Acclaim
about the Book
"Principled, timely, and
engaging, The Why of Work teaches
that building a culture of abundance and common purpose is essential to
organizational success." - Stephen R. Covey, bestselling author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
What
are the Details of the Book?
If you want to build abundant
organizations, read this book. If you
want to acquire tools and techniques to create meaning and value in your own
workplace, read this book. If you want to understand the needs of your
customers and employees, read this book. If you want to personalize the work to
motivate your employees and grow your business in any economy, read this book. Dave
Ulrich and Wendy Ulrich’s authored book The
Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win is
divided into ten chapters.
What
is Inside?
According
to studies, we all work for the same thing--and it's not just money. It's
meaning. Through our work, we seek a sense of purpose, contribution,
connection, value, and hope. Digging down to the meaning of work taps our
resilience in hard times and our passion in good times. That's the simple but
profound premise behind this groundbreaking book by renowned management expert
Dave Ulrich and psychologist Wendy Ulrich. They've talked to thousands of
people--from rank-and-file workers to clients and customers to top-level
executives--and synthesized major disciplines to identify the "why"
behind our most successful experiences.
This book includes targeted
checklists, questionnaires, and other useful tools to help you turn aspirations
into action. Using the proven principles of abundance, you can coordinate your
needs with those of your employers, your employees, and your customers--and
create a vision that resonates for years to come. When you understand why we
work, you know how to succeed. It outlines seven principles that drive
abundance
1. Abundant organizations build on
strengths (capabilities in an organization) that strengthen others.
2. Abundant organizations have purposes
that sustain both social and fiscal responsibility and align individual
motivation.
3. Abundant organizations take work
relationships beyond high performing teams to high-relating teams.
4. Abundant organizations create positive
work environments that affirm and connect people throughout the organization.
5. Abundance occurs when companies can
engage not only employees’ skills (competence) and loyalty (commitment) but
also their values (contribution).
6. Abundant organizations use principles
of growth, learning, and resilience to respond to change.
7. Abundant organizations attend not only
to outward demographic diversity but also to the diversity of what makes
individuals feel happy, cared for, and excited about life.
As a leader, you create a more
abundant organization when you help employees clarify their personal identity
and enhance their signature strengths and then help them see how those
strengths fit with the goals and values of the organization. The steps in this
process are:
1. Help employees define and grow their
personal strengths.
2. Define and build organizational
capabilities required for success.
3. Meld personal strengths and
organizational capabilities.
4. Determining customer and investor
expectations.
5. Connect both personal and
organizational identities with the needs of customers and investors.
Martin Seligman, the father of
positive psychology, has identified six domains of personal strengths and 24
individual character traits within those domains. The six domains are:
1. Wisdom and knowledge - cognitive
strengths in acquiring and using knowledge. It outlines curiosity, love of
learning, open-mindedness; creativity and perspective.
2. Courage – emotional strengths of accomplishing
goals in the face of opposition. It outlines bravery, perseverance,
authenticity and zeal.
3. Temperance – emotional strengths that
protect against excesses. It outlines self-regulation; prudence; forgiveness
and modesty.
4. Humanity – interpersonal strengths
that provide closeness and care for others. It lists out kindness and
generosity; social intelligence; loving and accepting love.
5. Justice – interpersonal strengths that
support healthy communities. It consists of teamwork, fairness, and leadership.
6. Transcendence – spiritual strengths
that connect us to the universe and provide meaning. It outlines appreciation
of beautify and excellence; gratitude; hope; humor and playfulness; and
religiousness.
Marcus Buckingham and colleagues in
his firm and the Gallup organization have developed an instrument that helps
people assess work-related skills and characteristics. They find that such
skills are difficult to train for but easier to hire for. They have identified
34 strengths a leader should consider when hiring an individual for a job –
strengths that have little to do with specific work experience or job skill but
a lot to do with the qualities it would take to work well in a specific culture
or with a certain kind of customer.
