I hold that as the biggest crisis. Right. I hold that as the reason why we have a mental health crisis. We have a crisis of isolation, we have a crisis of meaningfulness. Viktor Frankl said in the 50s, today we have more means to live and less meaning to live by, live for. And I think to me, I hold that as the reason behind all the polycrisis in the world is this, that exactly as you said, we want people to thrive, but if they are miserable or even neutral at work, like this is just a way. I mean, you're spending so much of your time there. How can you have full lives if almost 3/4 of your life is empty?

Exactly. Even if it's neutral.

Right.

You feel apathy, maybe you're languishing. You come, you come home and you're not energized.

Yeah. You're just tired.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, the, the beautiful thing too, I think sometimes leaders or, you know, people who work in culture transformation or human resources or any, any kind of leadership role that impacts culture really feel like they often agree with what they're hearing here. Right. What we're saying. And they, and, and they've often also experienced work as meaningful and is not meaningful. But I think sometimes it feels like too big of a mountain to climb, you know, and it's just too hard. And what we found in our research is that meaning comes from three main sources. Community, contribution and challenge. So we call those the three C's of meaning.

I love those.

Thanks. And it's so and so when I was talk about my experience in the advertising agencies, that felt meaningful, those were these moments where I, where I experienced community, where I experienced a sense of contribution, where I was challenged to reach my full potential. Right. And these moments, they can happen in any job every day. And they're not these big transformative moments. Sometimes you think like meaningful work happens in these big transformative moments. And of course intensity is valuable and we remember that. But it's also about frequency. It can be small moments that matter every day that really add up to make the overall experience meaningful.

So let's get into those three Cs and I want to chat a little bit about how do we practically. Right. If you're a leader and you say community contribution and challenge, how do I make that happen? So let's go into each one of them, disaggregate and maybe share some tips with our listeners.

Yeah, I love that because that was the goal of our study, was to find specific practices that leaders can enact. Right. To increase that experience of meaning. And so community is all about feeling like you belong and that you can show up authentically. You can not only be yourself, but you can share what you really think. And so community says, I matter here. And so we found, like in our study, the question we asked that predicted, that most powerfully predicted a high sense of community was my leader cares about what's happening in my life outside of work. And notice that it says cares, not knows. Right. It's one thing to have a culture of transparency where you can say like, oh, I need to leave early to go to doctor's appointment or oh, I'm gonna go catch my son's soccer game, or whatever, that's fine. The leader knows. It's another thing for then that leader to say, hey, how was the game? Did your son win? I remembered you said it was a big tournament. How was that? You know, it's like these small moments of caring. And you know, Jane's work shows it takes 40 seconds to form this high quality connection. So it doesn't have to be this like half an hour conversation that you have every week. It can happen at your next interaction, your next one on one, your next meeting, you know, show that you care, care about the person. Ask questions about something they're interested in. What are their hobbies? Like, do you know the book that they're currently reading? Do you know their kids names? These like small little things that really, really add up. And so to your example about the guy who was putting tires on the tractors all day, you know, I wonder if a leader ever came up to him and said, hey, I remembered your son was going to start kindergarten. How's that going? I don't know.

Yeah, you know, I'll tell you, I had with another client who I had a different client. Not a client, I don't serve them, but just somebody I was talking with. Potential client. I think people live, they try and live such a disaggregated life, like sometimes they want to be blind. They don't want to know. Right. And they miss the human. I think we don't live in a severance world. Like this is not a world. Right. I mean, in fact, that's the reason there's a show, because it's so out of the ordinary. Right. If you're experiencing your work as a severance world, like, know that that's actually not right. Because that's why there's a show. Right. You don't spend millions making a show. About.

About every day I go to the.

