Selected Podcast
Meaning-Centered Leadership: Skills and Strategies for Increased Employee Well-Being and Organizational Success
All leaders need to hear this important message about the power of meaning. Backed by research, Dr. Jackson shares the proven impact that meaning has on company productivity and worker well being. Developing your skills as a meaning-centered leader helps build positive relationships and creates a trustworthy working environment. Discover skills and strategies to help you connect with your team members to deliver the highest-quality services in all areas of the organization.
Featuring:
Ed Jackson, PhD
Dr. Jackson is coach, consultant, speaker, co-founder and co-author of Meaning-Centered Leadership. He earned his doctorate in Organizational Leadership. He presents the 3Es framework - “Engagement, Empowerment, Expertise”, that enables leaders of all organizations to lead with equity, maximize engagement, instill empowerment, and lead with expertise. Transcription:
Bill Klaproth: Welcome to the ASHRM podcast made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ASHRM, that's A-S-H-R-M, ashrm.org/membership to learn more and to become an ASHRM member. I'm Bill Klaproth.
So what is meaning-centered leadership and what kind of an impact can that have on your employees and your organizational success and what are the skills and strategies for increased employee well-being? And how can all of this have a profound and dramatic impact on the quality of yours and your employees' lives? Well, let's find out with Ed Jackson, Co-founder of Meaning-Centered Leadership.
Ed, thank you so much for your time. It is great to talk with you on such an interesting topic. I love talking about management techniques and how we can better the lives of our workforce. So, let me ask you this first, what proactive steps can organizations take to improve employee well-being?
Ed Jackson: Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about the meaning-centered message with you. The first proactive step every organization needs to take is a focus on deeply engaging with their employees and empowering them, building their expertise. Those are the three critical components that employees need to find purpose and significance in their work.
Bill Klaproth: So when you say deeply engaging with your employees, can you give us an example of that?
Ed Jackson: Absolutely. Deep engagement really comes from building trust, creating trusting relationships throughout the organization, establishing care and concern, establishing yourself as an organization that has normative expectations for caring throughout the organization and open communication and active listening, communicating clearly with people what's going on and listening to them. When people are listened to, they feel valued, they feel cared about, and they begin to develop trust. And it's those relationships that create that first marker of meaning that people need in their work.
Bill Klaproth: Okay. So then, how do I know what the level of meaning is in my organization? How can I determine that and the level of meaning I'm creating with my team? How do I do kind of an organizational audit of that?
Ed Jackson: I think in terms of data, quite often qualitative, quantitative. How do you assess that? And one way to assess that is the general affect of the people you're working with. I had a visit years ago when I was running a public-private organization. The private visitors from the corporate side came in and they were really impressed with all the smiles they saw on the faces of the people in the building. And I think that's the kind of evidence you need to know that people are connecting. They're happy. They're having good time in their work, that you're seeing collaborative efforts from people, that you're seeing people work together and treat each other respectfully. That's really great empirical evidence to help you understand how the culture of your organization is impacted by what individuals are doing. We have some assessment tools that we use with the organizations to help them really identify "What am I working on? What are the skills that I need to focus on to deepen that meaning?" And we also have a 360 tool that leaders can use to get feedback from a multi-rater audience to really clearly understand how their leadership is perceived and how it's impacting individuals they're working with.
Bill Klaproth: Right. I should look to see if my employees are connecting with each other. Are they happy? Are they collaborating? Is there a respectful environment? Those are some of the things we can just initially look at. And then, if any of those are lacking and I go, "Oh boy, this doesn't look good. I'm not seeing any of these things that Ed talked about. I need to work on becoming a better meaning-centered leader." What's the first step I should take?
Ed Jackson: Well, I think it would start with examining trust in the organization, that to me is the bottomline. Without trust in the organization, the organization is not going to make inroads. The number one thing in our research, we surveyed followers, we interviewed leaders, exemplary leaders, and the number one thing the employees mentioned that they need was a leader who creates an atmosphere where trusting relationships can flourish.
So there's some things that leaders can do to make sure that that happens, that those trusting relationships are taking place. And it begins with having those kinds of moments when you gather people together that are more about building community. So are you taking time for icebreakers and trust builders and team-building activities? Whether you're meeting virtually or in person, do you have the space for people to come together and collaborate and experience each other in positive ways where they're working on tasks together? And if you don't have that, it's going to be hard to build those trusting connections.
