Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download be prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. So if you are currently preparing your resume, this is a great example to take a look at and see what you can adjust on your resume. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And the last gift from me for today is a copy of a book we co-authored with some of our amazing clients. And you can get it at F-I-R-M-S consulting.com so firmsconsulting.com/gift. And the book is called Nine Leaders in Action and it went to become a number one best seller on Amazon. And today we have with us, Wes Adams and Tamara Myles, researchers and positive psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania. Wes and Tamara, welcome.

Tamara Myles  01:55

Thank you for having us so great to be here.

Kris Safarova  01:57

So, first of all, positive psychology, for those of us who haven’t studied this area, can you let us know a little bit more about it?

Tamara Myles  02:06

Yeah, so positive psychology is the scientific field that studies what makes life worth living. So how do we live our best lives? Are engaged in the world, perform at our best, have great relationships in the world, and it started as a field in the late 90s as a reaction to the focus of psychology, having become mainly the study of pathology, Like, how can we reduce suffering, reduce illnesses, and, you know, reduce anxiety and depression, and that’s really important field to study and and we’re very grateful that that psychology looks at that and has some some great answers for that. But it’s not enough. It’s not enough to reduce suffering, because when we think about the people we love the most. And you know, when we ask people, What do you want most for those you love? Most people say we want I want them to be happy. I want them to be fulfilled. I want them to have great relationships in their lives. And so positive psychology studies that, you know, how do we how do we create and maintain positive relationships? How do we create fulfillment and meaning in our lives? And so it’s a great compliment to the study of, you know, normal psychology.

Kris Safarova  03:37

And how can someone use it for themselves. So individually, let’s say someone is going through difficult time. How could they use positive psychology to help themselves?

Wes Adams  03:47

There are, there are pretty broad range of practices that have been studied over the last 20 or 30 years, since positive psychology became a more formal field, and I would say, depending on you know what it is that you are trying to tackle? You know, everything from figuring out how to have more gratitude in your life to what are some of the mindsets like a growth mindset that you might be able to take on positive psychology is very big on focusing on building relationships, other factors that impact our resilience and our ability to grow and thrive through change, challenge, adversity and opportunity. So as a pretty broad question, we could be here all day, I think, talking about all of the different tools available. And you know where Tamara and I fit in, I think, is we’ve really focused our work and our research in the positive psychology field, particularly on meaning at work and how, specifically how leaders help people find more meaning in their jobs, because meaning when you we believe our jobs are. Meaningful. That’s the upstream factor that drives all of the outcomes that we want, both as people working in an organization, we want to feel like our jobs matter. We want to be engaged. We want to show up and be excited about our work and for the organization as well. This is also the thing that drives high performance and things like innovation, creativity, even things like retention or bottom line revenue, have been clearly tied to people experiencing meaning. So that’s kind of our area of expertise.

Kris Safarova  05:30

And before we move to mini network and all the things that we can discuss around that. So you mentioned some of the things people can do using positive psychology. Are there maybe one of the things that you find most effective, that maybe you use for yourself when you’re going through difficult time, yeah.

Tamara Myles  05:47

So one of the most well studies and have studied interventions in all of positive psychology is using gratitude as a positive intervention. And so there’s a lot of studies that show that when we shift our focus towards gratitude and create a habit or practice around hunting for the good things in our lives. And that could be a gratitude journal. That could be what I do with my family every night, when we sit down at dinner, we do a daily gratitude, and we go around and we share. What happens is that, you know, we have a bias towards noticing the negative things in our lives more strongly, because it helped us survive when we needed to notice the Tigers that were going to be chasing us and we needed to escape. And so we developed this negativity bias, but when we shift into a gratitude mindset, when we are actively looking for the good and acknowledging the good things in our lives, it can actually help rewire our brain and we start noticing the good things. And it’s not a denial that bad things happen, or denial of the struggles or the suffering that we face. But that amplification of the good makes us feel more capable, hopeful, resilient. It helps us, you know, kind of attack our problems in a more optimistic mindset. So that’s one that I do actively every day, gratitude practice.

Kris Safarova  07:21

Wes, what about you?