Grocery store, I buy milk, I come back and I drink milk and have cereal. Right? Nobody's making about that. Right. Nobody's making shows about that. But this person, you know, we have a question. We say, you know, we have a question around. I experience financial stress in my life. And they said, I don't want to ask that question. And they have a huge attrition problem. I said, why? He says, because I know. I said, what do you know? That they have financial stress in their life. I'm like, and so why do you not. Why do you not want to address that? Why do you not want to address that? You just want to be blind. You want to be like, I don't. I don't want to know. This is the job. Come do it. You really are like, talk about mattering for you. That person doesn't matter. Exactly. This is the job. Are you in or are you out? But if you treat them that way, then why do you worry? I don't know why we have so much attrition. Because. Because you don't matter to them.

Right. And it. Isn't it better even if there's nothing you can do right now from a budget standpoint, to help that person or to, you know, give them higher pay or whatever? Even just asking the question or having a conversation, just say, you know, you are experiencing that. Like, if the person's willing to open up and say, I'm really sorry, let's put together a plan. There's nothing we can do right now. But what would be helpful here? Just asking questions.

There is so much.

Yeah.

There is so much.

Yeah.

What I really like about the word community as well is that. What I really like about that is you're not talking about a supervisor and a worker. It's about community. We are peers. We are together. We care about each other.

Exactly.

Right. And so there's a sense of cohesion there. And it's small moments. It's the micro moments that matter.

Right, exactly.

It's not once a year, Employee appreciation week. It's every day.

Every day. And, you know, so my favorite. One of my favorite social sciences studies is the friendship effect. One that, you know, if you put somebody at the bottom of a hill and you ask them to estimate how steep that hill is, if they stand there alone, they 10 to estimate it to be much steeper than if they stand at the bottom of the hill with a friend.

Right.

And so if you think about that, like, these challenges that we face seem a little less Daunting if we have a friend to do them with. And at work, we are solving hard problems every day. There's fires to put out, there's problems to be solved. And so if we feel connected to the people that we're doing the work with, they feel much more manageable, it feels less daunting. We are more creative, we are more engag like. It just makes so much sense. Like, the research totally shows this, but even from our own experience, we can all reflect on times where we had to struggle alone versus struggle with people by our side. Right. And what would we choose?

Yeah. And in fact, sometimes, you know, I'm just reflecting. Communities get stronger together, working their way through adversity and disaster. It's not just the good stuff, but how we support each other, how we work through something and grow through them. Right. Makes them absolutely so much stronger.

And I think that's where this, the third C like challenge comes in. Because that's another misconception about meaningful work, is that it always feels very good in the moment. And that's not true often. And you, you quoted Viktor Frankl earlier, but he talks about meaning coming from struggle, right. When you're struggling to. And so this is what Challenge is all about, is about having somebody. You could be a leader, could be colleagues, it could be a manager who really sees potential in you, sees your strengths and really creates opportunities for your development. And sometimes these opportunities are hard. We heard so many stories in our research, and one example is this woman, Sonali, who worked, works still at Schneider Electric, who. It's a global organization, over 200,000 employees, and she was a brand new employee and in the culture and like the HR team and the CEO kind of directly asked her to do a project. It was like a leadership development training program for the high potential individuals in the organization.

And.

And he picked her. And she was like terrified because she had never done anything like this before. And she was like, why did he pick me? But she went to her direct manager, Tina, and was like, I want to do this. Help me. What are the resources available? And so they worked together in a plan and the resources that were available. And she put together this program and it was hard, but she was so proud of it. When we interviewed her, it had been six years since that program had been implemented and it was still a moment, you know, that felt so meaningful because somebody believed in her, gave her a hard task, provided all the support. This helped her feel a sense of community because people came and helped her and she delivered. So when, you know we all need somebody to believe in us, and when they do, we want to prove them. Right.

Yeah. And, you know, and what you just said about this opportunity. Everybody wants to achieve. We know we seek achievement in our life no matter what we do. Right. As much as the world would like you to believe, everybody wants to be a couch potato and just sit and left to their devices, want to do nothing. Nobody does. They want to do things that make sense, that matter, and they want to achieve. And so this notion of achievement, right, which is like, hey, I'm going to stretch you. I am going to support you, that gives you meaning. We are excited to come home and tell. I'm sure even now she tells stories to everybody about that moment, how she rose to the challenge and what it meant for her.

