Your Guide Toward Meaningful Work

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Your guide toward meaningful work

by David Batstone

The pursuit for meaningful work must be at the top of many people's minds these days. All of a sudden I am receiving a slew of invitations to speak on the subject of vocation and meaning at university campuses and professional forums.

Individuals yearn to pour their talents and deepest interests into work that matters. They are tired of being one person at work, another with their family, and possibly yet another in their community or political activity. Sustaining these multiple personalities quickly becomes exhausting and makes us feel spiritually fragmented.

Of course, many people in the world do not have the privilege of choosing work that means something beyond a daily wage. But for the majority of SojoMail readers, that is not the case. Education and economic conditions offer choices.

It's exciting to watch traditional boundaries on work blur. In many cases, the decision whether to join, or launch, a nonprofit organization rather than a for-profit enterprise comes down to personal strategy and circumstance. In other words, your skills alone do not determine your career path. In that respect, I know some very talented managers and business minds who find their niche confronting the problem of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa or designing low-cost housing in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. In like manner, I met some remarkably creative and values-led people at Dell Computer Corporation where I spent last week delivering workshops on ethics and sustainability in a global economy.

Following the publication of my last book, Saving the Corporate Soul, I went on the road for two years visiting all kinds of organizations about significance and purpose at work. I discovered that when individuals explain what motivates them they keep coming back to three basic drivers: purpose, passion, and profit. So I designed a short inventory to identify how individuals take a primary orientation from one of these drivers. I call the tool the Triple P Quiz: Purpose, Passion and Profit- and it's available online.

I like to use the word orientation because we truly operate with a mix of motivations. Nonetheless, I discovered that nearly everyone I interview points to a primary driver that shapes their experience at work.

In designing the tool, I aim not only to help workers learn more about themselves, I want to offer the workplace a language for job engagement and the range of motivations that inspire team members.

It may be helpful to offer here a thumb-nail sketch of each p. Passion-led individuals value inspiring and creative work. No matter how much an organization touts the higher purpose of a job, if they do not feel passionate about the activities the position involves, they are not likely to find the job enticing. In other words, passion-led people shiver at the thought of waking up to a month of Mondays and face a set of tasks that are uninspiring.

I meet purpose-led people most often in the nonprofit and civic sector. Don't get me wrong, these individuals are not disappointed to take on creative tasks. But what inspires them is the larger mission of the enterprise of which they are a part. Purpose people do not fit into a one-size-fits-all box, however. While one person may want to find a cure for cancer, another purpose person finds motivation for designing a new software. You want purpose people to help drive the mission and core values of your organization. They keep the enterprise on course.

Profit-led people are the most rare in the non-profit world. Profit does not solely refer to bottom-line financials. More broadly, profit-led people find meaning in achieving a set of determined deliverables. They are the ones who provide discipline and structure to the organization. If you have ever started your own enterprise, you know the valuable role that profit-led people play, especially once your operation began to scale.

The deeper I engage with organizations, the more I appreciate the range of motivations required to make an organization healthy and successful. Individuals are not all wired the same; they find meaning in very different ways. Unfortunately, we do not always value the differences.

Last week I received a cynical note from an individual who took the Triple P Quiz and proclaimed that passion people are self-indulgent. In short, here's his message: It is well and good to seek inspiration, but get over it, because the world is full of suffering people. This purpose-led individual doubts the sincerity of other people who do not share his own motivation. In my experience, it is always a temptation for purpose-led people to feel that any other motivation for meaning is inferior, if not selling out.

His position reminds me of a dilemma that a CEO presented to me recently. The company was a victim of its own success; it was experiencing wild economic growth. When the company launched over a decade ago, the very passionate founder attracted a first wave of employees who also believed fervently in the products of the company. Once the company passed the $100 million mark in sales, the management team saw the need to bring in profit-led people who could better discipline its operations. The early-generation workers, of course, viewed the intrusion of the profit-led people as a threat to their passion-led corporate culture. The profit-led people felt less than welcomed. For their part, they wondered how such a chaotic, undisciplined crew could have gotten so far in business.

My challenge is to help every member of an organization recognize the value of an orchestra with many instruments. No organization can sustain itself without a strong mission (purpose), a creative and inspired dynamism (passion), and clear set of achievements and deliverables (profit). When any one of these values dominates in such a degree that it squeezes out the comfortable space the others offer, the organization will falter. Those enterprises that value the uniqueness of their personnel, on the other hand, design work environments where productivity thrives.

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So, are you Passion-driven, Profit-driven, Purpose-driven? Take the test here.

I took the test and I am 81% Passion, 69% Purpose, 50% profit.*

*My first test was taken in a busy room without much thought. I retook the test about 12 hours later and my new results were: 94% Passion, 63% Purpose, and 44% Profit.