GL MONTHLY e-NEWSLETTER - January 2005

Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

When discussions of leadership pay more attention to financial results than to a person’s ability to give the organization a sense of purpose, something crucial is lost.  Many of today’s organizational scholars assume that leadership equals economic performance … period.  However, an evaluation of leadership effectiveness must also look at a leader’s ability to forge new meaning and purpose for an organization and its employees.

Leaders earn the right to lead by engaging the hearts, minds, and muscle of the people they lead.  Too many organizations settle for only engaging their followers’ minds and/or muscle, while neglecting their hearts.  Leadership is about engaging and satisfying the needs and motives of followers that results in the followers taking a course of action toward a shared vision.

Here’s this month’s feature …

How to Put Meaning Back into Leading - by Martha Lagace

From the Harvard Business School ’s Working Knowledge - January 10, 2005

Highlights from the article:

• “Meaning-making” is required of leaders.  The leader is both architect and visionary, and both roles impact on the meaning that individuals experience through work.
    

• The obsession with shareholder value beginning in the 1980’s led organizational scholars to assume that the relevance of all aspects of organizations is circumscribed by their impact on financial results.  The social impact of organizations essentially took a back seat.
    

• A general theme across much of modern economic life is that values and purpose are no longer important concepts, especially if there is little evidence that they impact performance.  In place of values and purpose, we have come to privilege efficiency and rationality as paramount.  This tendency is most marked in modern business organizations.
    

• When you start talking about purpose and meaning, it’s often perceived as too soft for the business world.  Managers, executives, and scholars often ask what that has to do with the bottom line.  Yet rarely do we ask the questions “Why do people come to work?” and “What guides their decisions and actions?”
    

• Meaning has two components - a component emphasizing the ability of individuals to engage in action that is directly connected to their own ideals (their beliefs or values), and a social component, where the pursuit of those ideals occurs in the context of enduring relationships in community with other people.
    

• The need for meaning is a universal.  Without meaning, individuals tend to become rigid and hollow.  Society itself seems shallow and lifeless.  Organizational life seems petty and zero sum.  People go through the motions, and do so amid distrust, cynicism, indifference, and a sense of alienation.
    

• In order for organizations to contribute most fully to society, we must make room in organizational life to nourish human beings’ need for meaning.

For the full text article, go to . . .
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4563&t=leadership&nl=y

Finding Meaningfulness at Work

Meaningfulness at work is likely to be strongly impacted by:

1. The leader’s willingness to uphold organizational values especially when there is some perceived economic cost in doing so.
     

2. The leader’s willingness to make sure (through design and training) that each individual’s positional assignments fit their conception of self and their aspirations.
     

3. The leader’s willingness to commit her own time and organizational resources to ensuring that each individual understand how his or her own actions link up to the larger organization’s purpose.
     

4. The time and attention that goes into hiring and retaining those individuals who derive personal meaning from the organization’s values and purpose.

Want to assess the sense of purpose within your work unit, department, or your entire organization?  Download a Purpose Assessment provided by Tom Terez Workplace Solutions as a tool to compare different people’s perspectives and generate dialogue about what makes work meaningful.

“When employees make the job-mission connection, the result is a boost in morale and performance.”  - James K. Harter, senior research director at Gallup

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