The Search For Significance
AVENIR Leadership Institute
A future-focused organisation committed to developing leaders for the future.
In Seth Godin’s latest book, The Song of Significance, the author and entrepreneur offer meaningful insights into work and life in the modern age. While at times abstract, Godin does provide struggling leaders and professionals with some great wisdom. In Song of Significance, Godin explores why many are disillusioned with work and how leaders can cast a greater vision for employees and teams.?
Finding Fulfilment
What if instead of money, power, and influence employees today desire something deeper? Drawing on researching from 10,000 workers over 90 countries, Godin observes three characteristics for employee fulfilment:?agency, vision, and dignity.
Agency
Agency is about encouraging employee trust and creative licence. Instead of micromanaging, agency is earned trust and autonomy for employees that show initiative and creativity. A leader has the challenge and opportunity to create a workplace where employees are “creating a difference, being a part of something, and doing work they’re proud of.”?
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Vision
Vision is achieved by casting a clear and hopeful vision of an organisation’s work and demonstrating how one’s work is vital to the greater whole.?
Dignity
Since May 2 2023, writers, actors, and members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike. While the reasons for the strike are a combination of “…minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production” one of the throughlines is writers desiring to be compensated fairly and to be seen as collaborators and treated with dignity.
Godin argues that in the industrialism complex, leaders fail to provide the necessary care for employees which leads to insignificant work. Overall, employees desire to be respected and seen as people. More than machines or tasks rabbits, employee satisfaction is about being a leader that sees and listens well.?
Change can be scary but to bring about real transformation, the kind of transformation our world and workplaces need. After all, “the choice is simple: we can endure the hangover of industrial capitalism, keep treating people as disposable, and join in the AI-fueled race to the bottom. Or we come together to build a significant organisation that enrols, empowers, and trusts everyone to deliver their best work, no matter where they are.”??
Senior Consultant with Jefferson and Shea
1 年There is an interesting connection here and the work of Hertzberg in regard to intrinsically motivated roles vs extrinsically motivated ones. There is a flip away form motivators for the intrinsic role (research scientist, teacher, paramedic) as they wake up motivated to hygiene factors, the things that get in the way and slow them down doing the good work they want to do. The work here by Seth Godin may be arguing that the slice of who is intrinsically motivated may be much larger than we have understood it. So large as to be universal. If that is the case what engagement with Heztzburg’s theory - the most downloaded article in the history of the HBR.