Wes Adams  07:22

I have recently started doing something similar at the end of the day, because, you know, I think we’re all so busy, I rush from one thing to the next. I’m constantly feeling like I’m not getting it all done, and rarely taking time to appreciate what’s happened during the day, and so I’ve started taking a moment at the end of the day when I close my laptop and try to transition, to just stop and think about, you know, one or two of the things that that went well that day, you know, what are the things that I learned, or did I make a connection with someone? Or, you know, what were those meaningful moments for me, so that I can just kind of take a minute to appreciate that, rather than just keep rushing forward, which has been, you know, it takes 30 seconds, a minute, maybe, but just a really powerful way to sort of end the day and make sure that I’m not breezing past any of the reasons that I do this work in the first place.

Kris Safarova  08:24

So let’s transition to meaning at work. Were there any personal moments that shaped your interest in meaningful work?

Tamara Myles  08:33

Yes. So I started my career in advertising, and I worked for leaders and at agencies where I felt engaged and energized and excited to go to work. I had friends at work and connections with my clients and and I loved my job, and I was excited to come in every Monday morning, and I didn’t have any Sunday scaries. And I worked for other agencies and other leaders that depleted me, that created toxic environments that made it, you know, really hard to get up on Monday morning and start a whole nother week where Sunday night felt really tight in my stomach, where I was dreading that week ahead and and I was really curious to know, what was it I was working in advertising. Both jobs were very similar. I was kind of doing the same thing. And so I was really curious to understand, what was it that made one job really exciting and meaningful in the other not so much.

Kris Safarova  09:43

So this is the moment when you realize this is something you want to study.

Tamara Myles  09:48

Yeah. I mean, you know, from there, I had a lot of transitions. I left the field of advertising after a really bad experience with with a. Under and went on to start my own consulting practice where I wrote a book about productivity, and I was doing a lot of speaking and training and consulting around how to create systems that allow, you know, people and organizations to be more productive. So individual systems and organizational systems of productivity. And again, I was noticing that people who had systems in place had more time to spend on what really mattered to them, but also when they were spending time on work that felt meaningful and things that really mattered to them, they became more productive. And so there was this virtuous cycle in place, and I was really curious, again, to understand the science behind that cycle. And so my experience in advertising, and then my experience now as a consultant, seeing it from the outside, and seeing what was happening when people felt really energized, that’s what really prompted me to then go back to graduate school and study meaningful work and really kind of understand the science behind what makes work meaningful. And that’s where Wes and I met. We met on the very first day of grad school, and I’ll let Wes tell you what kind of brought him to grad school and then go from there.

Wes Adams  11:21

I just really wanted to figure out how, like, how do you put together an amazing team? I’m, I guess I’ve always been kind of a curious person, and I like to figure things out. Like, I like to put the puzzle pieces together. And my early career was in hospitality, opening nightclubs, restaurants, event space in different parts of the country, and I transitioned into social enterprise and consulting, where I was working with a lot of mission driven organizations. And, you know, some of some of those places, some of those mission driven organizations, were amazing places to work, and some of them, you know, definitely were not. And some of those restaurants that I worked in were amazing places to work, even though they didn’t have, you know, a huge mission focus. And you know, some of them were not. And so I, you know, as I moved along in my career and was leading more people and working internationally, I was just really, I got interested in Organizational Psychology and leadership science and all of those things, and I just really wanted to understand, like, Can you, can you sort of deconstruct those elements that make a great team? Can you figure out how, like, what’s a best practice way to create, you know, teams and organizations that thrive, and places where people do great work, where they feel like they’re doing great work, and that it’s meaningful. And so that was sort of what took me to grad school at Penn, where we both studied positive psychology, and, yeah, and then the rest is kind of history. We linked up, and we were both really interested in very similar things, and ended up doing research together. And, you know, have spent a number of years now, you know, researching these leadership practices and organizational structures that help people find meaning in their jobs.

Kris Safarova  13:10

Was there a specific turning point where you realize that traditional work culture in most places or in many places was fundamentally broken in its approach to meaning?

Tamara Myles  13:20

Yeah, I mean, I think for me, a lot of it was based on my personal experience with companies that I was consulting with and seeing like big stark differences in culture and all of that. But for I think the biggest turning point for me was actually during our research, because when we started our qualitative study, we were researching exemplar organizations, so leaders and organizations that were positive deviants, they were positive outliers in that space. So they were really intentional about creating cultures where people could find meaning at work. And so in the six months that we were conducting the interviews with leaders, we got to inhabit this alternate world of work, where, you know, if you Google work, some of the definitions are drudgery in words like that, and we kind of inhabited this world of possibility, where work was not only a place where people would go and earn a paycheck, but also where they they got a sense of community, where they had friends, where they felt like they mattered, because the work that they did added value and had an impact where they felt like they could learn and grow and develop. And so that was a huge turning point for me to know that it is possible. It’s already happening. There is an alternate world of work possible and available, and we can all create it.