The book outlines leadership actions
to build an identity as follows: help employees become more aware of their
signature strengths through assessment, conversation, observation, and
assignment; define your organization’s required strengths (or capabilities) by
doing a capability audit; make sure that employees’ strengths serve the
organizational capabilities they are hired to build; define your key customers
and investors and determine their expectations of you; and connect the identity
of the individuals and organizations to the customers they serve, building on
strengths that strengthen others.
The book outlines leadership actions
to articulate a purpose as follows: help employees recognize what motivates
them (insight, achievement, connection, empowerment); match the employees’
motivation with the organization task they are assigned to perform; create an
organization aspiration that declares a socially responsible agenda and
translates that agenda to individual action; and help employees satisfice in
those tasks that are worth doing poorly and prioritize tasks that are important
to do well.
The book outlines leadership actions
to foster relationships and teams that work as follows: develop good
friendships at work and encourage others to do so too; learn, teach, and model
the skills of making and receiving bids; listening and self-disclosing;
navigating proximity; resolving conflicts; and making amends; and apply these
skills to relationships between people and among teams.
The book describes that a positive
work environment is rooted in how people treat each other. In one fast-food
company, local leaders had a three-step protocol for determining the
friendliness of the franchise:
1. Do our employees smile at customers?
Greeting customers, smiling at them, and making eye contact shows a commitment
to friendliness.
2. Do customers smile back? When
customers reciprocate and smile back, the friendliness is two-way and customers
are probably enjoying that employee.
3. Do customers smile at each other? When
customers engage with each other without going through the employees, they are
fully enjoying the restaurant.
The book outlines the leadership
actions to create a positive work environment as follows: pay attention to the
work environment as patterns of how things are done; regularly monitor the work
environment; ask newcomers to your work environment their impressions of what
is positive and what is not; and make public statements about your commitment
to shaping a positive work environment.
The book outlines the calendar test to
do a time audit or “calendar test” to enable leaders to know if their
intentions are consistent with the actions:
·
In
the past 30, 60, or 90 days, what would you say were your top priorities?
·
What
did you talk about in your public speeches?
What were your stated goals?
What percentage of your time did you
spend on these issues?
·
Whom
did you meet with, and what were the topics of conversation?
·
What
were the agenda items in your meetings?
·
What
else did you spend time on, and how important were those things?
Leaders
may help employees ascertain their identity by asking them to complete a time
log and analyze the results. When we coach leaders, we often ask them to take
the calendar test – to reflect on the last 90 days and consider:
What
categories of activities make up your workday?
What
issues have you spent the most time on?
Whom
have you spent the most time with?
Where
did you spend your time (in your office, in meetings, with customers)?
What
reports and information do you spend time looking at?
What
business issues capture your quiet time (keep you awake at night, float up when
you are going to and/or from work, or surface often in conversations)?
Leaders
can bring direction and purpose to their organizations and employees by asking:
What
are the insights we need to succeed as an organization?
What
achievements and goals will keep us in business?
What
types of relationships will help us get our work done?
What
human problems are we trying to solve?
Which are the most pressing
motivations of this organization, and where do they fail among the four
quadrants of insight, achievement, connection and empowerment?
Dave has defined organizational
learning agility as the ability to generate X generalize ideas with impact. At
either a personal level (his friend Rand) or an organizational level, these two
principles help people build a learning response to change:
·
Generate.
Leaders who encourage learning seek new ways to do new things. In the face of
change, they are open to experimenting, adapting, and improving.
·
Generalize.
Leaders who learn transfer ideas from one area to another. They have the
ability to see patterns that may apply elsewhere.
The authors share with example of
straight conversation versus persuading conversation as follows: think of a
parent trying to motivate a teen to clean his room, something that teenagers
generally see no inherent value in and that feels to them like pretty hard
work.
Dad: Your room is a mess. Better clean
it up.
TEEN: I don’t have time. I have a
paper due.
DAD: You’ll feel better if your room
is clean.
TEEN: No. I won’t. I like it this way.
DAD: But how can you find anything in
there?
TEEN: I know where everything is.