Bill Klaproth: So trust is a great word to use as you work on cultivating that healthy work environment. But there's gotta be a bottomline component to this as well, Ed. If you have a very trusting workforce that is connecting and happy and collaborating and respectful, that's going to translate to your customers and your business as well, elevating the whole business. Is that right?
Ed Jackson: That is correct. I think the first thought that we have to have is if we want our customers to be treated well, we have to treat our employees well. And it begins with engaging them with care and trust and listening to them and communicating clearly with them and then empowering them. The second E in our framework is empowerment, where we really focus on creating a collaborative space for the vision of the organization to come to life. And I think that's really important. It moves people in the same direction and it can be a very powerful way to influence those in your organization to commit to the organizational goals.
Bill Klaproth: I love that line you just said. If we want our customers to be treated well, we have to treat our employees well. That really sums up a lot of this, which is really good. So is another question to ask or another metric to look at, does the organization have a unifying set of principles when it comes to leadership? What would you say to that?
Ed Jackson: I think that's really important. And I share a story from long ago, back in my service in the United States Marine Corps. I share it from the stage and in my book. And it was amazing to me how much of the leadership came from just completely different orientations. There was clearly no unifying code of leadership or method of leadership that was relied upon, but you knew great leadership when you experienced it. And I think that's true in many of the organizations I've had the privilege to be a part of. The best organizations I've been a part of really seem to have a unifying theme, whether it was transformational leadership, whatever the case may be. There are so many great books on leadership out there. It really is incumbent upon an organization, I think, to spell out what it is we stand for from our leaders, what we want for them, what we hope for our employees, what we want that experience to be. And if you don't have that spelled out clearly, you're going to have people working at a lot of different directions. It could be working at cross purposes.
Bill Klaproth: So Ed, what if you're a leader that doesn't naturally have a lot of empathy or doesn't have these types of skills built in where you really are interested in listening, as you said earlier, someone who feels heard, feels valued -- What if you're a bad listener, you have no empathy, and you're just one of these pile driver bosses, work, work, work, get things done. "I don't care about you. Get things done." What do you do in those situations?
Ed Jackson: It's all about organizational development and training your leaders. One of the CEOs that I interviewed out in California, CEO of a tech firm, he mentioned that he had a young engineer who was verbally mistreating some of the people who reported to him. And they realized when they called him in to talk to them about it and let him know that it violates our culture, a culture where we treat each other with respect, they realized in just talking with him that he didn't have a background in leadership. He had a background in engineering and they put him in a position where he wasn't set up to succeed, so they got him some additional training in leadership.
I believe it's like all skills, we can learn. We may not be naturally empathetic. We may not be naturally good listeners, but these are skills that you learn and you learn the value in delivering these skills. Not only does it help create conditions for optimal well-being of employees, but it creates conditions for maximum organizational success when your employees feel listened to, when they feel like people care about them. And so if you have leaders that are doing that, you really have a responsibility to get them the training that they need and make sure that you're putting forth in your company leaders who have a pro-social orientation who understand the value of that.
Bill Klaproth: Another good word, pro-social orientation. I love that. So Ed, in your journey working with a ton of businesses across this country, you must see a lot of things we're doing wrong or things we could do better. What's the number one mistake we're making, if I can phrase it that way? What do we need to do a better job at in our business organizations across this country?
Ed Jackson: Yeah. You know, I really believe it begins with considering everyone in the organization. I recently visited an organization and spoke with all of the division leaders about what is one thing the organization should work on to develop more effective patterns. Every single one of them mentioned communication. When communication is dysfunctional across the organization, it's really hard to create any sense of who you are or what the culture is, what we stand for, what our vision is. Because if you're not communicating that clearly, people aren't hearing it clearly. And when people don't have a clear understanding of what direction you want them to go in, they're going to be moving in directions that are going to create these great disfluencies within an organization that just exacerbate existing issues that might be out there and create deeper dynamics. If you've ever looked at the results of a communication audit, it can be really surprising how much just simply improving the communication in the organization can create pathways to do better things, to communicate that you care, to communicate the vision, to communicate the message that you want people to continue to grow their expertise and learn.
Bill Klaproth: Dysfunctional communication. So if there's one thing you could work on right away is among the other things that we've been talking about today is work on improving communication. Would that be correct?