Exactly. And then she does that now for other people, too, because she knows how much it mattered and how great it felt. And so this is the kind of leadership that she has implemented in her own leadership style. And I think, you know, that's. That's like you brought up a really good point, which is people want to achieve, right. We crave mastery. And I think this kind of took just go really upstream and to ask anybody who's listening, right. What is your fundamental belief, I guess, about people, you know, because I believe that, that, like you, that people want their time at work to mean something. They want to achieve. They want to be connected to the people they work with. They want to make a difference. They want their work to matter. Right. And I also believe that leaders show up to work every day not because they want to be a jerk or I want to be a toxic leader. Right. I believe that leaders care and that they want to develop their people, and maybe they just don't have the tools or maybe they learned, you know, their leadership was learned by observation, Right. Because they were never trained properly. They just were promoted to leadership roles because they were a great individual contributor. But if we fundamentally believe that, you know, that people want to achieve, that they want connection, that they want to care about what they do, and that leaders care and they want to be a good leader and develop their people, that changes the way we approach things versus if we believe people are lazy and they're just coming in for a paycheck, right?

Absolutely. How we treat people and the stories we hold about people create the reality we experience. Right? And I'm reminded, Tamara, I'm reminded about the experiment, right. That was done with these teachers where one third of them were told, these are the most gifted students that you have Gotten and will you be able to help them get to the next level? One third were told it's a mixed bag, some are good, some are bad. Can you help those who are struggling to catch up? Maybe help the good do better. And then the third group that were saying, I'm sorry but this year, luck of the draw, you just have these students are problem children. Do the best that you can, make a difference. But we understand. And at the end of the school year, the first group did really, really well. The second group kind of did what they did and the third done really badly. And the reality was all three groups had the same random assignment of students. But how the teachers interacted and I think that's so true. I think all of us, so many people believe that everybody is interested in their self and I need to kind of make sure they get things done. And if, if they don't, then they're not. And I think what we are missing are the things that you're talking about. Are we giving people work that matters? Right. Do they feel like part of a community, seen, valued, appreciated, that we care about them and are we actually helping them? If we believe that achievement orientation is a self orientation, people do want to do work that is going to stretch them, we're going to give them different things.

Absolutely. You know, in the book we ask the question like what if everyone is high potential? Right. Because so much of the development efforts in organizations are reserved for the 5%, maybe 10% of people that are deemed high potential individuals. And even though, you know, the label is not put on your wall necessarily, people know, people know who the high potentials are. And if you're not, and if we look at the self fulfilling prophecy research that you were talking about, the Pygmalion effect, it, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, right? So if you're not deemed a high potential and you're not given development opportunities, how are you to be engaged and how are you, you know, to think that you matter or that your growth at this organization matters? Like you're probably going to be looking for another job.

So talk to me a little bit about contribution and what are some ways in which contribution and connecting people to how their work is affecting others can make a difference? What tools exist? What are some simple ways that leaders can do this?

