Meaningful leadership is primarily about leading people on the basis of their potential, rather than managing them as resources. The idea is to lead m a way that helps individuals realise their potential, develop healthy self-awareness and be the best version of themselves.
When we talk about potential, what are we actually talking about? The potential to run 100 metres in under 10 seconds? The potential to be a scientist, entrepreneur, nurse or prime minister? Not really. None of these constitute essential aspects of human potential. The point is that everybody with cognitive skills has die potential to define and redefine the meaning of their lives continually by climbing the ladder of self-respect every day. Based on insight and awareness of die meaning of your life today, you can lead yourself toward living a more meaningful life tomorrow. Everybody is born with this ability, but they can only activate their life potential if they are aware they have it and feel personally obligated to realise it. Only then will they begin to insist on helping both themselves and each other climb the ladder of self-respect every day for the rest of their lives.
Potential should not be misinterpreted as an incentivising trick, like a carrot that is constantly dangled 20 centimetres in front of our noses, no matter how fast we run. That kind of management would be devastating, because we don’t know where the ceiling is until we hit it. Nor can potential be quantified. It makes no sense to say that our potential is 19 and today we are only at 17. It is more a question of identifying and trying to realize the purpose of our lives. We know who we want to be and who we don’t want to be. We define our potential ourselves, informed and challenged by the people around us.
Meaningful leadership involves rejecting the idea of work-life balance and nurturing flexibility instead. There is no balance between life and work. At most, there is an imbalance. Ultimately, it’s all just life, whether we spend it on work, sport, love or something else. Life should absorb work and subordinate it to our purpose. We should constantly measure and weigh work to determine whether it helps us realise our potential. In other words, does it increase or decrease our MQ?
Once we recognise the intimate and existential nature of work, it is no longer something that is restricted to a particular place or skill. When work is no longer the opposite of life but is part of it, both employees and managers are more inclined to be flexible. If there is an overlap between our own individual purpose in life and that of our employer, we will go the extra mile, because it has meaning. If it has no meaning, we will either not do it or regret doing it, because we wasted valuable time from our one life without any existential return. Conversely, if we mutually acknowledge that work is existential, then employers should be more willing to be flexible. Partly because it will, in purely cynical terms, make it more likely that staff will stay with the company for longer, and partly (even primarily) because it reduces the probability that individuals will regret the time spent In that particular workplace.
All of this requires planning and trust, but if the relationship is built on a mutual existential demand, it is definitely achievable.
As soon as a manager acknowledges that their employees only live one life, in one time, as one person, the same as they do, they should immediately throw the performance review out of the window. Performance reviews are meaningless. Once we acknowledge that it is, first and foremost and above all else a human being who is sitting in front of us, it is absurd to believe that we can appraise just the pan of the person who is the employee, separate from the rest of their being. It is impossible to isolate the 33 per cent of the human mind that spends time at work from the remaining 67 per cent, let alone have a meaningful conversation with it.
It comes as no great surprise that, according to a YouGov.org poll of the UK workforce, more than half of all professionals describe appraisals as “pointless” or “time-consuming”. According to Gallup’s research on the American workplace, many managers struggle to conduct effective performance reviews with their employees. The report finds that the current version of performance reviews fails to provide clarity or a sense of meaning. In fact, only 23 per cent of all employees think that their managers provide meaningful feedback. On the other hand, employees who claim to have had meaningful conversations with a manager about their goals and accomplishments are 2.8 times more likely to feel a sense of commitment to their jobs.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with the idea of a manager and employee meeting alone in a room and having a confidential conversation. In practice, however, it is a different matter. Pint, it often takes many attempts to fight our way past the horde of middle management and assistants before we reach the management oracle. When we get there, we discover that what we thought would be an hour-long conversation about something heartfelt is more often than not a quick and superficial chat that leaves us with more professional questions than existential answers. The reason for this is that these conversations neither start from an existential position – the fundamental aspects of being – nor end with an existential perspective on the realisation of our potential.
If we are to manage in a meaningful manner, what we need is a conversation based on the idea that work should be existential and intimate. The time we spend at work comes from the same pool as the time that we spend on any other activity. This conversation must not be a career-oriented one, aimed at evaluating the professional development needed to reach the next pay grade. It must be two individuals who care about and respect each other. The starting point is love, not exploitation. They both need to feel quite sincerely that pursuing the organisation’s purpose is meaningful.
The conversation must seek to identify what the employee would consider a meaningful life, as well as the barriers, in life and in work, that are preventing them from realizing it. This type of conversation presents a fundamental challenge to the concept of professional distance and the idea that time can be split Every member of staff must be given the opportunity to present their whole life to their manager. They must also feel secure in the knowledge that the manager is effectively assuming co-responsibility for their whole life and, therefore, their well-being.
It doesn’t need to be an abstract concept, either. Take, for example, an employee (we’ll call her X) whose boyfriend lives in a different country. In her case, the conversation must address this problem. She must feel comfortable enough to say that he is finding their long-distance relationship difficult. She wants the best for him but also wants to give their relationship the best possible chance. Her manager must be able to trust her enough to organize and design the work in such a way that she can spend more time with her boyfriend while delivering the results expected of her.
What about her colleagues in production? They too can be led on the basis of platonic love. How? The manager explains their colleague’s personal situation and tries to work with them to find a solution that everyone is happy with. Can we adjust the work schedules to ensure that X works just as many hours and is just as productive, but has every Friday and Monday off to visit her boyfriend? In a workplace with a high MQ – or at least an ambition to achieve It – this should be possible. If not, then X’s future in the company will be short-lived, as the degree of meaning in her life will be so low that she will have to choose between her job or her relationship, which is not a desirable outcome for her or the organisation.
In the end, life is inherently unpredictable. Meaning is not found in the vagaries of fortune or misfortune, but in how we handle them. And that goes for both employees and managers.
Excerpted with permission from One Life: How We Forgot to Live Meaningful Lives, Morten Albæk, LID Publishing.