Wanting to make people feel like who they are and what they do matters is common sense, but not common practice.
Zach Mercurio is an author, keynote speaker, consultant, and researcher specializing in purposeful leadership, meaningful work, mattering, and positive organizational development. Zach shares with us the data that proves mattering is a primal need that never goes away but is often overlooked. Learn simple, actionable practices you can use to make your team members feel noticed, affirmed, and needed. If you can do that, you can create highly effective work environments rooted in trust and connection.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Don’t Forget the Little Things
We have to turn this idea of mattering into a common practice. If you look at your to-do list today, how many items on that to-do list have to do with remembering someone’s full name or naming someone’s unique gifts or naming their strengths or showing somebody how they make a difference or saying to somebody, ‘If it wasn’t for you…’ The data indicates that we’re not doing this as well as we think we are. Upwards of 65% of people in global surveys indicate they feel underappreciated and unrecognized. I’m reminded right now of a McKinsey study that found that uncaring leaders were one of the top reasons amongst all 600 people in a study on why they left a job. So while everybody listening is probably like, “I want to make sure everybody feels like they matter.” Oftentimes that common sense is not common practice.
2. Intuition Doesn’t Scale
Intuition doesn’t scale, practices and skills do. So, for example, you would never rely on your pilot’s intuition to fly safely. They have a certification for how they should fly an airplane. We’d never rely on our surgeons to use their intuition to make sure we’re safe on the operating table. And yet when it comes to leadership, organizations and individuals tend to do this all the time, we leave leadership up to intuition. Leaders are responsible for where humans spend upwards of 35% of their waking lives. Leaders should be expected to have clear, hard competencies for how they treat those people. What I’ve been seeing is that we need to turn this idea of being a good leader into a hard skill set that can be defined, that can be learned, that can be evaluated, that can be rewarded, versus leaving it up to someone who’s just ‘good with people,’ which is what we tend to do.
3. Lean into Meaningfulness
Meaningfulness is just the psychological condition of experiencing mattering. It’s knowing that I, and what I’m doing, is purposeful. One of the most powerful findings I’ve seen was that what happens in the interpersonal interaction between a leader and someone they lead is more important to promoting meaningfulness than having a big vision, policies, procedures, even pay or benefits. Just what happens between a person and their leader. So, for example, one of the number one predictors of meaningful work, of experiencing meaningfulness, which we know leads to engagement, motivation, satisfaction, and ultimately performance, was my leader creates a personal connection with me.
Book Recommendation:
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Listen to the full episode: Episode 179: Why Mattering Comes First with Zach Mercurio