DAD: This is ridiculous-human beings
just don’t live this way.
TEEN: This human being lives this way
and thinks it is just fine.
DAD: Don’t your friends find this
disgusting?
TEEN: No. My friends’ rooms all look
like this.
If the leader (Dad) wants to impact
the son’s behavior, he needs to figure out what matters to the son and show him
what behavior will lead to that outcome.
Dad: Your room is a mess. Better clean
it up.
TEEN: I don’t have time. I have a
paper due.
DAD: That’s important. When is it due?
TEEN: Tomorrow. I’ve been working on
it, but I still have a lot to do.
DAD: How can I help?
TEEN: Well, could you proofread it for
me when I’m done?
DAD: Sure. I’ll proofread if you’ll
work on your room. You’ll need a break from writing by that point anyway. Deal?
TEEN: Deal.
Work can be categorized along three
dimensions: intellectual, physical, and relational. Intellectual work focuses
on making knowledge productive. Knowledge workers analyze problems, discover
alternatives, shape thinking and create innovative solutions. Words and ideas
become the basic elements of work that can be shaped and molded to change how
people think and act. Employees who like intellectual work enjoy debates about
how to shape problems and discover interesting solutions. Intellectual work
results in intangible outcomes that may not always be seen or measured easily.
Physical work emphasizes tangible results that are visible and traceable.
Physical work emphasizes concrete, touchable results. Physical work might
include figuring out what materials to use in a design, making mock-ups, and
seeing products through the manufacturing and sales process. Relational work
emphasizes connecting with others and getting work done through others.
Relational work includes helping others reflect or learn, organizing people to
accomplish a task, or just bringing people together.
The book explains that experiments are
bounded in time and space and audited rigorously to determine how well they
work. Experiments may occur in a number of areas: product design and features
(e.g. Microsoft Office), service (e.g FedEx), channel of distribution (e.g. online
purchases), operations (e.g. Wal-Mart’s supply chain), cost management (e.g.
lean manufacturing at Herman Miler), customer experiences (e.g. Starbucks)
management processes (e.g. virtual teams at Nokia), business model (e.g, direct
distribution at Dell), or industry redefinition (e.g. iPod at Apple).
Google employees work aggressively on
building a culture of experimentation or innovation. They have identified 10
attitudes for innovation that capture their commitment to experimentation:
1. Ideas can come from anybody.
2. Share everything you can (new ideas
and projects are put on the Internet).
3. Dare to recruit somebody more powerful
and insightful than you.
4. Have a green light to your dreams:
commit one day a week to contribute to the company the way you like (50 percent
of new initiatives are developed during this day).
5. Look for quick wins.
6. Provide less “I like it” and more
analytics.
7. Do not kill an idea; transform it.
8. Innovation required constraints like
budgets and timelines.
9. Care about the end customer first, not
the money.
10. Identify your “twin” in the company ..
an innovation sparring partner.
The book outlines leadership actions
to facilitate growth, learning, and resilience
·
Have
a positive attitude about change; trust that you can learn from it and be
resilient when facing it.
·
Learn
how to generalize new ideas through; self-reflection, experimenting, boundary
spanning, continuous improvement
·
Learn
how to generalize, or share, new ideas by: moving talent across boundaries;
sharing information across boundaries; building incentives to encourage shared
behavior.
·
Become
resilient in the face of change by making the unspeakable speakable; turning
what you know into what you do; and changing events into patterns.
The
book outlines leadership actions to ensure personalized contributions to work
as follows:
Learn
what outcomes matter to employees; How does this job related to their identity,
values, and purpose?
Help
employees articulate the line of sight between what they do and the outcomes
they value.
Help
employees discover the intrinsic value of their work and what they enjoy in the
work itself.
Shape work conditions and match
employees to conditions that appeal to them (where, when, with whom, and how
they work).
The book shares a classic example of
this second mind-set is Thomas Watson, Jr, who headed IBM in the 1960s. A
manager reporting to Watson ran a business unit that lost $10 million. Watson
called him into headquarters. The guy walked into Watson’s office weak-kneed.