So contribution. The tools under contribution fall, fall under like two main buckets. The first one is positive recognition, positive feedback. And it's something that is so simple but so underutilized. You know, there's research from work, human and gallup that shows that one thank you once a week from a manager is enough to cut burnout and disengagement in half. One thank you once a week. But less than 40% of people feel like they're appreciated often enough and thanked appropriately for their efforts. And so that's low hanging fruit, right? Just recognizing people saying thank you, appreciating it. You know, you can use a sentence starter. Like I noticed how you sort of Ashish, I noticed how you really prepared for our interview today. Thank you for sending me some thoughts ahead of our conversation. It really helped me feel comfortable talking to you. I really appreciate it. Thank you. So something like that, so simple, takes 30 seconds, right? So I noticed how you did this because of you something or, you know, you. I'm giving you this assignment so that like explaining the reason and the impact that they're going to have. So having these sentence starters. Zach Mercurio, who is our research partner, has this sentence starter that I love, which is if it wasn't for you. So if it wasn't for you. And then just tell them the impact, the difference they made. And so, and you know, people will say, well, life's so busy, I don't have time. And so what I tell them is have a mix. There's a, you can have a sprinkling of positive feedback in your week and think about it. And a client helped me think about it this way. So on stage, backstage and after the show. So on stage. So let's say during a meeting or during a one on one, there's a lot that you can do to give positive feedback. You can nod, you can agree, you can amplify something somebody said or saying. Right. So there's a lot you can do to like reinforce or show them that you're there and supporting them and thanking them. Backstage is the quick like the sentence starter type thing that I just went through. So backstage you're all, oh, that was a great show. If it wasn't for you, blah, blah, blah, or you know, I know noticed how in the meeting you spoke up when you disagreed. That took so much bravery and I appreciate you doing that because everybody was thinking that, but you were the first one who said it. So these like backstage moments where it's just like right after the show and then later on the after the show can be the deeper kind of positive feedback. And we created a positive feedback model that we included in the book and it's available for free on our website, but we call it the best feedback. And that's an. An acronym that takes you through steps, and there's a worksheet, and that's for a little bit deeper, more specific feedback that you can do maybe like once a week. So there's. There's a lot of opportunities there.

So walk me through the best. The acronym and that deeper feedback approach.

Sure. So the B is for behavioral. So you want to focus on what the person did, not who they are, not their character, but what is it that they did. So speaking up in the meeting, for example. Right. That you did that. And then the E is for explicit. You want to explicitly state the impact that it had. So I'm going to go with that example. So thank you so much for speaking up in that meeting when you were disagreeing. You know, that took a lot of. Well, I'll keep that. When everybody was disagreeing, because you did that, it allowed everyone else to feel comfortable speaking up. And so that's the explicit impact that it had. S is for strengths. So what strengths did you see? You know, it was so brave of you to speak up like that. And you'd, like, demonstrated courage, even though I'm sure it wasn't easy.

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So thank you for using your strengths. And then T is timely. Do it. You know, don't wait until the urine review to talk about something that happened in January because then you lost a moment. So it's behavioral, explicit, strengths based. And time.

Yeah, I love it. So you're acknowledging something they did, the impact it had. What about a unique strength? Right. What was the strength they used? Because we don't spend so much time actually playing that back for people. Right. We talk about the actions, but where it comes from. And I love the notion of, you know, do it, do it often, do it frequently. Julian Mirwell, who is one of the researchers, and he does so much work in positive communications, he's written a wonderful book. I had him on our podcast. He and I were actually exchanging some LinkedIn messages early this morning as I was taking my flight out. You know, he recorded a video based on a story from this book written by Dan Millman. Right. And the Way of the Silent Warrior, I think, or something. And it's also. I'm forgetting the name now, but I love that book. I've read that book. And I'm saying this because many people will say, yeah, but there is not enough happening every day for me to be thankful or every week to be thankful. And there is this particular learning in that book where he says, there are no ordinary moments. Every moment is an extraordinary moment. And the reality is, as I reflect, we often think about what people don't do. We don't think about what people are doing, and they are doing miraculous things every day. We just don't notice them. If they didn't do it, we would notice them. Right. And then we would call them out. And so I think if we tune ourselves. And that's what you're inviting leaders to do, is they spend 50 hours with you, 40 hours with you, 30 hours with you. It doesn't matter. Find something in the 30 hours that they did that made a difference.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack. But I'm going to share a story about a leader we work with. So this is a accounting firm, one of the big accounting firms. Right. And we were working with a group of auditors. And so auditors spend a big part of their lives looking for what's wrong.

Right. They're like, I was the same. I was in consulting. That's what you do. You want to find all the bad stuff.