Ed Jackson: Absolutely. Because clear communication allows you to address engagement, empowerment, and building expertise. And without it, you can't be certain that you're communicating anything that people are hearing.
Bill Klaproth: Ed, this has really been fascinating. I could talk about this all day long. But as we wrap up, is there anything else you want to add? What other important point should we all remember or take away from this conversation or from your work?
Ed Jackson: Well, I think the important point that stuck with me when I was doing the research and my partner-- -- Dr. Bartels out in California and I -- when we completed our research and we published our dissertation, we both agreed that this is too important to sit on a shelf for academics only, and it really needed to be shared with everyone. The information about how meaning impacts our ability to manage stress, and then from stress, how many physical conditions are related to that and how many ailments across this country are just related to stress that people feel related to their work. We have to do a better job and meaning-centered leadership really I think takes the research on that topic and puts it in the hands of practitioners so they can understand how do I improve the quality of life? How do I try and optimize the well-being for my employees? So they can be the best they can be and our organization can be its best because of that impact.
Bill Klaproth: How do I optimize the well-being of my employees? That's a great question asked and every leader should probably have that question front and center every day. How do I optimize the well-being of my workforce? And you said there's a physical component to this too. Think of the stress. And we all have worked for somebody that probably wasn't a great boss or had poor communications or some of the things we were talking about today and how stressful that is. When you walk home, "Oh, my God. What a day today," right? That's just stress. So there is a physical component to this as well. Is that right?
Ed Jackson: Right. And the important part in the research, it clearly states that when people find meaning in their work, they're happier, healthier, more productive and three times as likely to stay in their organization. But more importantly, they take that home with them. It impacts the rest of their life. So if you're taking home a terrible day, it's impacting your family, your community, your friendships, so that's an important consideration.
Bill Klaproth: Absolutely. It's like it's cyclical, right? If you go home and treat your family in a poor way, that leads to them treating other people in a bad way. I mean, if we get this right in the office, we can really improve the quality of life for many, many people.
Ed Jackson: One hundred percent.
Bill Klaproth: This has been great, Ed. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and sharing your expertise and knowledge. We really appreciate this. Thanks again.
Ed Jackson: Thank you.
Bill Klaproth: And once again that's Ed Jackson, co-founder of Meaning-Centered Leadership. The ASHRM podcast was made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashrm.org/membership, and ASHRM is A-S-H-R-M, to learn more and to become an ASHRM member. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. I'm Bill Klaproth. Thanks for listening.
Bill Klaproth: Welcome to the ASHRM podcast made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ASHRM, that's A-S-H-R-M, ashrm.org/membership to learn more and to become an ASHRM member. I'm Bill Klaproth.
So what is meaning-centered leadership and what kind of an impact can that have on your employees and your organizational success and what are the skills and strategies for increased employee well-being? And how can all of this have a profound and dramatic impact on the quality of yours and your employees' lives? Well, let's find out with Ed Jackson, Co-founder of Meaning-Centered Leadership.
Ed, thank you so much for your time. It is great to talk with you on such an interesting topic. I love talking about management techniques and how we can better the lives of our workforce. So, let me ask you this first, what proactive steps can organizations take to improve employee well-being?
Ed Jackson: Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about the meaning-centered message with you. The first proactive step every organization needs to take is a focus on deeply engaging with their employees and empowering them, building their expertise. Those are the three critical components that employees need to find purpose and significance in their work.
Bill Klaproth: So when you say deeply engaging with your employees, can you give us an example of that?
Ed Jackson: Absolutely. Deep engagement really comes from building trust, creating trusting relationships throughout the organization, establishing care and concern, establishing yourself as an organization that has normative expectations for caring throughout the organization and open communication and active listening, communicating clearly with people what's going on and listening to them. When people are listened to, they feel valued, they feel cared about, and they begin to develop trust. And it's those relationships that create that first marker of meaning that people need in their work.
Bill Klaproth: Okay. So then, how do I know what the level of meaning is in my organization? How can I determine that and the level of meaning I'm creating with my team? How do I do kind of an organizational audit of that?
