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The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams

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The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams

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When you dance on the edge of infinity, there’s always enough … because you aren’t taking opportunity from anyone else, you’re creating it.

Each of us can show up in our own way, but the choice is the same: to lead, to create work that matters, and to find the magic that happens when we are lucky enough to cocreate with people who care.

We can create the best job someone ever had, the best experience any customer can imagine—and build organizations that are regenerative, resilient, and powerful.

The top four items (people could choose more than one answer) overwhelmingly came out ahead: I surprised myself with what I could accomplish I could work independently The team built something important People treated me with respect

What if we created the best job someone ever had? What if we built an organization people would genuinely miss if it were gone? How much better would our work be if we could simply talk about the work without hesitation? What if the work we did made things better?

If you’re not drowning, you’re a lifeguard.

When people feel disrespected, unseen, or unsafe, they can shut down, phoning in the work and doing as little as possible, hoping to simply hold on to their job—at least until a better one comes along.

Until our existential needs are met, it’s difficult to produce the emotional labor needed for progress and possibility.

Give up your dreams and your soul, we promise each other, and you can buy some things that will give you status and satisfaction. Or at least let you forget what you gave up. While that promise may have worked well half a century ago, it rings hollow today. There is an alternative. It’s a different sort of increase, a better sort of safety. It’s work that matters. It’s creating a difference, being part of something, and doing work we’re proud of. This is the song of significance. This is what motivates people to do the work that can’t be automated, mechanized, or outsourced. And this is the song that humans yearn to sing together.

Agency gives us control over our time, and it encourages us to choose what our contribution looks like. Because it demands responsibility and some authority, agency is antithetical to controlled industrial piecework. Dignity flows from agency, allowing us to be treated as humans, not cogs. To be respected for our work and treated with as much kindness as the situation allows.

As each machine was developed, displaced workers were encouraged to increase their education and move up to jobs that the machines hadn’t taken over yet. As of 2023, those machine-done jobs include robots working in hotels, algorithms doing stock trades, and machine learning systems sketching illustrations and reading X-rays. What companies need has shifted, and suddenly. Instead of cheap labor to do the semiautomated tasks that machines can’t do (yet), organizations now seek two apparently scarce resources: creativity and humanity. Both skills involve dealing with other humans, creating strategies, and finding insights in a fast-moving world.

Industrial capitalism (industrialism) seeks to use power to create profits. Market capitalism seeks to solve problems to make a profit.

Market capitalism, meanwhile, continues to create most of the jobs and value worldwide. This is the never-ending work of finding problems and solving them. Market capitalists have no power over customers (or even, in most cases, their employees). Instead, they work to bring effort and insight to a rapidly changing marketplace in service of their customers.

Together, we can make something better. Something worth our time, our effort, and our imagination.

The work of significance embraces the very things that industrialism seeks to stamp out. Significance is inconvenient. We’ve built powerful tools. Tools for communication, production, and amplification. Tools that allow humans to leverage their insights and care to produce value for others. And now those tools are there for us to use to make things better. If we choose to.

We need to decide what work is for. Whether we want to spend our days creating scarcity and harm, or if we want to commit to the regenerative work of building the best job any worker has ever had, and the best organization any customer has ever encountered.

No grades, no check marks, no badges. I’m not in charge of you, and I’m not manipulating you. I’m simply establishing the conditions for you to get to where you said you wanted to go. You tell me where you’re going and what you need. You make promises about your commitment and skills development. I’ll show up to illuminate, question, answer, spar with, and challenge you. I’ll work tirelessly to make sure you’re part of a team of people who are ready to care as much as you do. We can get real. Or let’s not play.

Real value is no longer created by traditional measures of productivity. It’s created by personal interactions, innovation, creative solutions, resilience, and the power of speed.

The opportunity for all of us lies in the emotional labor invested by enrolled and committed employees who seek to make a difference—that is the competitive advantage that extraordinary organizations produce.

  1. Significant Organizations Create an Impact They earn more money. Attract better employees. Change more lives. Raise more donations. Offer better work environments. And the only thing you need to create that impact is to give up merely doing your job and start leading instead. More isn’t the point. Better is.
  1. Toward Better There’s no need to be a victim of a system that has outlived its usefulness. Instead, right here and right now, you have a chance to lead. To create the conditions for change. To enroll people in a journey that creates connections, dignity, and possibility. Leadership is a skill and an art, and it can be learned. We can lead together.