Exactly. And so. So we are already wired with a negativity bias that helped us survive. So it's already kind of harder for us to notice the good. And then on top of that, you have a job where literally you are looking for the bad. And we were sharing our research and sharing the findings on positive feedback, and one of the leaders was like, wow. Like, it just hit her that she was not recognizing her team, you know, and she was like, I really want to change that. And so after our workshop, she put a meeting, a recurring meeting, on her schedule for Friday afternoon. And her goal was to send five gratitude emails every Friday afternoon to her team. And so the first week felt a little awkward, you know, like they weren't used to this kind of in the culture. But she was like, you know, I'm gonna do it. And it, you know, she was trying to keep track all week of who did what. Well, when she sent the notes and a couple of things happened. Number one, the people who got the notes felt like they really appreciated it. They felt seen, noticed. And so they were thanking her for the thank you. But also it kind of spread. The behavior spread. And so they started thanking others on the team. And it just Kind of shifted the culture in, within her team in a matter of months to a culture of gratitude where they are appreciating each other, they're calling each other out, they talk about it openly in meetings. And so what happens over time to our brains, even though it's hard sometimes to notice the good, when we have a practice, you know, gratitude practice, that's something that's studied very deeply in positive psychology. It's one of the practices that can literally increase your level of happiness if you, if you do it. And there's many different ways that you do it, but it rewires your brain over time and absolutely notice the good in the mundane, in the everyday, ordinary things. Whether you're taking your dogs out for a walk and it's warm today and that you're so grateful for that, or the leaves are starting to change and it's so beautiful and the light caught them just the right way. And oh my God, I feel so grateful. You start to notice the good in everyday moments.

It's a practice that changed my life. I can say that, you know, in my book I talk about nine practices, but this was the one that really changed my life. I think my brain, if I look at 10 years ago to now, is fundamentally different brain. Brain. It's not the same brain. Even in extreme, when there is something that has gone terribly bad, I see the good, right? I always, always see the. I was driving home and literally we hit a bollard. It was the middle of the road. It was like a concrete block. It was night, half the side of the car was gone. I managed to get home. And in the morning when we walked and looked at the car, like literally the half of the car was out and I had somehow managed to get back home, home. Lately, the first thought in my thought wasn't that, oh my God, half of the car was. Half the side of the car was gone. It was the fact that, wow, I got home that just before that there was something that had made me shift lane. Otherwise I would have hit it at 70mph head on, rather than just the side of the car. That would have been very, very different. You know, I was reminded of the fact that it's just a car. Nothing happened to me. I mean, all of those thoughts were present. And I think it's not that it made the fact that the car was destroyed or what was, what was that doing there, but it just made it so much, the foundation was so strong that, you know, it didn't completely destroy my day, hour, week, month, Exactly. I could appreciate. You know, I could. I mean, frankly, you know, the thought that came to my mind. You're gonna laugh at this. Was actually the following. Oh, my God, I've been driving for 25 years. Isn't it crazy that this is the first time this has happened? Who are all the people who keep the roads so clean that this doesn't happen more often? That was the thought that went through my head.

Yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing. It's such a powerful example that, you know, being grateful, noticing the good, finding the hope and the gratitude in difficult moments doesn't deny the negative, doesn't deny the suffering or the struggle. But you can experience both at the same time. And then you have a choice to, you know, kind of of wallow in the bad. Right. And sit there and, oh, my God, I almost died. What am I gonna do? I'm never gonna drive again. These roads or who did it and.

Why was it there.

I'm gonna go sue them. And, oh, my God, look at my car. And like, you can or you can exactly what you did say, oh, my God, this is a miracle that it didn't happen before. And so grateful. It's just a car. And of course, you have to deal with insurance and logistics. You still have to do all the things. Right. But how you feel doing all the things is completely different.

Yeah. And that's it. You know, I think every day, going back and tying it to work, there are things that people do every day. There are many things that go bad every week, but there are also so many that go well. And even if they just went as planned, think about. They could have gone bad, and they would be a nightmare. So I think we can appreciate. And people are always doing things. I think it's recognizing them for the impact that they're making is what you are inviting leaders to do. Focus on the gains, not just the gaps.

Exactly.