Ed Jackson: I think in terms of data, quite often qualitative, quantitative. How do you assess that? And one way to assess that is the general affect of the people you're working with. I had a visit years ago when I was running a public-private organization. The private visitors from the corporate side came in and they were really impressed with all the smiles they saw on the faces of the people in the building. And I think that's the kind of evidence you need to know that people are connecting. They're happy. They're having good time in their work, that you're seeing collaborative efforts from people, that you're seeing people work together and treat each other respectfully. That's really great empirical evidence to help you understand how the culture of your organization is impacted by what individuals are doing. We have some assessment tools that we use with the organizations to help them really identify "What am I working on? What are the skills that I need to focus on to deepen that meaning?" And we also have a 360 tool that leaders can use to get feedback from a multi-rater audience to really clearly understand how their leadership is perceived and how it's impacting individuals they're working with.
Bill Klaproth: Right. I should look to see if my employees are connecting with each other. Are they happy? Are they collaborating? Is there a respectful environment? Those are some of the things we can just initially look at. And then, if any of those are lacking and I go, "Oh boy, this doesn't look good. I'm not seeing any of these things that Ed talked about. I need to work on becoming a better meaning-centered leader." What's the first step I should take?
Ed Jackson: Well, I think it would start with examining trust in the organization, that to me is the bottomline. Without trust in the organization, the organization is not going to make inroads. The number one thing in our research, we surveyed followers, we interviewed leaders, exemplary leaders, and the number one thing the employees mentioned that they need was a leader who creates an atmosphere where trusting relationships can flourish.
So there's some things that leaders can do to make sure that that happens, that those trusting relationships are taking place. And it begins with having those kinds of moments when you gather people together that are more about building community. So are you taking time for icebreakers and trust builders and team-building activities? Whether you're meeting virtually or in person, do you have the space for people to come together and collaborate and experience each other in positive ways where they're working on tasks together? And if you don't have that, it's going to be hard to build those trusting connections.
Bill Klaproth: So trust is a great word to use as you work on cultivating that healthy work environment. But there's gotta be a bottomline component to this as well, Ed. If you have a very trusting workforce that is connecting and happy and collaborating and respectful, that's going to translate to your customers and your business as well, elevating the whole business. Is that right?
Ed Jackson: That is correct. I think the first thought that we have to have is if we want our customers to be treated well, we have to treat our employees well. And it begins with engaging them with care and trust and listening to them and communicating clearly with them and then empowering them. The second E in our framework is empowerment, where we really focus on creating a collaborative space for the vision of the organization to come to life. And I think that's really important. It moves people in the same direction and it can be a very powerful way to influence those in your organization to commit to the organizational goals.
Bill Klaproth: I love that line you just said. If we want our customers to be treated well, we have to treat our employees well. That really sums up a lot of this, which is really good. So is another question to ask or another metric to look at, does the organization have a unifying set of principles when it comes to leadership? What would you say to that?
Ed Jackson: I think that's really important. And I share a story from long ago, back in my service in the United States Marine Corps. I share it from the stage and in my book. And it was amazing to me how much of the leadership came from just completely different orientations. There was clearly no unifying code of leadership or method of leadership that was relied upon, but you knew great leadership when you experienced it. And I think that's true in many of the organizations I've had the privilege to be a part of. The best organizations I've been a part of really seem to have a unifying theme, whether it was transformational leadership, whatever the case may be. There are so many great books on leadership out there. It really is incumbent upon an organization, I think, to spell out what it is we stand for from our leaders, what we want for them, what we hope for our employees, what we want that experience to be. And if you don't have that spelled out clearly, you're going to have people working at a lot of different directions. It could be working at cross purposes.
Bill Klaproth: So Ed, what if you're a leader that doesn't naturally have a lot of empathy or doesn't have these types of skills built in where you really are interested in listening, as you said earlier, someone who feels heard, feels valued -- What if you're a bad listener, you have no empathy, and you're just one of these pile driver bosses, work, work, work, get things done. "I don't care about you. Get things done." What do you do in those situations?
Ed Jackson: It's all about organizational development and training your leaders. One of the CEOs that I interviewed out in California, CEO of a tech firm, he mentioned that he had a young engineer who was verbally mistreating some of the people who reported to him. And they realized when they called him in to talk to them about it and let him know that it violates our culture, a culture where we treat each other with respect, they realized in just talking with him that he didn't have a background in leadership. He had a background in engineering and they put him in a position where he wasn't set up to succeed, so they got him some additional training in leadership.
