How do leaders provide “meaningful” work to their team members?
I wrote about “meaningful work” in an earlier blog on my website www.changingtack.nz, but the more I work and learn, the more I realise the discussion around the definition of meaningful work (and maybe “meaningful life”- but I am not going there!) is a critical one for leaders and team members alike.
There are some great writers on the subject. Daniel Pink and Josh Bersin to name just two. In fact, Josh Bersin’s interesting and easy-to-read article, Becoming irresistible: a new model for employee engagement is available via the internet at http://dupress.com/articles/employee-engagement-strategies. Bersin’s base premise is that talented people in today’s market are free agents, and thus the onus is on organisations to “become irresistible”.
Providing meaningful work is a key element of being irresistible.
While it is worthwhile for any leader to seek out the many interesting and intelligent articles on the subject and examples of organisations that have become “irresistible”, identifying the actions that an organisation can take to meet this lofty ambition is often just left to the organisation’s development team, to be signed off by the leadership team.
Surely this is paradoxical? While what is “meaningful work” for one team member may share elements that are similar to other colleagues, (e.g., work environment, available resources etc.) if, as I do, you buy the notion that emotional, cognitive and physiological needs are highly individual, then how can building an irresistible organisation be achieved by only organisation-wide programes?
My proposition is that the only way to provide meaningful work to all team members is to ask them to define that for you. Organisations today have to become flexible, adaptable and able to value and provide for diversity, especially if they wish to attract millennials. Through adult conversations with open-ended questions and lots of active listening, and also by using easy-to-use pulse surveys, such as those provided by www.askyourteam.com, team members can be given the opportunity to provide thoughtful feedback and ideas about all the elements that make an organisation high-performing and irresistible.
Not only will you get fantastic new ideas and useful feedback, but the process of asking team members about what they think defines “irresistible” for them is a defining characteristic of an “irresistible organisation!"