And it changes. So I want to pack something, you know, which you talk a lot about, you've written about it, you differentiate. You talk about purpose, you talk about mattering, you talk about meaning. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, how do they overlap? How are they actually different? And how should leaders think about all of those three elements?

Sure. So purpose. I'll start with purpose and meaning. Right. They're used interchangeably a lot. And one of the big misconceptions is that they are the exact same thing. And actually they're not. Purpose is a part of meaning, but it's not the whole story. And so when you have a sense of purpose at work, it's great to feel purposeful. But just having purpose is not enough to make work meaningful. And a great example is what we started talking about, like doctors that are saving lives or people that are working in non profits or teachers that are teaching. You know, these are very purpose driven organizations and purpose driven careers. And the experience of work is often not meaningful because you're missing the community aspect or the challenge aspect. So purpose lives under contribution. And so, and, and the other thing about purpose is, you know, I don't know, 20 years ago, whenever Simon Sinek came out with, start with why all the organizations really made an investment in defining the purpose and what is it you, why do we exist? And all of that. And that's really great to attract talent, right? People that want to work to solve the same problem you're solving or to, you know, to that are attracted to your organization because they believe in that purpose. So, so having a purpose is really great to attract talent that cares about the same things that you care about. But it's not enough to make their experience every day meaningful. And that's where contribution comes in. So you need to not only do the positive feedback, which is what we talked about, the other thing is actually highlighting their impact. And so that is where you really frequently tell the story about how what they do every day actually connects to that purpose. And so that's really important. So purpose lives under the contribution C. But, but having a purpose is just not enough for the experience to feel meaningful. And then meaning and mattering overlap a lot. They're actually really interconnected. And when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania studying positive psychology, 19 Marty Seligman told us that he was kind of rethinking his PERMA acronym. And so PERMA is his theory of well being. And the N in PERMA so stands for meaning. And he was at that time considering changing it to mattering because he felt like mattering was a little bit more actionable. He ended up not doing that. He still uses meaning as the acronym. But mattering is maybe the, the other side or the actionable side of meaning. So I use them a lot to say like community says matter here. That's how you feel when you experience community, right? Contribution says, says what I do matters here. And challenge says my growth and development matters here. And so mattering feeling like you matter, like what you do matters, contributes to meaning. And they're very interlocked.

I love those. And I have two reflections as I think about what we do, slightly different words, but so synced up. Right. So the first reflection I have is for 12 years, my first 12 years at the firm, at McKinsey, the work I did was highly purposeful. It made a massive difference in improving operational efficiencies, profits, shareholder returns. It made an impact on my clients I served. It made them more successful. Really, really high, really high impact. It had no meaning personally to me. I don't care about money. And the fact that I was helping people negotiate cents of dollars to like it was not meaningful. And back then, it didn't really connect for me. And I ended up having my own crisis with anxiety, which I later through all of the work, as I discovered this work in psychology and neurosciences and some of the spiritual work I did gave me the language to say what I was suffering was actually a crisis of meaning. It wasn't a crisis of purpose. The work was very purposeful. It was a crisis of meaning. Meaning. Right. And I see it all the time. You know, there are so many organizations which are in not for profit, social workers, et cetera. The work is purposeful, but because they're missing community, frankly, because also they're missing financial compensation in a way that shows you that you matter and your work matters. Yes, you're having an impact, but I'm not going to pay you for it. And you're struggling to make ends meet. Right. There is this, there is that element of also financials and means, meaning that show up. But you know, the second thing is when we do these interventions, I often ask leaders, and this is based on the research we did at McKinsey. We were looking at sources of meaning. And what we find, Tamara, is like, often only 20% of people found meaning because of the positive impact that they were making on society. 20%. So when you lead with purpose, and here's our purpose and here's the how impact you're losing 80% of the people. That's not what gives them meaning. It might give them purpose, but it's not meaningful for them. For some of them, what matters is what they're trying to solve for where they're going. So I love this notion and I always hence ask leaders to say, talk to somebody and ask them what drives them, what are they solving for, where are they trying to go and if you can just help them get there. First of all, you're showing that you matter. You don't just exist here to make the tire. I care about your growth, I care about your life. You talked about, you know, community. I Care about your goals and what you want to achieve, but I want to help you get there. Right. And that's the way to actually infuse meaning it's an important element. It's not enough to talk about our.