But teams doing significant work can create a culture where clarity, professionalism, and enrollment open the door to possibility. Forward motion is the way to significance. Significance requires trust, and trust comes from consistently keeping our promises.

Creating the conditions for significance isn’t easy. If it were, we would all be doing it already.

By helping his clients ask “how” and “what” in their conversations, he helps teams find a way forward. These two words help us discover what other people are seeking and how we can accompany them in getting to where they seek to go. “How do you feel about this client?” or “What led you to want to do it this way?” are great places to begin. Connection comes from the mutual understanding that these conversations can uncover.

The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their story and narrative. Wonder is the open-ended version of curiosity, without seeking an explanation to solve the problem. Process and principles don’t require a specific plan. We can’t plan a basketball game in advance. If we focus on culture and process, however, we can enable the players to achieve their goals regardless of how the game unfolds.

Engineers, surgeons, and race car drivers do easily measured work. They are able to focus on executing along proven paths. The rest of us, though, need to engage in useful discussions about what might be.

The midcentury consumer revolution was easy: make it cheap and convenient and you’ll do fine. When the internet was in its infancy, smart observers understood that useful decisions could be easily arrived at if we asked the question “What does the internet want?” Not the people who are using the internet, but the network itself. What does it thrive on? If you offered more person-to-person connection, more bandwidth, or more selection—the things that the internet itself was good at—you were likely to succeed regardless of anything else you did. The network effect was a symptom of understanding how this new technology was revolutionizing whatever it touched. Kevin Kelly helped us understand that asking what technology wants is a useful North Star, a compass for riding with the current instead of fighting it.

The earth is your customer, and many people will be aligned with you as you serve it.

And the lesson of this manifesto is simple: An organization of any size can effectively move forward by asking, “What do humans need?” What will create significance for those who interact with us?

We’re not here to fill self-storage units or simply gain market share. Instead, we’re asking what our people need. What is the change we seek to make? Does it matter to the people we work with?

What each revolution has in common is that it is inconvenient. It was inconvenient for an industrialist to embrace the internet in 1998, for a nonprofit to shift gears and become sustainable, and for a successful corporation to embrace significance. It’s rare that it happens quickly or easily, which is precisely why these changes are revolutionary. The revolutions begin at the edges but ultimately end up changing whatever they interact with.

Customers respond well to a generic, predictable, and convenient service. We like Big Macs and Prime shipping. Fast service and low prices come at a cost, though.

“Ultimately, for the business, these tools are about really helping their employees thrive,” Nadella said. “The only way a business is successful and productive is if employees feel that sense of empowerment, that sense of energy and connection for the company’s mission and are doing meaningful work.”

The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. Ben Zander, Boston Philharmonic

When we consider the four kinds of work, we can lay them out in a two-by-two grid with stakes and trust as the two axes.

The planet does not need more successful people, but it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. David Orr

People respond to score-based systems, especially systems with rewards and even prizes. Fast-forward a century, though, and we can see the results of de La Salle’s innovation. A friend’s kid came home from first grade and proudly showed his mom the cheap plastic trinkets he had earned that day. “I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quietly tomorrow, I can get some more prizes!” First grade. Stand quietly and get a toy. That’s one way to indoctrinate kids in both obedience and consumption. This is precisely what industrialism seeks.

Gamification is simply a codification and amplification of the motivations that we each respond to once we are enrolled in a game. Training for the industrial regime of control and short-term productivity. As Adrian Hon points out in You’ve Been Played, it’s all gamification now. The real argument to be had is the difference between good and bad gamification, between useful and manipulative, between magical and banal.

Sooner or later, all motivation is self-motivation. Either the points become part of who we are or we cease responding to them. And when we cease responding, the external forces seeking more power will simply amp up the points.

Plato argued that the State should be sure to indoctrinate children early, and never let them develop imagination. “Being different, they’ll demand a different kind of life, and that will then make them want new institutions.” How many followers do you have online? How much can you fit in? Here’s today’s dot, go stand on it.

As soon as an industrial system can monitor your day, it will. Relentlessly.

The people you hire to follow instructions are rarely the people who will help you build something of innovation and substance.