Kris Safarova  14:56

Was there any counter intuitive finding that you guys came across during your study on meaning of work?

Wes Adams  15:02

I would say one of the things that surprised us the most was the importance of beginnings, that meaning actually doesn’t start on your first day it’s created, or the tone for it is created in the recruiting process and follows through to the onboarding process. We found that some practices that folks use in the interview process were affecting people’s sense of meaning throughout the life of their employment with the company. And so this was a, I think, an intervention point that we, I think maybe, you know, had talked about before, but I don’t think we realized how significant it was until we went through the research, and especially the the empirical research, to really tie specific behaviors to the impacts that they were having people and organizations longer term. And so I think this is a big one where there’s a lot of room for improvement in most organizations. How are you recruiting people? How are you telling the story of your organization, the values, what the work means, who it impacts. And then when people join your organization, how are you bringing them in to the culture? How are you welcoming them in? We kind of compare it to, you know, are you going to if you if you get married? Are you going to go down to City Hall and just sign the documents and that’s it? Are you going to have, you know, a big wedding, and are you going to make an event, and are you going to talk about why it’s important and the commitments that you’re making, and build relationships with other people at the organization? So the folks, I think, as you might suspect, that do the latter, tend to have a, you know, a much more meaningful career with an organization.

Kris Safarova  16:43

And if you had only about three five minutes to convince a skeptical CEO that meaningful work is crucial for company to be profitable, to be successful, what would you say? Maybe each of you could do that.

Tamara Myles  16:57

Yeah, there was a lot of data. So we know that 9 out of 10 people prioritize meaning at work and would be willing to take a job for less money for more meaning. So they’re willing to trade money for meaning, and they’re willing to trade 25% of their lifetime earnings, so almost 25% of their lifetime earnings for more meaning. We also know that people who find work meaningful are 64% more fulfilled, seven times more engaged, 69% less likely to quit. So the business case for meaningful work is very strong, like Wes said earlier. You know, meaning is truly the upstream factor. When we find our work to be meaningful, we are more creative, more innovative, more resilient, more likely to stay, more likely to recommend the organization to others. And so it’s, I don’t think I even need five minutes. I think those data, what else Wes, what would you add?

Wes Adams  18:07

I mean, I would just say, I think yes to all of that stuff. And I think it’s also as simple as saying, Do you want to show up and be excited about what you’re doing? You know, do you want to walk into the office or jump on a teams, call and be engaged and feel like you’re working collaboratively with a group of people that are aligned around doing something that they feel is important. And are you being stretched? Are you learning and growing? You know, I think whether you are leading a company or whether you’re a new associate, we all want meaning, like we all want that feeling about our work. And just to be clear, we’re not talking about, you know, work that has to be your life’s calling, right? Like you’re this doesn’t have to be the most important thing in your life, or, you know, something that you feel called to do for your days at work, to feel worthwhile. You know, we can have this sense that our work matters. You know, even if we’re taking a job to pay for school, or even if we’re taking a, you know, a job, an extra job to make some money, right? And and I think we’ve seen this in our research across, you know, we’ve studied employees across industries, you know, 25 different industries, 1000s of people. And you know, these practices and this desire for meaning holds across all of it. And you know, for those people that want to feel that way and also perform at a high level, keep high performers engaged in their organization, you know, it’s just a you know, it’s a no brainer.

Kris Safarova  19:43

So for someone listening to us right now, who understands, you know what I need to do something my team doesn’t feel that they have enough meaning. What would you recommend they do differently?