Corporate purpose is this, it's, it's not enough. I mean, I work, I live in the Boston area, so there's a lot of biotech here, right? So companies that are developing drugs to save patients lives, like literally for orphan diseases and all, all kinds of new drugs and therap and I mean you could think that's like very purposeful work, but it is just not enough. It's not enough. In general, you need all three Cs present for work to become meaningful. They don't need to be present at the same level, but they have a multiplier effect. So if one is at zero, the other two are just crumbling. They, it doesn't work.

So I'm curious about this. You obviously researched this extensively and since then you've been working with many companies to actually make this a reality for their organizations. What is for all of those who are very numbers driven, what is the roi? How do you show ROI around these initiatives? How do you measure tangible impact from this intervention, from this different way of infusing community contribution and challenge into the design of an individual's job and work? How do you show the impact? How do you measure it?

So our research showed very clearly that meaning, you know, meaningful work is the upstream factor that leads to the things that leaders measure and worry about. So productivity, retention, attraction, engagement. So meaningful work is a leading indicator and those metrics are lagging indicators. And so, you know, we're so worried about retention, you know, attraction of the right talent. And we measure one thing. We're like putting out fires one thing at a time. Like our engagement numbers are terrible. Let's focus on engagement or oh my gosh, productivity is down. And what we see is when we actually focus on making work meaningful, all those metrics improve. And then there's research from Oxford University University, Jan Emanuel Deneuve and colleagues that actually shows an impact on the bottom line too, on the financial impact, impact on the organization in the stock market, the stock price over time, you know.

Have you been able to show like in a company or a business unit or a function setting the link directly, I'm reminded, financial impact or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Financial or productivity or attrition.

We've showed the links between attrition and productivity, but not financial returns. We have not measured that yet.

We probably should yeah, you know, I'm. I'm reminded of this one study, the only study. That's why I was curious if you had seen the. Seen it or from the work that you're doing. The study that I'm reminded of is, is the work that Adam granted, you know, with the call center people who were calling to raise money and how like the amount of money they raised, etc. But I'm actually, you know, I am curious about doing this work in call centers because they measure everything.

Yeah, yeah.

And if that can actually, you know, look, I really believe companies should do this because everybody matters, because it's the right thing to do. Not just because it drives profits, but if we are able to show at a company. You know, that's the thing with Oxford. I know Jan Emanuel very well. So much of this work is research which is at large sample sets. Even the shareholder return impact that they did is at large company level. Level. I think for us in the field, figuring out a way almost to find here's the company, here's as hard as it is, if we are able to show 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and create these, go and see cases, I think we'll get more people to go from research to me search, as Tal says it, to say, you know, it works, it can work for you.

Right? Yeah, I mean, that's a really great point. We do measure before and after. You know, we have an assessment, a scale that we developed as part of the research. And so we measure meaningful work and the practices like before and after interventions and all of that. And then it does show improvements in fulfillment, mattering, engagement, productivity and all that. But we haven't quite. That's a really good, good point. We gotta figure out how to do that.

Yeah, I just go back because, you know, in a place where 15% of people find meaning at risk, I go back to this notion of Seth Gordon talks about it's very hard for people to change their worldviews. The reason we are at 15% of people find meaning is people share worldview that it doesn't matter.

Yeah.

And I think they're not going to change. It'll take a lot. And I think for people like you, me, others who are in the field, I think we almost have to go from research to really specific macro to micro. And yes, it's hard. But I think if we find more of these, I think we might, might increase because my hope is in my lifetime we are able to take that from 15 and reverse it. Right. We're 85% find meaning.