Watson said, “Do you know why I called you here?” He responded, “I assume you
called me here to fire me.” Watson said, “Fire you? Hell, I just spent 410
million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”
The
book highlights inspiring story of Teeda Butt Marn who and her family
eventually escaped Cambodia and started a new life in the United States. If a
small moment of delight can bring hope to someone in certain circumstances,
affirming that life is a precious gift even under the handoff unspeakable
oppression, surely such moments can bring meaning to those us with much less to
overcome, much more to live for.
The book outlines leadership actions
to foster delight as follows: see and test the connection between employee
delight and customer loyalty; find ways to delight yourself at work and
encourage your employees to find delight through creativity, pleasure,
humor/playfulness and civility; and in either personal therapy or leadership
coaching, we generally start with a “presenting problem.”
A positive work environment is one in
which the employees are committed, productive, and likely to stay with the
company; customers pick up on employee attitudes and are more likely to do
business with the company; investors have confidence in the company’s future, giving
it a higher market value; and the company’s reputation in the community is
enhanced.
The book lists out 10 attitudes that
underlie an abundant work environment and what leaders can do to foster them.
1. Attitude toward success: arrogance versus
humility.
2. Attitude toward value and values:
implicit versus explicit.
3. Attitude toward service: self-interest
versus selflessness.
4. Attitude toward ideas: criticized
versus invited.
5. Attitude toward connections:
impersonal versus personal.
6. Attitude toward involvement: hands-off
versus hands-on.
7. Attitude toward accountability:
enfeebling others versus empowering others.
8. Attitude toward communication: reduced
versus increased.
9. Attitude toward conflict: run and hide
versus run into.
10. Attitude toward physical space:
haphazard versus chosen.
HR
Takeaways
·
Although
most countries use the Gross National Product index to measure national
success, in 1972 King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan instituted a Gross
National Happiness (GNH) index to assess his country’s progress. The king
instituted social and economic policies to help Bhutan citizens find meaning
and well-being in their lives.
·
Talent
and skill are honed or abandoned. Creativity and problem-solving skill are
developed or undermined. And future sustainability is either ensured or
threatened.
·
Generation
Y employees (born between 1981 and 1999) move into the workforce, their values
(like self-esteem, self-interest, and leisure time) often clash with those of
the baby-boom generation.
·
Gallup
Management Journal’s semiannual Employee Engagement Index shows that only 29
percent of employees are actively engaged in their jobs, while 54 percent are
not engaged and 17 percent are actively disengaged. Right Management (a
consultant firm) found similar results with only 34 percent of employees fully
engaged while 50 percent are completely disengaged.
·
Disengaged
employees are less likely to meet corporate goals or to stay with the firm.
·
In
the United States, about 45 percent of first marriages and over 60 percent of
second marriages end in divorce. In Canada and parts of Europe the rates are
even higher. The disposability of families has severe consequences for the
financial stability, personal health, and emotional well-being of partners,
children, and society as a whole.
·
Many
of these self-help books, tapes, or workshops offer false hope with few
sustained successes. When desperate people seek easy solutions without doing
the hard work of fundamental learning and change, resilience is undermined and
real growth and learning fade.
·
As
leaders probe the whys of work, they empower employees to find personal meaning
that creates value for customers, investors, and communities.
·
Many
leaders see employees’ search for meaning as their own affair, while
productivity and bottom-line results are the business of business.
·
Abundance
is neither a random act nor an isolated event. Leaders who intentionally create
abundance at work build organizations that turn customer and investor
expectations into daily employee actions.
·
Creating
abundant organizations despite headaches and hassles requires leaders to
struggle with paradoxical goals and values. These individuals must balance
their professional dreams, career enthusiasm, family relationships, and
retirement plans against business realities, office politics, the demands of
growth, and larger economic contexts. Let’s face it: leaders who attend only to
personal needs (theirs or their employees’) may create caring organizations
that end up bankrupt. On the other hand, leaders obsessed only with making
money will likely be socially and emotionally bankrupt if they fail at other
things that matter: reputation, relationships, sustainable purpose, engaged
employees, and the simple but invaluable experience of having fun at work.