But when we start squeezing people, sometimes they speak up or walk away. The world has changed. Employees have more information about alternatives, respect, and wages. You can’t torture them in private as easily as you can push a machine to its breaking point. That information also highlights opportunities for individuals who are able to contribute more human insight and possibility somewhere else. Remote work makes this even easier, since the number of places to contribute without leaving home is close to infinite. And finally, as a result of scale and information exchange, nearly all the benefits of maximizing inputs from nonhumans have been exhausted. It’s easy to find parity with your competitors when you’re all outsourcing to the same producers. The result is a real shift in how we need the people we work with to act: like humans, not like obedient machines.

  1. Kinko and Sleepy There’s an alternative to the top-down regime of compliance. When Paul Orfalea was building Kinko’s (which he sold to FedEx for more than two billion dollars), he said that his best technique for growing the business was simple: he would walk into one of their stores and ask someone there to tell him about an innovation they’d implemented that was working (and then he’d tell all the other stores about it). If you didn’t have an innovation to share, Paul let you know you needed to do better. When Harry Acker was building Sleepy’s (which his son sold to Mattress Firm for nearly a billion dollars), his best technique for growing the business was to call every store every day and ask, “What’s wrong?” and then fix the problem. The store manager who told me this story made it clear that if you didn’t have a problem to share, you were in trouble. Two sides of the same coin. It’s possible your team knows what’s up.

This Time, with Meaning Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. kathrin jansen

Management runs a race to the bottom; leadership offers a chance to run for the top.

The manager seeks compliance. A manager makes a profit delivering industrial progress and productivity, which is done by doing what we did yesterday a little faster and a little cheaper. The leader seeks to create the conditions for people to make a change happen. Leaders don’t need authority, but they must coordinate the trust, focus, and connection of people who are enrolled in a journey to do work that matters. It’s tempting to want the easiest and best outputs of both. To promise people dignity and connection and excitement, and then use discipline to get them to do what you want. But that’s not working as well as it once did.

It’s time to change this. We can create value, cause change, and make a difference by leading with humans instead of treating them as cogs in a soulless machine.

In 1909, a gusher in Texas ushered in a century of cheap oil, fuel that could be burned to create power and wealth. In 1911, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, a manifesto that envisioned humans as machines, compliant devices that could be made ever more efficient. And in 1911, Taylor met Henry Ford as he was building the Model T plant in Highland Park, Michigan. Human resources was born. Cheap oil plus leveraged machines plus obedient humans created enormous profit and we got hooked.

This is what happens when you race to the bottom. It requires that you see humans as resources, not as people, and that the factory (in whatever form) use that resource for maximum short-term efficiency.

  1. How Do I Get People to Do What I Want? Perhaps the better question is: How do I create the conditions for other people to do work that matters? Management is the practice of using power and authority to get what we want. To get the burgers flipped, the packages delivered, the phones answered. Leadership is the art of creating something significant.

The leader understands that a commitment to significance is a generous act, but it also brings apparent risk and real fear to everyone involved. Fear that’s wily and subtle, clever and persistent. When we embrace the mutual commitments of significance, we create the conditions for a shared understanding that our work, our actual work, is to dance with the fear. And dancing with fear requires significance, tension, and the belief that we’re doing something that matters.

  1. Searching for Kokoro Like most important words, translating a concept like the Japanese term kokoro is difficult. It means heart, spirit, mind, and self. It’s the inner and outer expression of who we are and what we’re capable of. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, the word is likely to resonate. It’s an expression of our personhood, the dignity and connection we seek in the things we do and the way we’re understood. To be able to find kokoro in the way we spend our days is magical, and to give someone the opportunity to bring their self to work is generous and powerful. In this moment, kokoro isn’t simply what we want. It’s also what our organizations need.

Rising Tide doesn’t exist to wash cars. Washing cars is merely an opportunity to make a difference for their employees and their customers. Rising Tide spends far more time and energy on training, on customer service, and on their employees than any other car wash I know of. And as a result, the customers return and the business thrives. Their retention is five times the industry average, and each location washes more cars and makes more money than most of its (industrial) competitors.

The people on the front lines are people. They are your brand. And they are the point.

