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“Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”
This week’s episode of HBR Ideacast is an interview with journalist-turned-student of positive psychology Emily Esfahani Smith about her book, The Power of Meaning, and her recent thinking about the culture of achievement, and how work might or should change in response to the pandemic. Esfahani Smith’s focus is on the difference between happiness and fulfillment, a difference highlighted by the increasing incidence of people leaving their jobs in pursuit of purpose and personal satisfaction. She talks about meaning making as a form of well-being, and with acute concern for employee well-being after 2020 sees a need for more intentional meaning making at and about work.
Interviewer Alison Beard asked, “And what about people…who have always found meaning in work because they equate it with achievement, they’re incredibly ambitious, they want to start companies and lead companies, do you find that those people in this moment as we emerge from COVID-19 are rethinking how they’ve approached work or are they just running full force back into the way it used to be?” Beard’s question is on point, both directed squarely toward the type-As who effect corporate culture (and who probably make up the majority of her listeners) and rooted in the same kind of trepidation central to Roy’s essay — if this is our chance to make a change, for transformation, will we take it? Will we prioritize whom and what we need to prioritize? Will we attend to the structures that failed us in this global crisis, to the patterns that continue to exclude and marginalize in the interest of consumption and profit? “The pandemic is a portal,” Roy wrote. Will we drag into the future “the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us,” or will we “walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world”?
For me, podcasts are welcome companions throughout the day, complements to other tasks. I keep folding or editing or walking or cleaning or whatevering while I listen, but when Beard posed this question, I, a lover of philosophical extrapolation and meaning making, stopped. This is the question I’ve been asking myself, asking as many around me as I could, for the last year and a half. This is the moment to flip the script, turn the tables, adopt new models, other metaphors for radical change…will we?
Disappointingly, Esfahani Smith didn’t really answer the question. Instead of imagining the possibility of what prioritizing meaning and purpose might do to the experience of work, she tilts toward tips for managers on making work more meaningful for employees. I get it — that’s the point of the podcast. She cites four pillars of meaning-making from her research and encourages managers to find opportunities to integrate them. Belonging (“relationships where you feel like you matter to others, where you feel like you’re seen”) could be accomplished by making sure everyone feels part of a team. Purpose (“accomplishing the goals that are most meaningful to you”) and storytelling (how we frame our experiences) could reinforce each other and connect team members to the broader purpose of an organization. And transcendence (those moments that “bring us into the present moment and wash away our anxieties and help us gain some perspective on what the world is really about”), well, didn’t come with a sure-fire tip, but I suppose that just emerges from the satisfaction of checking all the boxes for meaning-making.
It’s exciting to see positive psychology and meaning-making take center stage in consideration of corporate life, but Esfahani Smith’s approach doesn’t start early enough or look far enough. “Maybe you don’t necessarily need to completely quit your job,” she ponders, “but just figure out if there are ways for you to get on projects or shape the tasks that you do to align more with your values and what you believe that your sense of purpose is.” Okay. First, getting on a new project is not imagining the world or even the self anew — it’s simply adapting oneself to continue to accommodate the goals of an organization over which employees, even valued team members, have little control. Second, when, exactly, do managers and team members have the time and space to explore and articulate their values? If organizations and managers are responsible for the moral formation of employees, we’re in big trouble. Businesses who benefit their owners and stockholders (so, you know, all of them) have no incentive beyond bolstering the common good to broaden their employees’ worldviews.
Real transformation, both for individuals and organizations, would come from flipping that script. Instead of encouraging employees to define their purpose within the ambition of the organization, now is the time for organizations to rebuild themselves around the humans that constitute them. “How do your values align with the purpose of the organization?” is the wrong question. Employees, managers, organizations, and the world would be on a surer tack through that portal to a new world if we started with the questions, “What are your values? What is the world you want to live in? How can this organization construct a path to that world?” Sure, if actually and thoroughly implemented, that approach would probably mean significant pruning and restructuring, and it would be most painful for the folx who have been the most comfortable. Anything less, though, isn’t much change at all. It’s just a return to normal. “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
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