Meaningful Work

Once, long ago when I was a young Director of Product at Gilt Groupe, I was struggling to motivate one of my teams of engineers. We had fun working together, and I had tried many of my - at the time - tried and true tricks for getting stuff done: praise, bribery, gamifying, cajoling...but nothing seemed to be getting to the heart of their motivation. Up until that point, I had thought I was quite good at this motivation thing, but I was stumped.

So I asked an engineering leader I respected - how do you motivate teams? And his answer was so simple and surprising to me, I still remember exactly where I was standing when he said it:

"Give them meaningful work to do." -Chris Hazlett

No pizza parties? No beer?! The whole model of NY Startup culture was called into question with 6 words, and I knew in that moment that he was 100% right.

I return to that moment time and time again in my career. I've seen companies burn people out with constant churn - the ideas that were critical enough to drop everything for yesterday are forgotten today for the next shiny thing. When I see leaders trying to squeeze extra time out of employees, when I hear about struggling cultures, when I feel myself growing detached or demotivated from my work, inevitably, what I see underneath is a lack of connection to meaning in our work.

We may work with machines, but we are humans. Humans evolved as social creatures over millennia, and whether a person is an introvert or an extrovert, at their core, they need to know that they matter to someone else, and to know that what they have to give matters, too. We take pride in taking care of each other, of animals, the earth, of building things and solving problems. No amount of technological advances will change that fundamental truth of who we are. Having a distant impact on a company's bottom line or shareholders' value in a company just doesn't cut it when it comes to feeling like your work is meaningful.

As I've navigated a career based largely in technology, I've continued to be drawn to the human elements of it - the teams I've collaborated with, the customers' problems I could solve. These have always been the areas that give me a sense that I am doing meaningful work. The more I shared the impact of the work we were doing with my teams, the more engaged I saw them be. Eventually, those areas called to me even more, and I found more meaning in work that let me teach, coach, and work with people more often. When I scroll through LinkedIn and see all the posts about AI coming for everyone's job, I can't help but fear we're facing a terrible cliff of mattering.

If I needed reinforcements to my own lived experience, I found it in Jennifer Breheny Wallace's book, Mattering. The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose, which I've been reading lately. She has done extensive research on what it means to matter and the elements of what mattering even is. Wallace describes the epidemic of burnout that we all talk about - quiet quitting, worker disengagement, and of that - as a symptom of a deeper issue of working in "systems that have forgotten to treat people as people." It's understandable

"When companies talk about 'empowering employees' or 'building resilience,' they shift the burden back onto people already overwhelmed by the system. These approaches signal that we'd prefer to teach people how to cope with not mattering rather than change the conditions that leave them feeling like they don't." -Jennifer Breheny

The more I see of this, the more convinced I am that the companies who are going to be left behind are not the ones who fail to adopt AI, the companies who will falter will be the companies that lose the connection between the work they're doing and the impact they're having. In contrast, the leaders and companies who will succeed will keep a laser-focus on what matters, and connect their teams to that meaningful work. I'll leave you with this parting thought:

"Imagine how much better our organizations would be if everyone believed that their job contributed to the overall mission. Imagine how much happier we would be if at the end of the day we thought our contribution mattered. -Joe Byerly