Tamara Myles  19:55

So the practices we found in our research fall under what we call. Three C’s. So there’s like three main pillars that make work meaningful, and the three C’s are community. So it’s this feeling that you belong in your organization. You can show up authentically, that people care about you, that somebody would notice if you didn’t show up to work the next day and maybe call and reach out and say, Are you okay? And so community is really the feeling that I matter here in my team and in my organization. The second C is contribution, and that is the feeling that what I do every day matters. So it’s understanding how what you spend your time doing the tasks, the spreadsheets, the emails that you’re sending, how do they add up to impact what? How do they ladder up to the big purpose of the organization? Or how do they impact my team member or my leader? And that is, you know, it’s about understanding the impact so leaders clarifying the impact, but also it can just be as simple as being appreciated and thanked. We talked about gratitude earlier. When we receive gratitude for some from someone, it can really, really make our work meaningful. So that’s contribution. And then the third C is challenge, and that one is really about believing that your growth and development matters to the leaders in your organization, that you have opportunities to learn, to keep growing, to keep innovating, to try something new, that that you know your your leaders, your managers, your team, believes in you, and they think you can do it, and They give you those challenges, for you to keep growing so community contribution and challenge for anybody listening, anybody who’s like, you know what? I really want to try to increase meaning at work, for my team, for my colleague, for myself, focus on those three C’s.

Kris Safarova  21:57

And what do you think is the biggest mistake or what have you observed is the biggest mistake that leaders make when trying to create meaning in their teams?

Wes Adams  22:06

Believing that people already feel like they’re appreciated, believing that people already have that answer. I think what we found in our research was that leaders account for about half of how meaningful people find their work, what leaders do, or what they fail to do, has a huge impact on the story that we tell ourselves about what work means to us. And so if you are a leader, part of your job is to help tell that story, help make those connections for people. And so that can be done, like Tamara said, in a few simple ways, but you have to actively and intentionally do that, and we’re finding that that’s more and more the case, especially when people aren’t in the same room, especially when we’re working across four or five different generations in our workplace, or working internationally, across different cultures, we have to make this intentional effort to tell this story, to implement these practices and make space for it so that we can be helping people find meaning in their work.

Tamara Myles  23:12

Yeah, and I would add another big misconception about meaningful work is a lot of companies have invested money in creating things like ping pong tables and free dry cleaning and free meals and all of those, and that can be great like and maybe, you know, if we have free lunches at work, we can have lunch with our colleagues and connect with them that way. So if it leads to more community and things like that, but there’s a big difference between happiness and meaning. So happiness is fleeting. It’s something, you know, oh gosh, I got you. We had a big party cake because with somebody’s birthday today, yay. That felt good. We had cake, and that’s good, but happiness is that sugar rush that you got from the cake. It’s fleeting, and it goes away and it’s good, you know, and we want that, but meaning is like the well balanced meal that we need for our bodies and for our nutrition. And so I think it’s a big misconception that as long as we create these bursts of joy and happiness, that work will be meaningful. We have to invest in the three C’s for work to become meaningful. And then the other biggest myth, I think, of meaningful work is something that Wes touched on earlier, is that not all jobs can be meaningful, that meaningful work is reserved for helping professions, health care, social impact work. And that is not the case. We studied over 25 industries. And there are studies, you know, beyond ours that have looked at everything from, you know, hospital janitors to zookeepers and so every every profession we can find meaning in every job everyday.

Kris Safarova  25:00

Have you observed something that leaders often do that they should immediately stop doing?

Tamara Myles  25:06

I’ll start. Wes. And I think the biggest thing, the biggest meaning killer that we found in our research, is when leaders say one thing and do another. So if they they’re not acting in line with the values of the organization. So for example, if one of the organization’s values is transparency, and you know, it on the website, it says transparent. Values transparency. We, you know every we say it like it is, and we and we let everybody know what’s going on. But then, so that’s what the leaders say. But then in real life, when they’re at work, they are not transparent. They’re not upfront with the things that are happening, and there’s a lot of gossipy and secrecy, and that’s not the lived experience that destroys meaning. So this, this say, do gap is the biggest meaning killer that we found in our study. So if any leaders are not walking the talk, stop that and start walking the talk. That’s that’s a huge thing you can do.

Kris Safarova  26:09

Is there maybe some kind of leadership habit that has an outsized impact on meaning at work?

Wes Adams  26:16

One of the stories that really made a big impact on me that we learned in our research was there was a a woman who we call Kathy in the in our book, and she, she worked at an audit firm. And, you know, this is a organization where you spend all day looking for mistakes, right? That’s an auditor’s job is to look for things that are wrong, and so you can really easily fall into the negativity bias of that work. And she recognized that, and so she decided that she was going to start at the end of every week sending gratitude notes, little emails, short emails, a couple of sentences, to four or five people, letting them know what she appreciated about what they did this week. So she started doing that. You know, she did it the first week. She fired them off and wasn’t sure how that would go, or if it would feel weird for people to get those notes from her. And she found very quickly that not only were people so happy to get those notes and to be recognized, but also they started sending notes to other people as well, and and it just kicked off this sort of culture of gratitude on the team that really transformed the way that they interacted with each other, that they connected with each other. And that was so simple. It was such a small practice, but a habitual practice that she implemented once a week, you know, saying thank you for certain things. And we know from research, from Gallup and work human, that one thank you once a week from a manager can cut disengagement and burnout in half, and that’s such a small thing. And that same research showed that less than 40% of people believed that they were adequately recognized for their work. So I think that’s a huge leverage point that isn’t really being taken advantage of in most organizations.

