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DOING BUSINESS

A monthly publication by Business Development Group

Volume 1, Number 4

December 27, 2001

Reality is the best land to live in, after all. Let's visit it now.

-- William Bridges

MEANING IN THE WORKPLACE

According to a recent issue of Barron’s, the percentage of Americans who stated that they were seeking for some type of spiritual renewal or reawakening in their lives has nearly tripled over the past decade – from around 25% at the start of the 1990’s to nearly 75% these days (and that was data collected before 9/11). The old, traditional walls between business and spirituality have been crumbling fast.

As with all changes, this one brings both a promise and a threat. The promise is that business owners have a golden opportunity to come to terms with what rank-and-file workers have always known: that there’s much, much more to work than a paycheck, a health insurance policy, and a 401-K. The threat is that business owners, to address these issues at all, need to find positive ways to deal with the increasing ideological diversity of our now very multicultural workforce (because the toes you step on are often connected to the hand that files a lawsuit).

Although I’m in fact a person of deep religious faith, this article won’t be about spirituality in that deepest and highest sense, except to remind readers that there are no atheists in downsizings; the best study on that question, commissioned by a major national outplacement firm, clearly indicated that there isn’t a single person in involuntary career transition, from CEO’s to part-time entry-level production workers, who don’t ask the ultimate questions of existence seriously and thoroughly when faced with a job loss they neither expected nor wanted. Rather, following the lead of that great ordained Christian minister and internationally regarded career expert, the Rev. Richard N. Bolles (What Color is Your Parachute), I’ll be talking about spirituality by way of creating meaning in the workplace.

Work serves two purposes in our culture: it is a means of making a living, but also a means of making a life. After all, the average American accumulates upwards of 100,000 hours on the job; that’s 15% of the total average allotment of hours from cradle to grave, and is second only to sleep as the largest single slice of time’s pie. That’s a lot of time spent doing something that is meaningless or unconnected with a person’s “real self”!

That’s why teaching others how to develop personal mission statements is a growth industry: because people have never been hungrier for ways to connect their mundane activities to a wider sense of meaning and purpose. When I was a graduate student at UW-Madison (two decades ago, I note with some regret, since if I was in my late twenties then, that means that today… well, you do the math, I don’t want to), one of the many fringe groups on campus (of which there were many) was a feminist socialist group named “Bread and Roses”. We may not have agreed on much else, but I loved the title of their group, which signified that both economic security (the bread) and a sense of personal significance and meaning (the roses) were equally essential. You don’t have to be a socialist to agree with that; personally, I voted for Reagan.

How can you help your workers to connect meaning with what they do? Here’s a list of 5 quick possibilities.

Trust workers with some freedom. In a classic study of nursing home residents, half were given a small potted plant and told, “If you want this plant, taking care of it is up to you.” The others were given a plant and informed that the nursing staff would be taking care of it. Within two years, over twice as many of the residents in the second group had died compared to the first group! Clearly, having something to be responsible for… and being given the freedom to exercise that responsibility as one sees fit… is essential to psychological, and even physiological, well-being. The moral for the workplace is obvious. You can’t let everyone decide everything, but you can give everyone a circle of influence within which they are allowed to make some decisions on their own.

Show your people the big picture. In the classic Federal Express commercial, the shipping manager moans, “How can I ‘think outside the box’ when it’s all I can do just to think about the box?” Clever, but wrong. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there; all of us (no matter how limited the scope of our responsibilities) need to take an occasional bird’s eye view of how our day-to-day activities impact the wider scope of things. Knowing that you’re contributing to something bigger than yourself may just be the key to surviving tough times in the here and now.

Encourage employees to think of themselves as self-employed. This doesn’t mean that everyone gets to vote themselves some hefty stock options. It means that everyone learns to see himself or herself as a self-contained profit center, with customers (internal and external), costs (fixed and variable), product lines, competitors. Read anything by William Bridges (see the masthead quote above) if you need to be convinced that healthy companies no longer have employees; they have entrepreneurs who happen to be drawing paychecks.

Set an example. People don’t so much listen to what you say, of course, as watch what you do. How’s your personal mission statement these days? Do you even have one? If not, why not? If you do, has it been over a year since you’ve dusted it off, looked at it, and revised it in light of changing reality? What specific steps have you taken in your career and your professional life in the past six months to flesh out that statement and make it a living reality in your life? If this is all completely foreign to you, run (don’t walk) to the nearest Internet search engine and type in “Stephen Covey”.

Do a culture audit. Corporate missions are nothing more than the confluence of individual perceptions about meaning and purpose. They aren’t something fixed and static, like the words on that impressively framed statement hanging in your corporate annex; they’re ever-changing, as market conditions, customer needs, and your own people’s life experiences change. One of the most valuable things you can do as a company is to take a periodic snapshot of where you are now… and (more important) where you want to be in the next 2 to 4 years… as a mission-driven organization. If you want help with that, contact Business Development Group for more.

All of that sound too abstract and high-falutin’ for your organization? It’s not, but if you think so, start smaller. Ask yourself… and then encourage the question among those who work for you: “What do you enjoy doing so much at this organization that you’d continue to do it even if you weren’t paid anything at all?” If the answer is “nothing” or “gossiping around the water cooler,” some quick action is in order – the company you save just might be your own. In the healthiest organizations, work is indistinguishable from play; the only difference is that with work, you also get direct deposit. How close is your company to that ideal?

‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE DIFFERENT

Change. Everyone claims to be for it, but no one wants to be the first kid on the block to engage in it.

As the new year looms (by the time some of you read this, it will actually be upon you), why not take a few minutes out of your busy schedule to make a quick list of some ways that you’d like your life (and your career and your company) to be different in 2002 than they were in 2001?

Since this is a wish list, you don’t have to be realistic at first. Wish that all your competitors would simultaneously file for Chapter 11 status if you want to. But then turn from those delightful fantasies to something you think you might actually be able to help to create.

Why does this matter? Because most of us don’t change very much. Psychologists have long known that the best known predictor of future behavior is… past behavior. If you want to change, you have to exert effort, because we all have a default mode. And, more often than not, de fault is our own.

An apocryphal story has it that chess grandmaster I. A. Horowitz was once asked the secret of his success. He noted cryptically that it had to do with the fact that he made lots of mistakes. Asked for clarification, he noted that he made as many mistakes as anyone else, but he was in the habit of making different mistakes. Most of his competitors, in contrast, made the same five or ten mistakes again and again and again.

How about you? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again… once. But after that, try doing something radically, dramatically different. You just might be surprised. You may not fail any less often, but you’re guaranteed to be far less bored.

Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

Business Development Group

324 ½ Washington Street #4, Wausau, WI 54403

(715) 849-1968

membree@dwave.net

www.dwave.net/~membree

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