Service, for me, for us, is not a transactional act. It’s not a trick we undertake to get people to give us their money. Yes, of course, great service has strategic value. Every day we go out with the belief that we need to re-earn our customer’s trust and make it worthwhile for people to want to spend time and money with us. But really, service is a way of being in the world. Ari Weinzweig, cofounder, Zingermans

Find the nerds, the motivated, and the overlooked, and figure out what they need to thrive. That exploration will reveal what others have needed as well but didn’t care enough to speak up about. When Rising Tide optimizes the workflow for autistic employees, they help their neurotypical employees thrive as well. When d.light builds a product for some of the poorest families in the world, they get better at serving people who are more privileged. When By the Way Bakery focuses on people who don’t eat wheat or dairy, they end up building a kitchen and production operation that is more accessible and appealing to all of their customers.

Part of the challenge of leading a significant organization is getting clear about the right proxies.

Significant work requires us to make commitments and to keep them. To create change. To explore the liminal space on our way from here to there. This is difficult, and when the song of safety is hard to hear, it can be challenging to move forward.

Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s a willingness to do things that are so important they’re worth doing even (especially) when we’re feeling the fear. Vulnerability in conversation is the power of speaking about what you see and believe, even when you’re afraid. This is the opposite of weakness.

  1. Fear Is Easy Fear is an easy tool, but it rarely builds a resilient organization. That’s because fear is most useful as a tool for compliance: “The best way to avoid being fired is to do what I say.” All the boss needs to do is fire a few people to make that really clear. The problem is that doing what the boss says doesn’t scale very well, and it doesn’t work in a complex, fast-changing world. All of us are smarter than any of us. In any field where skills are valuable and switching jobs is possible, the employees you need the most have options. That’s why creating a culture of fear and compliance is a dead end. Great work creates more value than compliant work.

The decision becomes much easier when we realize that leaders aren’t managers with a fancy title. Leaders are planting the seeds for generations of impact to come, regardless of whether those people work for your organization or another one. What happens in that conference room today will change the people who were there. Or it won’t. It depends on who called the meeting.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that humans have three ways to spend their time. The labor required to feed ourselves and survive. The work of doing a craft that we are proud of. And the action of organization and possibility.

Milton Friedman argued that every organization must be profit-centric. That its only job is to maximize shareholder value. Others have argued that it’s possible to be customer-centric, using customer service as a proxy for profits. By delighting customers, they contend, we make it more likely that we’ll increase profits. The hustle behind this is revealed when some companies trade customer delight for short-term profit as soon as they hit a certain size. Significant organizations are team-centric. Their goal is to make a change happen, and to do that with and for a group of people who care about making an impact. That’s why the smallest viable audience is the engine of marketing in our modern world, and why enrollment from the team is so much more valuable than being a convenient place to work.

We can reclaim our nature, human nature, and seek to reconnect and to make things better.

Enrollment, mutual connection, federation, recognized dignity, and the journey of increase: together these create the conditions for a powerful, resilient way forward. And yet we fail to see that creating these conditions is up to us, and that if we fall short in prioritizing this work, we will ultimately revert to top-down management and the cynical low expectations it brings with it.

We’ve reached a point where we’re shifting from How do I get my employees to do what I want? to How do I create the conditions where the team can make the impact it desires?

  1. What People Want Safety is first. It’s impossible to grow, to connect, or to lead if we are under threat or feel the ground shifting beneath us. Next come affiliation and status, an alternating dance of vaguely related emotions. Affiliation is being part of something, fitting in, being connected. And status is simply who eats lunch first. Our place in the order of things. But the real desire is significance. To do something that matters. To be missed if we’re gone. The universal desire to achieve dignity and be seen.

When confronting the possibility of change, tension arises. Tension is the feeling of wanting to be in two places at once. Often that’s the place of safety, where we know everything will be as it was, versus the place of significance, where we can increase our affiliation and increase or maintain our status. Tension is not something to avoid. You can’t walk outside on a sunny day without casting a shadow, and you cannot create significance without encountering tension. The partner of tension is enrollment. The desire to be right here, right now. Voluntary enlistment in the cause, not for money but for emotional and cultural benefit.

Money doesn’t motivate us enough to create the magic a team needs. That sort of work comes from intrinsic, not extrinsic forces.

Cookie cutters are great for cookies, not for people.

It’s our boat, not my boat. If we come together and hold hands and support each other, we’ll be much stronger. Todd Labrador, master canoe builder

Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, reminds us, “There is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking.”

If anything but HERE is seen as incorrect, dangerous, or momentary, it’s difficult to build an organization set on significance. Because significant organizations spend most of their time and energy not being where they were yesterday. In fact, the uncertainty and dislocation are the point, not a temporary inconvenience.