Kris Safarova  28:13

That is very true. I remember during my time in consulting, sometimes you receive something from someone very senior, some very senior partners. I know you’re such a star, it feels like all the nights you haven’t slept that week were worth it.

Wes Adams  28:26

Because you’re lighting up now, just talking about it, like your whole demeanor has changed. You’re glowing just thinking about it, it’s so powerful,

Kris Safarova  28:33

Very true. So for someone who is managing a remote or hybrid team, what are some practical ways for a leader to build an immediate sense of community?

Tamara Myles  28:44

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a big, a big question right now, and I think it’s a it’s a lot of leaders are struggling with, with creating community and strong, fostering strong relationships in hybrid and distributed teams. And in our research, we found, again, the exemplar organizations that are doing it really well. And so again, like with these other habits, starts with intention, right? And so even if you are distributed, one thing that really helps is, you know, is there a once a quarter, once a month, maybe once a year, where you can all be together, and then the purpose of that gathering is not to just sit in front of a screen or have a bunch of meetings, but be intentional about building community and fostering relationships and doing team building things. And you know, lots of lots of ideas that we can talk about, for, for, for building community, so bringing people together to build community intentionally, whether it’s once a quarter, once a year, once a month, once a week, whatever is possible, that’s one way. And then to keep that. Sense of community going during the distributed and hybrid work. One thing the most powerful question that we asked in our research that predicted the sense of community was, does your leader know what’s happening in your life outside of work? And so ask people, like, take the time. It’s really easy in our hybrid work to start a meeting right away, like, jump in, be off camera, get right to the point, you know, we’ve kind of lost some of those, like, social connection moments of the water cooler, but be intentional about that. And one, one way you can do that is by if you have a weekly team meeting, for example, you can have somebody each week take a turn, share something personal, a picture of an item that means something, tell the story of that picture of that item, spend the first three to five minutes talking about that, that can really allow people to get to know each other on a deeper level and build connections that you might not even know were there. For example, if I come in to the meeting and I bring flowers of my garden in the spring, because I’ve been gardening, and my flowers are really beautiful, there might be another gardener on the team that is also into hydrangeas, and we can then have that connection to talk about. So it’s these simple but intentional practices that can be really powerful to create community.

Wes Adams  31:36

May I add to that? Because I was doing a workshop with some leaders yesterday, and I was talking a little bit about this practice, and someone raised their hand and said, I don’t have time for that, you know. I’ve got a lot of things to do. I’m busy. I don’t have time to oh, we’re going to take five minutes and somebody’s going to share a photo, and that just feels like a real waste of time. I have too many things on my plate, you know? And it’s so easy when, especially when we’re not in the same room, and especially when we feel the sense of urgency to just transact with people, you know, to make our day full of transactions with other people. And that’s, you know, it’s very draining, and it’s not relationship building, and that has a real long term negative impact on the business, not just because people become disengaged and they leave, but even while they’re there, if you’re not building a relationship of trust, if you’re not creating an environment where people feel like they can speak up, you know they have the safety to do that, that they can bring their ideas to the table, or even bring their whole selves to the table, you’re missing out as a leader on a lot of really valuable information that you need to make good decisions, and you’re just not getting that. And so it’s actually a critical investment in having an effective and a functioning and a high performing team, and so I think you you don’t have the time to not do that if you want to continue to succeed.

Kris Safarova  33:07

Now let’s talk about contribution, especially in jobs where it’s not very easy to figure out how you’re contributing.

