Why are only one in five people fully engaged in their work and passionate about their job? This is not just a personal problem for those doing the work. It’s a huge problem for firms today, because disengaged knowledge workers are not very productive. And today most work is knowledge work.
The key to understanding the problem is meaning.
In big established firms being run with traditional management, most people don’t see meaning in their work. They have a job. They do their job. They produce their outputs. Whether they do their job well or badly, quickly or slowly, whether the boss is happy or not, it hardly seems to matter. There’s no real meaning in their work. The story of their working life makes no sense to them.
Creating Meaning in Work
Meaning in work, as Chip Conley, the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, points out in his book, Peak, is different from meaning at work: “Meaning at work relates to how an employee feels about the company, their work environment, and the company’s mission. Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job task.”
Some organizations are content if they have a worthwhile mission and people are paid adequately. Feeling part of an organization that is making a difference in the world can help give people a sense of being part of something more important than themselves. Having a mission that can inspire, like Apple’s “Think different,” Nike’s “Just do it,” and Joie de Vivre’s “Create joy,” can—to a certain extent—give people a feeling that they are working in something larger and may even encourage them to tolerate bad working conditions.
And yet if people can’t see how the specific work they are doing on a daily basis fits into this larger mission, cynicism may set in. This is the issue often faced by people working in the public sector and at nongovernmental organizations: the mission is worthwhile, but the traditional management often practiced by those organizations is dispiriting.
Radical management is about creating both meaning at work and meaning in work: that is, both a worthwhile mission for the organization as a whole and meaningful work on a day-to-day basis. The distinction is nicely depicted in this figure.
The Distinction Between Meaning at Work and Meaning in Work
Source: Based on Conley, C. Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.
Iterative Work Patterns Help Achieve Meaning in Work
Meaning in work can be facilitated by getting work done within client-driven iterations. This is not only where the rubber hits the road but also where the people doing the work can see the impact of the rubber hitting the road. That’s because in client-driven iterations, the people doing the work can see in each cycle of work whether the clients are delighted are not. The meaning of their work is immediately apparent.
In traditional management, which focuses on the production of goods and services, there is a disconnect between the people doing the work and the people for whom the work is being done (the ultimate customer). People end up working to "please the boss". As a result, people can't see the point of what they doing. They don't understand the "why?" of the work.
In radical management, by working in client-driven iterations, the people doing the work can see at the end of each iteration whether the customers are delighted. Work stops being about "pleasing the boss" and becomes focused on the people for whom the work is being done. The disconnect is removed. This is about getting the "why?" right.
Iterative work patterns have been around for a long time. In fact, in painting, literature, music, engineering, and filmmaking, they are the norm. At Pixar, for example, the award-winning digital moviemaking firm, although each team has clear leaders, collaboration and criticism are built into the creative process. The work on each film is subjected to daily review and anyone can offer an opinion.1 And rapid prototyping is one of the practices that underlie the success of the award-winning San-Francisco design firm, IDEO.
As early as the 1930s, quality management saw the introduction of iterative approaches to work when Walter Shewhart, a quality expert at Bell Labs, proposed a series of short plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles for quality improvement. Starting in the 1940s, quality guru W. Edwards Deming began vigorously promoting PDSA, which he later described in his book, Out of the Crisis.
Quality management, however, focused for the most part on internally driven iterative work patterns. It was management that defined quality and steered the flow and direction of change. The client wasn’t always the center of attention. By contrast, client-driven iterations start from the client. Rather than pushing steadily improved goods and services to the client in the hope of making a sale, client-driven iterations adopt a pull approach, starting from the client.
Firms practicing radical management through client-driven iterations are able to keep inventory and work in process as small as possible and customize their product not only to meet the customer’s original perceived needs but also to adjust it to meet any changes in those needs. Interestingly, client-driven iterations not only create meaning in work. They are also more efficient.
To learn more about how radical management creates both meaning in work and at work, read chapter 5 of my new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management 
Comments