·
Martin
Seligman and his associates have inserted the proposal that the domain of
psychology extends beyond fixing pathology to probing health and happiness. Positive
psychology asks what makes people happy in the long run.
·
To
manage scarce resources and rebuild organization reputations, many leaders have
begun to pay attention to a “triple bottom line” of people (values and
reputation), profits (financial return), and planet (e.g. carbon footprint).
·
Leaders
in abundant organizations take employee competence and commitment another
step-to employee contribution.
·
By
studying what helps POWs survive and thrive, how Navy Seals can be trained to
stay calm under attack, and what abused children who become successful have in
common, we get hints about how leaders encourage learning under conditions of
stress and challenge.
·
Great
leaders understand that the search for meaning that builds abundance is
grounded in clarity about our truest individual and organizational values and
how they align.
·
Formal
360-degree feedback assessments help employees learn how others perceive them
on a set of leadership dimensions.
·
We
learn by doing. When we perform familiar tasks, we demonstrate our skills and
take pleasure in our expertise. When we act outside of our comfort zone, we may
learn hidden strengths we did not know we had.
·
All
talent management begins with hiring people who have the right strengths for
the job, and these “right strengths” are customer defined.
·
Your
leadership challenge is to align capabilities with strategies, evolve
capabilities, and make sure management actions reinforce key capabilities.
·
Great
companies are not built on the great strengths on their leaders or employees
but on how those strengths build value for their customers. To turn personal
and organizational strengths into value for others: be clear about what you
want your organization to be known for by your best customers. Check it out
with key customers. Make sure that organization practices inside match the
intended brand or identity.
·
Clarity
about where we want to go and why is crucial to a sense of meaning and
abundance.
·
Any
organization that does not provide real value to real people is unlikely to
endure over time.
·
In
fact, the anonymity of e-mails, tweets, web-based bulletin boards, and blogs
often intensifies the challenge as it removes the personal touch so central to
meaningful relationships.
·
What
we see on those screens increasingly involves gamesmanship, overt hostility,
partisanship, backstabbing, and cutthroat, competition, with few role models
for healthy relating.
·
Organization
reveals that employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more
likely to be highly engaged at work than those who do not. People with close
friends at work are 27 percent more likely to see their strengths as aligned
with the company’s goals.
·
People
we don’t know as well are more likely to think of something we haven’t thought
of, to bring fresh perspectives and unusual information to bear on our problem.
·
Doris
Kearns Goodwin determined that President Abraham Lincoln’s political genius
included his willingness to bring together a “team of rivals” to staff his
cabinet – people who not only had not supported his presidency and his
viewpoints but who were his major competitors.
·
Malcolm
Gladwell’s “tipping points” are fueled by people, who always seem to know
somebody who knows somebody who.. As these folks share information and bring
people together, trends are born, deals are made, and ideas are
cross-germinated.
·
How
long does it take to get a feel for the atmosphere in a work setting you walk
into? Think of walking into a doctor’s office, a store, a restaurant, a
classroom, or a plant. Within minutes or at most hours you have a pretty good
sense of what it feels like to work there.
·
Most
of us have personally experienced both a negative and a positive work
environment. A negative work environment comes with cynicism, frustration, and
gossip. Employees spend more time backbiting, protecting turf, resisting, or
blindly obeying than solving problems and helping the company add real value
for customers.
·
A
number of companies we have worked with have taken their value statements to
their key customers and asked three questions: are these the values you would
like us to have? What do we have to do to live these values? And if we live
these values as you expect, will you buy more from us.
·
Work
occurs in many places. Traditionally, employees are “at work” when they are in
the office or on the job.
·
A
consultant who doesn’t travel is like a doctor who doesn’t see patients. But
the parameters of work are not always as fixed as they appear: not many doctors
make house calls these days, but this used to be expected.