Tamara Myles  33:15

So Wes talked about appreciation, and Kathy, who created that gratitude practice. That’s one way where you can highlight people’s contributions. Another one, I want to tell you a story. So when I was, you know, when Wes, and I were doing the research, I went to my hairdresser, and I’ve been going to her forever. A lot of us women have special relationships with with our hairdressers, and mine is Brianne, and I was in her chair, and she’s coloring my hair, and I’m telling her about my research, and she stops and looks at me in the mirror, and she said, you know, Tamara, I don’t see myself as a hair stylist. And I was like, Oh, really? She’s like, Yeah, I see myself as a day maker. And I was like, wow, tell me more. And so she told me that she was trained at a salon where the founder, one of the co founders of the salon, had had an experience with a customer, and that customer had come in one day to get her hair done, and, you know, he did her hair and talked to her, and they laughed together, and they shared some special memories. And when she left, he gave her a hug, and then he went on and saw other customers, and a few days later, he had received a note from that client, and in the note, the client confessed that she had been struggling with depression, and had come in that day, planning to end her life, and she had come in because she wanted her hair to be done for the funeral, but in that connection that she experienced with him, in the laughing together and the hug he gave her, he gave her hope, and so she decided to check herself into um. Um treatment instead. And she wrote that letter thanking him. And that moment was transformative for David. And he was like, Oh my gosh, here. I just thought I was doing hair and making people look good, but what an impact I can have. So he started the stay maker movement. And when Brianne, my hairdresser, got trained, she learned about this, and then she learned the practices to become a day maker. And I was on the receiving end of someone who finds her job really meaningful, who takes these extra steps, these extra moments, to make somebody’s day. And it’s it is amazing, because every time I go to her, I am so excited, and we connect, and I feel great, and I’m like, Ah, you know, I do feel like she made my day, and so and so, it’s really about thinking beyond your you know, your task, about what you’re doing, like she is cut, coloring and cutting and blow drying my hair, but she’s also making my day. She’s taking the time to to get to know me, to ask me about my kids. She’s taking the time to find out what I’m doing this week and how she wants me, how I want to look. And so it’s these extra things, and so so that’s one way we can think about our contribution, is by thinking about not just the tasks that we’re doing every day, but what is it adding up to? Where is it leading? Why are we doing this? And that’s where leaders play a huge role, to come in and say, you know, because of you, we’ve been able to do this. Or, you know, when you do this task, I know, I know it’s really hard, and I know you have to work all night, and I really appreciate it, but if it wasn’t for you, we weren’t going to meet. We didn’t we weren’t going to get this client or so things like that. It’s it’s really up to to leaders to highlight those contributions for us when we can’t find them for ourselves.

Kris Safarova  36:55

And for someone who’s listening to us right now, who maybe they are relatively senior. They’re not yet very senior, and they want to find meaning for themselves, because they’re starting to feel that their job has no meaning. What advice would you give them?

Wes Adams  37:10

We have an exercise that we take people through when we do workshops for them called the moments that matter exercise, and we ask them to take a step back and think about a time that they found their work particularly meaningful. You know, what’s a time that you’re proud of, or what’s a moment that stayed with you? And can you write specifically about that moment? And, you know, usually we find that, you know it, I mean, always, really, it falls into one of the three C’s. People write about a moment where they connected with somebody at work and felt supported and seen. Or they write about a moment where they understood the contribution somebody said, Thank you. Or they connected with a client who got a lot of value out of their work. Or, very often, it’s where they struggled to take on a new project, a stretch project, or get through something difficult, and they did it, and they did it successfully, and they learned and they grew and achieved something that they weren’t sure was possible. And if you take a step back and you figure out what it is like, what one of those moments is for you, you can start to look for ways to have more of those moments. You can emphasize those things moving forward, and you can start sharing those moments with the other people that work in your organization and ask them what their moments are. And you can begin to see where there might be some other opportunities to find meaning.

Kris Safarova  38:38

And what will be your advice to leaders who are struggling to understand the younger workers and what creates meaning for them, because they seem to be different from the way those a little bit older leaders. It seems that they see world a little bit differently. See their career differently. What would be your advice?

Wes Adams  38:55

Tamara is punting This one to me. You know, I mean, this is one of the biggest things that comes up when we’re working with clients these days, and it comes up from both sides, right? Like we work with very senior leaders in organizations, many of whom struggle to connect with or motivate folks who might be newer to the organization. And we work with a lot of folks in the Gen Z cohort, people who are newer to working at organizations, or newer managers, newer leaders. And you know, there are, you know, I think there are definitely some generational differences and some cultural differences in what we expect of work now. And there are also life stage and Career Stage differences that we need to be aware of. So, you know, people who are earlier in their career, they want to be challenged, they want to participate, they want to learn and grow. And so that third C Typically holds a little bit more of a of an appeal for them. People who are, you know, a. Have been in their career for a much longer time. Are less interested, you know, they’re already very senior. They’re less interested in moving up, and more so maybe in understanding how they’re contributing, how they’re mentoring, how their work has an impact, right? And so recognizing that, you know, there’s not necessarily a one size fits all across the organization, and taking the time to actually have those conversations with people you know and ask them, What is it about your work that’s meaningful? Where is it that you want to go? What are you hoping for? Is a really helpful place to begin, you know, and just trying to connect someone’s work to those things that are meaningful to them.