I believe it's like all skills, we can learn. We may not be naturally empathetic. We may not be naturally good listeners, but these are skills that you learn and you learn the value in delivering these skills. Not only does it help create conditions for optimal well-being of employees, but it creates conditions for maximum organizational success when your employees feel listened to, when they feel like people care about them. And so if you have leaders that are doing that, you really have a responsibility to get them the training that they need and make sure that you're putting forth in your company leaders who have a pro-social orientation who understand the value of that.
Bill Klaproth: Another good word, pro-social orientation. I love that. So Ed, in your journey working with a ton of businesses across this country, you must see a lot of things we're doing wrong or things we could do better. What's the number one mistake we're making, if I can phrase it that way? What do we need to do a better job at in our business organizations across this country?
Ed Jackson: Yeah. You know, I really believe it begins with considering everyone in the organization. I recently visited an organization and spoke with all of the division leaders about what is one thing the organization should work on to develop more effective patterns. Every single one of them mentioned communication. When communication is dysfunctional across the organization, it's really hard to create any sense of who you are or what the culture is, what we stand for, what our vision is. Because if you're not communicating that clearly, people aren't hearing it clearly. And when people don't have a clear understanding of what direction you want them to go in, they're going to be moving in directions that are going to create these great disfluencies within an organization that just exacerbate existing issues that might be out there and create deeper dynamics. If you've ever looked at the results of a communication audit, it can be really surprising how much just simply improving the communication in the organization can create pathways to do better things, to communicate that you care, to communicate the vision, to communicate the message that you want people to continue to grow their expertise and learn.
Bill Klaproth: Dysfunctional communication. So if there's one thing you could work on right away is among the other things that we've been talking about today is work on improving communication. Would that be correct?
Ed Jackson: Absolutely. Because clear communication allows you to address engagement, empowerment, and building expertise. And without it, you can't be certain that you're communicating anything that people are hearing.
Bill Klaproth: Ed, this has really been fascinating. I could talk about this all day long. But as we wrap up, is there anything else you want to add? What other important point should we all remember or take away from this conversation or from your work?
Ed Jackson: Well, I think the important point that stuck with me when I was doing the research and my partner-- -- Dr. Bartels out in California and I -- when we completed our research and we published our dissertation, we both agreed that this is too important to sit on a shelf for academics only, and it really needed to be shared with everyone. The information about how meaning impacts our ability to manage stress, and then from stress, how many physical conditions are related to that and how many ailments across this country are just related to stress that people feel related to their work. We have to do a better job and meaning-centered leadership really I think takes the research on that topic and puts it in the hands of practitioners so they can understand how do I improve the quality of life? How do I try and optimize the well-being for my employees? So they can be the best they can be and our organization can be its best because of that impact.
Bill Klaproth: How do I optimize the well-being of my employees? That's a great question asked and every leader should probably have that question front and center every day. How do I optimize the well-being of my workforce? And you said there's a physical component to this too. Think of the stress. And we all have worked for somebody that probably wasn't a great boss or had poor communications or some of the things we were talking about today and how stressful that is. When you walk home, "Oh, my God. What a day today," right? That's just stress. So there is a physical component to this as well. Is that right?
Ed Jackson: Right. And the important part in the research, it clearly states that when people find meaning in their work, they're happier, healthier, more productive and three times as likely to stay in their organization. But more importantly, they take that home with them. It impacts the rest of their life. So if you're taking home a terrible day, it's impacting your family, your community, your friendships, so that's an important consideration.
Bill Klaproth: Absolutely. It's like it's cyclical, right? If you go home and treat your family in a poor way, that leads to them treating other people in a bad way. I mean, if we get this right in the office, we can really improve the quality of life for many, many people.
Ed Jackson: One hundred percent.
Bill Klaproth: This has been great, Ed. Thank you so much for spending some time with us and sharing your expertise and knowledge. We really appreciate this. Thanks again.
Ed Jackson: Thank you.
Bill Klaproth: And once again that's Ed Jackson, co-founder of Meaning-Centered Leadership. The ASHRM podcast was made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashrm.org/membership, and ASHRM is A-S-H-R-M, to learn more and to become an ASHRM member. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out the full podcast library for topics of interest to you. I'm Bill Klaproth. Thanks for listening.