·
We
see four dimensions of how work is done that may help leaders create more
abundance for their employees: innovation, autonomy, opportunity, and
visibility.
·
Good
leaders both tap employees’ creative energies and help them settle in
comfortably to more routine aspects of work.
·
The
self-employed often work longer hours and have more demanding and stressful
jobs than their employees, but they find more meaning in their work because
they have control.
·
Beverly
Kaye suggests leaders have a “stay” interview with employees where they ask,
“What would it take to keep you both on the job and passionate about the job?”
·
Visibility,
recognition, praise, and positive feedback allow leaders to communicate
gratitude to employees for their work.
·
Time
has often become people’s scarcest resource and most valued asset, and many
companies today are pioneers in its use. How we spend our time communicates our
values and priorities.
·
The
four ways leaders generate new ideas are: self-reflection, experimentation,
continuous improvement, and boundary spanning.
·
Continuous
improvement programs are just what they sound like: efforts to institutionalize
the focus on constant improvement. Leaders encourage continuous improvement
through both formal programs and informal conversations.
·
An
experimentation protocol involves idea generation; impact; incubate; invest;
integrate and improve. To foster experimentation, follow the mantra “Think big,
test small, fail fast, and learn always.”
·
Resilience
is the ability and courage to bounce back and try again when faced with change.
One of the greatest examples of resilience is U.S. president Abraham Lincoln.
Born into poverty, Lincoln faced defeat throughout his life. He lost eight
elections, failed at two businesses, and suffered a nervous breakdown. Lincoln
not only learned from setbacks but demonstrated almost inconceivable
resilience. His biographers have described the emotional strengths that
contributed to his enormous resilience: empathy, humor, magnanimity, generosity
of spirit, perspective, self-control, balance, and social conscience.
·
Personal
resilience is the ability to bounce back from defeat, and it increases when
leaders can do the following: maintain an optimistic attitude, live out of a
strong moral code, face fears head-on, see patterns and put events in context,
stop worrying and start living, manage risk, and move on.
·
John
Kotter at the Harvard Business School is a world expert on change. He has
written a number important volumes on the process of change, books that get
quoted in academic articles and look impressive on bookshelves but don’t sell a
lot of copies. Then Kotter decided to write a lighthearted parable about
penguins who realize their iceberg is melting and something will have to be
done. ‘Our Iceberg Is Melting’ has sold more than 500,000 copies.
·
Wherever
people work together to accomplish a shared goal, meaning matters. While money
will always matter, the new employee value proposition is also about meaning.
·
People
distrust leaders who make personal gain more important than organizational and
societal responsibility.
·
When
leaders focus on meaning-making activities, employees more readily sense that
their experience at work matters to someone and that their contribution is
valued. Leaders at all levels can help make meaning happen. Research
compellingly suggests that meaning making for employees can be money making for
shareholders.
There
is a liability of success, and it causes many successful companies to fail.
There is a rapid turnover of firms in the U.S. Fortune 500 (almost 50 percent
every 10 years). Twenty years after In
Search of Excellence was published, many of the 43 original firms had not
lived up to the criteria that placed them in the “excellent” category.
Researchers Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs who received
superstar status as evidenced by public CEO awards (from BusinessWeek,
Financial World, Chief Executive, Forbes, IndustryWeek, Morningstar.com, Time,
Time/CNN, and the like) actually performed 15 to 20 percent worse than
comparable CEOs for the three years after winning their award, suggesting that
if such awards promote arrogance they do their recipients and their employees a
real disservice.
The liability of success can be
overcome as leaders avoid arrogance and complacency and remain learning focused
and service oriented. Humble leaders take the blame for mistakes and share
credit for success. They talk less about personal accomplishments and more
about others’ achievements. They focus on giving rather than receiving service.
They don’t boast about what has been but focus on the challenges yet ahead. Jim
Collins in Good to Great notes the
importance of leadership humility, labeling it a key factor in “Level 5
Leadership.” Humble leaders have also been called servant leaders, who don’t
need to always get their way, who admit that others may be right, who express
appreciation for insights, who seem to learn, and who help others do their job.