Tamara Myles  40:40

And I want to just add something. I think it’s really easy, you know, for to for media and the story to become like us versus them, right? Well, Gen Z wants this, but we don’t. And it’s this like, there’s always this narrative when people write about this generation, but when we look at the data, the research actually shows that all generations want meaningful work and all define it really similarly. So maybe Gen Z has been more vocal about it. You know, I think that the pandemic and what we went through together changed the psychological contract that we had with work and and Gen Z kind of was growing up in that era and entering the workforce, and so maybe they, they just are more vocal than we ever were, and their expectations about about work, life balance, and those things Have have come to the forefront, but, but we all, every generation that has been studied about meaningful work has shown, the research has shown that every generation cares about meaningful work.

Kris Safarova  41:54

And then your studies, what have you uncovered about Gen Z? So for some leaders who feel I don’t really understand Gen Z, I always actually try not to work with them. I have my team that I’m rely on, but I know that I cannot get away from it for two months. I need to figure out what Gen Z wants so I can figure out how to get them to my teams. What would you say with them?

Tamara Myles  42:14

So our research, we didn’t have enough of a sample size of Gen Z, like we had 1000s of people, but to parse it out by generation, we didn’t have high enough numbers to make any conclusive, I guess, have conclusive opinions based on our research specifically about Gen Z, but in our consulting practice, and actually, I have three Gen Z ers. I’m a mother.

Wes Adams  42:42

Just three Gen Zs at home everyday.

Tamara Myles  42:45

Actually, in all three of them, they’re there. One is in college, two or in high school. But all three of them have jobs, and so as somebody who is managing them at home, but also seeing their relationship to work right these like first high school jobs and internships and things like that. What I can say for my end of three is that they they want to do a good job. They want to be challenged. They want somebody to believe in them. You know, my son worked at a grocery store, a little local grocery store, and he was bagging groceries, and he was doing a good job. Like my son is very competitive and analytical, so he wanted to be like the fastest bagger and like he plays, okay, but you know what the manager noticed? And he was like, Oh, you’re doing a great job. How about you become our produce clerk? And so he kind of got this little promotion after a couple weeks, and became the produce clerk, and he came home and he was proud, you know, because somebody noticed, somebody saw that he was working hard. And so I don’t think it’s it’s that different. I don’t think senior leaders should be scared, like you said of Gen Z years of not wanting to work with them, because at the end of the day, we’re all human, and we all fundamentally want to belong to a community. We want to contribute to something that matters, and we want somebody to believe in us and challenge us to learn and grow. And I think if a leader approaches their Gen Z workforce with those three C’s in mind, they will be pleasantly surprised.

Kris Safarova  44:18

Of course, we cannot have this discussion without discussing how AI will impact all of this. What are your thoughts?

Wes Adams  44:25

We’ve had a few conversations about this, and it’s, it’s something we talk a little bit about in the book. And I’ll say that neither Tamara nor I are AI experts or technologists, and I think there are, there are a couple of things as far as AI and meaningful work. One is the way that we’re developing AI is going to have a huge impact on how it influences our ability to work and how it serves us or doesn’t serve us in the long term, right now that AI is being developed by. Companies that have a certain agenda, right? And it’s being developed very quickly and rolled out very quickly. And, you know, I think if we want AI to be something that brings out the best in us, the best in our humanity, for it to be a tool that is valuable, we should have more voices in the table. You know, philosophers, psychologists, humanists, ethicists, artists, thinking about what’s the data that we’re using to train this? What are we trying to get out of this tool? Right? I think we saw with social media, there was sort of this race to the bottom right. It was just a race for our attention at all costs, and we’re really paying the price of that right now. We’re paying the price because it was developed with, you know, an attention seeking profit mindset and nothing else, you know, no concern really, for anything else. And, you know, I think, I think the other thing is, can we develop AI in a way that frees up our time to do more meaningful work. Can it become something that takes away some of these tasks that may not be so interesting, that could be automated, right, and allows for more creativity, allows for us to do more interesting work, to stretch ourselves? You know, can we design it in a way that does that, rather than just taking away jobs from people and making them obsolete. How do we use it as a platform to give people a step up into something that’s more interesting?

