3 Tools to Help Employees Pull Meaning from Work – Pt 1

3 Tools to Help Employees Pull Meaning from Work – Pt 1

Posted on 04. Oct, 2011 by in 1 Leadership

What’s needed from a manager to help employees pull meaning from their work?

First, to let’s define meaningful work.

To help mitigate this sounding a bit “touchy-feely,” I constructed this definition using research from the Journal of Business Ethics and Malcom Gladwell.

  • Work to which employees can use their strengths
  • Can be done autonomously
  • The work is challenging
  • Effort and reward are favorable – could be money, recognition, achievement

So, with that in mind, it takes a manager’s purposeful effort to help employees pull meaning from their work.

Here are three leadership tools to help achieve the above.

Art of Self-Discovery
Don’t give employees the answer or solution to every question or barrier. Develop the discipline to let employees discover where their knowledge and skill limits are and how to compensate for or grow into them.

Self-discovery is the use of open-ended questions to help employees get to the answer without you giving it to them. Often times the answer the employee reaches is stronger. It certainly resonates more deeply.

Failure Recovery
John C. Maxwell makes a great distinction about failure: fail forward. A strong manager has the know-how to help employees recover with minimal bruising, headful of lessons, and keen insights into what went wrong. A strong manager has the patience and understands that failure is about the attempt, not the person.

Coaching and Feedback
Given the two above skills, this one is no surprise. To help employees navigate challenging work and maximize the reward they want to reap, you must set aside time to coach and give feedback.

These tools are aimed to help the employees. Tomorrow, I’ll share three more tools that are important to you: Purpose Driven, Political Navigation, and Creating Vision. These three directly influence the ones shared today.

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4 Responses to “3 Tools to Help Employees Pull Meaning from Work – Pt 1”

  1. Suchitra Mishra

    04. Oct, 2011

    Excellent summation into three points, Shawn – covers all the “touchy-feely” aspects well :)

    Where would “encourage continuous learning” fall in ? Maybe self-discovery ? I have found that we need push towards taking training to move to next levels as we are very often bogged down by day-to-day responsibilities to think of making time for self-development. It often takes the manager to push employees towards self growth through training.

    Regards,
    Suchitra
    Twitter : @suchimishra

    Reply to this comment

    • Shawn Murphy

      06. Oct, 2011

      Suchitra,
      Continuous learning could go into self-discovery; however, I think a category of learning and development would be a good addition. With a stronger emphasis on development and learning to supplement development plans. I distinguish between learning and development this way: learning can be online, offline in a classroom or conference, for example. It’s a traditional approach. Development are the coordinated on-the-job assignments purposeful given or chosen to develop or strengthen a skill.

      Always good to “see” you here, Suchitra.
      Shawn

      Reply to this comment

  2. Suchitra Mishra

    07. Oct, 2011

    Thanks, Shawn – Your posts always add a notch to my self – development :)

    Suchitra

    Reply to this comment

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