Senior leaders need not only advocate
and institutionalize meaning but also audit it. In addition to financial,
customer, and organization reviews, leaders might ask questions such as these:
·
How
do you feel about the work you do?
·
How
do customers feel as they receive the outcomes of your work?
·
How
do you use your strengths and values at work, and how often?
·
How
do you see your work contributing to things you care about?
·
What
are you learning about yourself in this job?
·
How
do you explain what you do at work to your closest friends and family?
·
How
much energy and passion do you feel for your work?
Dave is frequently asked why he chose
to invest in HR. His response is simple: HR practices form the infrastructure
that makes sustained organizational success possible.
Moving into a more senior position for
the sake of salary and status alone does not always lead to sustained
motivation. Employees are more likely to sustain energy and passion for their
career moves if their signature strengths match their new roles.
Money is a big motivator, often a
primary motivator. But money often has as much value as a symbol of importance
or prestige as it does in buying power itself. Nonfinancial rewards like work
flexibility, growth opportunities, access to valued relationships, and positive
work environments are frequently at least as important as money in shaping
employee meaning.
The importance of meaning to the next
generation came into sharp focus in the spring of 2009 when almost half of the
MBAs graduating from Harvard Business School took a pledge to “do no harm,”
“serve the greater good,” and “act with the utmost integrity.” While symbolic
more than binding, this ambitious pledge sent a clear signal about the hopes
and ambitions of a talented and capable elite group. They expect work to make a
difference for good in the world, they expect to make a difference at work, and
presumably they expect work to make a difference to them. We see this social
responsibility pledge as a worldwide tsunami with more and more
business-oriented students wanting to both make money and do good.
Employees can make more thoughtful
meaning choices about their professional lives by considering the seven
questions:
·
What
will I be known for?
·
Where
am I going?
·
Whom
do I travel with?
·
How
do I build a positive work environment?
·
What
challenges interest me?
·
How
do I respond to disposability and change?
·
What
delights me?
In up markets, when talent is scarce,
meaning matters because employees are essentially volunteers who can choose
where to allocate their time and energy. In down markets, some organizations
experience a gratitude effect and get false positives on employee engagement
scores from employees who gratefully compare themselves with less fortunate
colleagues. But memories last longer than recessions. Employees who felt
mistreated or taken advantage of during the down markets may look elsewhere
when options open up. Companies that succeed at helping employees find meaning
in downturns often create a cadre of resilient and motivated contributors who
will be the problem solvers and innovators of future success.
The book concludes with a thought
provoking message as follows: Meaning should be a real option for every worker
who values it, and not just in non-for-profit organizations that have been its
traditional province. Whether our future employees are graduating from the
Harvard Business School or the local detention school, meaning matters. It
matters not only for the profit of investors and the needs of customers but
also for the hearts and souls of the millions of people who get up and go to
work every day. Delivering on that hope is one of the most important
opportunities facing business today.
What
is the Recommendation?
This is a widely researched book with
interesting findings. It contains anecdotes, inspiring examples and
illustrations. It outlines striking stories that arouse the interest among the readers
and sustains it throughout the book. The language is simple and straight
hitting the bull’s eye. The ideas and insights are well-punched. The flow is
natural and the content is inspiring, and an average reader can understand
it.
This book provides meaning to your
work life. It helps you build and lead organizations effectively. It is one of
the most inspiring books I have read on HR in my lifetime. It is useful for
leaders at all levels. You can gift this book to others. Enjoy reading this
book!
"Will have a major impact on how
individuals shape their attitude to work, how organizations create abundant
cultures, and how leaders turn personal meaning into public good."- Jigmi
Y. Thinley, Prime Minister of Bhutan
References
The Why of Work: How Great Leaders
Build Abundant Organizations That Win by Dave Ulrich and Wendy Ulrich (McGraw-Hill; 1 edition June
6, 2010)
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