Kris Safarova  46:30

To wrap up this discussion, I wanted to ask you my favorite question. It’s outside of this topic. Over the last few years, what were two, three aha moments, realizations that you will feel comfortable sharing that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business.

Tamara Myles  46:47

So two big moments for me. So when we were in graduate school, we learned some research in what’s called active, constructive responding, and that research shows that how we respond to positive news and positive events. When somebody that you know we’re close with or we’re friendly with comes to us and share something positive and exciting that just happened, how we respond in that moment has more of an impact on our relationship, on our sense of connection, on the trust we have with each other, then how we respond to bad news, and the name, the title of the paper is, will you be there for me when things go right? And that really was an aha moment for me, because, you know, we always think like, oh, we need people who will be there for us and help us through the tough times. But we actually really need people that are going to celebrate with us our good news. And whether that is something like we got a book deal and our book is coming out, something big like that, but it could also be, oh, my goodness, I woke up early today and I saw the most beautiful sunrise. And you know, I’m excited about that, and if I’m sharing that with my husband in the morning, if he’s like, oh, okay, that’s nice, and then doesn’t share in my excitement that over time can be hugely detrimental to the strength of your relationship. And so that was a big aha moment for me. And then the second one was our research finding about the impact that the leaders have on the experience of meaningful work. When we set out to do the study, we suspected that leaders had an impact, and we knew that that we would find that impact, but the fact that it’s almost half, it’s 48% that blew my mind and really highlighted the the huge responsibility and huge opportunity that exists for leaders to create more meaningful work environments.

Wes Adams  48:49

For me, I think Tamara stole one of mine, which was the act of constructive responding. I mean, that was such a huge turning point for me, and has had such a big impact on a lot of my relationships. I also think one of the things I’ve learned in the last few years through our, I think a little bit through our research and our education and positive psychology, and a lot through the consulting work that I’ve done working with leaders, is that there’s, there’s no way around difficult challenges and like negative experiences. You know, I think maybe not explicitly, but in the back of my mind, I thought, you know, I’m going to get better at this. I’m going to learn how to be a better leader, or how to run a business more effectively, and I’m going to be able to avoid those difficult conversations. I’m not going to have to give that hard feedback anymore. I’m going to, like, figure my way out of some of these downsides of life, you know, just the negative things that happen in life. And, you know, I think one of the big, you know, we were talking earlier about. Positive Psychology and the you know, the focus of it, and one of the big focuses, is on learning and growing through challenge and adversity, right? It’s not about avoiding challenge and adversity. It’s about having an approach mindset to the difficult things in life, the challenges that we face, not ignoring them, not saying, oh, everything’s going to be okay, and looking the other way, but facing them head on, and saying, You know what, this is hard, and there’s no way around the fact that this is hard, and what can I do to move through it more effectively? Is there an opportunity, even though this sucks, to learn, how can I do this in a way that’s aligned with my values. And I think for me, that’s been a really big it’s been a really big shift so that I’m I’m much less trying to avoid those things and much more trying to meet those things with my own values and long term goals in mind. But you know that’s really easy to say and not always easy to do. So I would say I’m not perfect at that, but I’m working on it.

Kris Safarova  51:07

Thank you so much for being here, for sharing everything you have shared today. Where can our listeners learn more about you, by your book, anything you want to share.

Tamara Myles  51:16

So the best place to find us is on our website, which is make work meaningful.com. We are both also active on LinkedIn and Instagram, and would love to connect to your listeners. And you can buy our book through our website, but it’s also available through all the major booksellers.

Kris Safarova  51:35

Thank you again for being here and for important work you’re doing.

Wes Adams  51:40

Thank you so much. Great conversation. Yeah, it was awesome.

Kris Safarova  51:44

Our guests today, again, have been Wes Adams and Tamara Myles and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. So if you are currently updating your resume, you can take a look, see what you can improve on yours. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And you can also get a copy of our book, a book we co-authored with some of our amazing clients. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. And the book is called Nine Leaders in Action, and it went to become number one best seller on Amazon. And I think you can learn a lot from it and enjoy it. That’s all for today. Thank you for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.