Changing the World One Job at a Time

In my writing life beyond this blog, I do a fair amount of work for my husband in his business consulting company. We got his first book published a couple of months ago, but the writing need continues. This week’s newsletter is something I worked on. It’s his concepts, put out there with my ghost writing for him. Some of these ideas have probably made their way into this blog before, but not directly. Maybe there’s someone out there who wants a better work life. So I’ll just share this as is (except I’m adding a few illustrations).

_______________________________________

 

Maybe you remember Billy Crystal in the 1991 movie City Slickers.   He sells ads for a radio station. When he participates in a career day at his kids’ school, compared to the other parents it seems pretty lame to “sell air.” The resulting depression is what sends him on the adventure of the movie.

screenshot from the trailer for City Slickers

Having meaningful work is a major factor in quality of life—more than income or any other reward from a job.

A friend in the Human Performance Improvement field, Brent Powell, was at the house for dinner one night some years ago. And as he always did, he talked a wide and deep range of things. One memorable part of the conversation was about young people who put in their hours at work and then go home to play video games. He pointed out that the games were giving them something they weren’t getting from work: heroism. The games gave them a mission that their skills and character traits made them suited for. They had meaning in their imaginary game world that they didn’t have in their real world. They weren’t willing to put in the hours and energy beyond the minimum for work that didn’t yield them anything meaningful. But they’d put in the endless hours and energy—even taking up their sleep time—to get that sense of meaning they craved, even though it wasn’t real.

photo of North Jerusalem Old City wall, East of Damascus Gate,
found on a friend's Facebook page

People want meaning. They also want to work. As it says in Nehemiah 4:6, “the people had a mind to work.” In their case the work was building the walls of their temple, which had meaning for them after a century and a half of being deprived of it. Meaning gave them the energy and drive to do the work.

What happens without that meaning? Bad things.

Mattias Desmet is a psychologist known for talking about a phenomenon called mass formation. That’s a sort of group think that leads to totalitarianism. It was first discussed by Gustave Le Bon as early as 1895, whose concerns came to fruition multiple times during the 20^th Century, leaving massive deaths in their wake.

I’ll let Desmet connect the dots that lead to the atrocities (which he does in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism). According to Desmet, there are four characteristics of a society that can lead to mass formation, all of which relate and lead to one another:

·        Feeling disconnected from one’s natural and social environment.

·        Lacking a sense of meaning making.

·        Feeling free-floating anxiety.

·        Feeling free-floating frustration or aggression.

In the last two, a particular person might lean toward one or the other; some are anxious in general without something to be anxious about, while some feel frustrated or aggressive without something identifiable causing those feelings.

Of the first one, Desmet points out that, just before the coronavirus crisis in 2020, a survey showed that over 30% of people worldwide claimed not to have even one meaningful relationship, and they would only connect to other people through the internet.

Mostly today we’re looking at that second one: lack of meaning making. Desmet, in a discussion with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein on mass formation, mentioned a 2018 Gallup poll that said 60% of the people worldwide considered their job to be a so-call BS job. He did not use the letters, but said the word so quickly, in his Belgian accent, that it was clear he understood the meaning but didn’t seem to recognize it as a profanity. Anyway, he described, for example, people who produce something in their work. Very few people get to see the person who eventually uses or benefits from the thing they produce. So they’re disconnected from it. It’s like “selling air.”

Mattias Desmet, left, and Bret Weinstein, on the DarkHorse podcast
screenshot from here

I’m not sure I found the same poll, but there’s this Gallup poll report from 2018.  In the intro, talking about their measurement of employee engagement, they tell us,

Out of 5 billion adults on this planet, 1.4 billion have a good job. Of these 1.4 billion, roughly 16% are engaged. Out of a global workforce of an estimated 3.3 billion adults who are working or looking for work, then, only 7% or 214 million people have a great job. This means about 3 billion people who want a great job don’t have one.

The dream of men and women around the world is to have a good job and, ultimately, a great job. Yet only 214 million people are realizing this dream. Global leaders need to make “great job” creation a top priority.

Weinstein asked Desmet whether this lack of meaning making was related to the industrial revolution, and he admitted it definitely was. People in industries—even in industries that produce solid products like cars or kitchen appliances, even furniture builders—may not even see the finished product. They might only see the various cogs they put in place. So to them it feels as if all they do is produce a long line of not-yet-usable factory parts. And much of that might be automated so that they’re even less connected to results of work. They watch machines for a living. Maybe they troubleshoot sometimes.

In the past half century more and more work is idea-related, rather than solid-product-related. That makes it even harder to see the results of work. People go to an office, put in time at a computer, just keeping busy at tasks their manager has assigned, which are unconnected to anything more meaningful to them than a paycheck.

For a while, getting a paycheck might seem meaningful enough. But most people who “have a mind to work” will soon want more. They’ll want to up their skills, move into position for promotion, find something more challenging—or more meaningful.

How do you get more work-life satisfaction? When I went about finding the answer to that, I realized that the key is meaningful work—and being good at meaningful work. Hence the name of my program: Meaningful Competence®.

Competence is not equivalent to competency; don’t even go there. Competency is usually a minimum requirement for a particular job or salary level. It isn’t related—except tangentially, with some intangible hope—to producing value for the employer. The employee going through a competency program might still never understand what it is her employer values—or how her work gets the organization what it values.

Meaningful Competence®, on the other hand, connects an employee’s work to what is of relevant value to the organization. Then, more granularly, it helps the employee identify the countable, measurable outputs of value she produces. That employee’s personal metrics will identify their batting average, if you will.

Literally, in baseball, everything is measured. The team owners have a particular outcome they value—a full stadium, or fans that buy tickets or pay to watch. The successful batter is one of the contributors to that. So the individual employee’s batting average matters. Other metrics might be the right measures of value for other players who specialize in defense. But they’re all measurable in ways that can be seen contributing to the value that is relevant to the employer—the Relevant Business Results.

Not all jobs will bring the fame and fortune of a really great major league batter. But every job can be something that connects to their organization’s Relevant Business Results. And every employee can learn what to produce that the employer values—the Value-Added Outputs for his job. And then he can find ways to increase his production of those Value-Added Outputs.

book available here

In principle, it’s not that complicated. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery. Some employers and employees figure it out themselves; they’re naturals. For everyone else, there’s Meaningful Competence®.

·        Good for the employer—who gets engaged employees producing more of what they value.

·        Good for the employee—who sees how his work has value to the employer, and how increasing the value he produces is in his hands.

·        Good for the world—where people no longer have a lack of meaning making.

So, in an effort to make work life more meaningful—more value-producing—we’re doing our small part in saving the world from existential threats of totalitarianism, or just general drudgery.

Saving the world—it’s my meaningful work.

If you’re interested, check out my book: Untapped Value: The Power of Meaningful Competence®.

Or check out what’s available at TorchSolutionsGroup.com.