When Your Team Wants Meaning

i was talking to a leader of an engineering firm recently and he had this really interesting question that inspired a very fun conversation and I wanted to share it with you because I think the topic is something that maybe a lot of leaders are experiencing these days so he was telling me that the 20somes on his team have expressed an interest in their jobs being meaningful and this came up because I had just mentioned to him that I thought of engineering as being intrinsically meaningful that when you’re an engineer your job is all about solving problems which means making a difference for the people out there who are experiencing the problems and that could be an engineering firm’s clients it could be the bosses of the people who are working on the project who need their experience to be optimized throughout the the process of the project and of course it could be for the decision makers who hire the engineering firms to solve the problems and work on the project at hand and the leader that I was speaking with was kind of surprised that his 20some team members kind of thought about things this way he was saying you know I I just don’t think of work as being a source of meaning for me he was saying he gets a sense of meaning out of community activity or church activity and my response to that was I think younger people have grown up in a world that is meaningfully different from my generation they’ve grown up feeling like there isn’t a whole lot of meaning out there they’ve grown up being a consumer and being valued for being a consumer their attention has been valued so the meaning that they grow up thinking for themselves is I am a cog in a machine that’s much larger than me which can kind of make your life feel somewhat meaningless i mean if you’re just thought of as a consumer if you’re just thought of as someone who could potentially buy something if you’re just thought of as someone whose attention is worth purchasing in this moment then your time isn’t your own anymore and that’s why I think the younger generation is absolutely hungry to feel like their time and their energy and their effort is valuable and where else but in your work life do you invest your time and your energy and your effort so what I want to encourage leaders to think at this time is when they are working with their team members to really consciously focus on communicating the difference that their team members are making you want to tell them a story of how their actions are making things better for the team that they work for the project that they’re working on the clients who have hired you to do this project and for the community that’s being impacted by this project there are any number of stakeholders around a project and your team every member of your team is directly affecting all of those stakeholders you want to get into the habit of telling stories about how each and every action in this project is directly making a difference for people that your team members care about so that brings me to a great place to end and it’s the place for you to start as you talk about the work that your team members are doing ask them who they care about so that you know how to connect the dots between their actions and the people that they want to directly impact