Right. I wonder if part of that. So I'm gonna. I'm from Brazil originally. I was born and raised down there. And the book just got translated to Portuguese and it's gonna launch down there in October. So I'm gonna be down there speaking at a conference, actually. Adam Grant's gonna be there and Jan Emanuel is gonna be there. And the interesting thing about Brazil, Brazil is that the government just passed a new law that companies have to. Are now responsible for psychosocial effects and harms of, you know, in employees. And so they, they have until May of 2026 to make changes to their organization and their regulations and their culture and all of that to protect the psychosocial safety of employees. And I think, think that's one way also to change. Right. They have to.

I love that. And I think maybe that becomes a rich place to actually go do this work and have them measure it. Yeah. I'm reminded of the old era, you know, of Sarbanes Oxley, where a lot of people did Sarbanes Oxley as a cost because it was, once it was adopted, it wasn't an option to do it or not. It was always the right thing to do.

Right.

But it only now it was a loss. So you had to take a cost. And all of a sudden people started looking at how can I justify the gains as a way to kind of make it happen.

Exactly.

And I wonder if that is creating an opportunity for this field in that country to say, look, we're going to measure it. You're going to have to make the investment. Let's make sure you're making the investment in a way that it actually gives returns. And that way people don't just do check the box.

Yeah. Because I think that's always the risk, especially in a country where the science is more nascent than it is here. Right. You have to make. Make sure that the interventions are evidence based, I would say, you know, not just because somebody thinks it's a good idea.

So just looking at time, I have one question for you. In this world, with the rapid adoption of AI and how companies are using AI, people are feeling more replaceable, invisible, and at risk. I'm curious about your reflections around mattering meaning and purpose in the age of AI. What, what perspectives would you have? How can those tools help us to actually even more increase meaning mattering and purpose at work? And in what ways should we prevent them from taking away from us?

I mean, I think that's, that's a very important question. It's something that I'm thinking a lot about now. Wes and I are writing an article for HBR on this exact direct topic. And so what role does meaning mattering purpose play? I think a bigger role than ever. Because in a world that is increasingly technologically based, right, where we have agents, AI agents working alongside humans, and where AI is infused in our lives in a way that we can't even picture yet, or at least I can't, I think then those qualities that, that make us human are going to become more important than ever. And so how do we preserve that? And I think if we look at the past five years from when Covid hit to now, there's been so much transformation at such a rapid, like, accelerated pace, and it's only changing even faster now. And so I think that skills like adaptability, resilience, you know, cognitive flexibility, skills that allow us to connect to each other. I mean, that's one thing that really happened when we all went hybrid work became really transactional. Right? We jump in the zoom and. Right. You know, nobody's asking, like, oh, how was the thing on the weekend? Because you're jumping in. And often you can start a new, like, end one job on a Friday, start a new job on a Monday from the same space. So the queues and all of that. So, and so I think those qualities are of, like, how do we connect with each other, how do we adapt together? You know, how do we think more flexibly, how do we think critically, how do we, you know, how do we feel like we're still making an impact, are we still making an impact? And having those conversations are going to be more important than ever. And then the role that AI is going to play, I think really depends on how thoughtfully it is implemented. And so we're talking with a lot of organizations now that are. Are rolling out AI plans. Some that are really thoughtful, like Visa and HubSpot and Bettera, are some of the organizations that are doing it really well. And there's so much that we can learn about this experimentation phase that they're in that I think can inform how it can be done well. Just like we studied exemplars when we were doing our research for meaningful work. Who are the companies that are doing it really well and what can we learn from them? We're hoping to also learn about great AI implementation, but it's too soon to tell.

Well, thank you, my friend. Thank you for the important work that you do. You know, we spend most of our time at work. I'll end with that. Right. And it is. It is up to us as individuals. And it's especially up to us if you're a leader, leading people to infuse meaning meaning mattering and purpose into those you lead and into your own life. Otherwise, a poorly lived work life is a poorly lived life, given how much time we spend there.

Mic drop moment? Yes.

Thank you, my friend. So lovely to have you.

Thank you so much.

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