A significant job requires us to be in two places at once. Our work is to acknowledge the present situation while working hard to change the circumstances and status of those we serve.

“Everything will be okay once we get through this” is a common enough sentiment. But perhaps it’s more useful to remind ourselves “everything is okay now.” If we define that liminal state as normal, and normal as okay, well, here we are.

What are we asking folks to do? At Netflix, Reed Hastings didn’t ask each employee to reinvent how the entire film industry would work. Instead, he and his team broke the problem into many smaller components, and then different groups claimed responsibility for each piece. Each element of the project was insanely difficult, challenging the structure of a sclerotic industry, happily stuck in its ways, and also the laws of physics, the structure of the internet, and the giants of telecom. No one could have built the Netflix streaming system alone. But together, as you can see any night of the week, it was a doable project. The leader doesn’t have to be able to do every element of the project; they simply need to figure out how to assemble a team that does.

  1. Significant Work Is Project Work A job that is repetitive, easily measured, and consistent lends itself to industrialization. The pressure is on to make it cheap. But when we think of the important moments in our work life, we think of projects. A beginning, filled with possibility. A middle, with challenges and insights. And an ending, bittersweet, with thoughts of what we did and who we did it with, along with ideas on how to do it better next time. This can be treating a patient, putting a new dish on the menu, or launching a new company. The scale isn’t as important as the rhythm. We need the stability that day-to-day consistency can bring. But we find significance in the projects, large and small.

If the work can be queued up, processed in a cookie-cutter fashion, and inspected for defects, then it benefits from industrial management. But if the work involves novelty, innovation, discernment, judgment, or care, then industrial management is a poor substitute for enrollment, skill, and leadership. What sort of work do you need done? What we make isn’t widgets: we make decisions.

Take responsibility and give away credit.

Systems work is people work.

Bees aren’t self-organizing. They’re simply organized, aware of what the other bees are doing and each bee’s role in the journey of the hive. They have a culture of peer-to-peer awareness, not top-down authority. The same is true of all resilient, decentralized human organizations. It sounds obvious, but it’s rare, because it means giving up the feeling of control.

The water is a heavy substance, practically a solid mass. We use the water to leverage ourselves and our boat forward. We don’t change the lake that much. The lake responds to our effort by changing us.

It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us, but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. gabrielle zevin

A significant organization needs employees who are enrolled in the journey and willing to do this sort of work. In turn, employees who are willing to do this sort of work need an organization that won’t revert to an industrial management mindset, one without regard for the people who built it. The Catch-22 is obvious. You can’t have one without the other, but everyone hesitates to go first. Given that the number of people seeking to make a commitment is far greater than the number of organizations willing to enable those commitments, it seems to me that the organization needs to go first. To not only state the commitments, but to honor them when it’s difficult to do so. Especially then.

When we rebuild work around significance, we change the promise. We require bosses to produce a different set of rules, and we invite workers to bring different expectations, energy, and commitment to their jobs.

  1. The Significance Commitments We’re here to make change happen We are acting with intention Dignity is worth investing in Tension is not the same as stress Mistakes are the way forward Take responsibility, give credit Criticize the work, not the worker Turnover is okay Mutual respect is expected Do the reading Get to vs. have to Standards instead of obedience Show your work Make it better Celebrate real skills

there’s to be a new product, an announcement, or even a meeting, we must be clear about why.

Because change is the metric, we need to acknowledge the “who.” We cannot (and don’t even want to) change everyone, so “Who is it for?” is a question we’re comfortable asking. If we keep measuring the wrong things, we’ll keep getting the things we don’t want.

  1. We Are Acting with Intention Instead of “I’m just doing my job” or “Is this what the boss wants?,” we are committed to being intentional about our decisions, our metrics, and our interactions. Each meeting should last exactly as long as it takes to deliver on the intention of the meeting. And if a meeting doesn’t have an intention, it should be canceled. Behavior that harms the mission of the organization is likely to disappear if we’re required to announce our intentions.

More than a raise, people seek a place to belong. A place to see and be seen, to do their work in a way they’re proud of.

When people feel seen and are given the chance to make a difference, they often do. Supporting human dignity is more than a moral obligation. It’s also a competitive advantage.

  1. Tension Is Not the Same as Stress Stress is the unhappy feeling of wanting two things at the same time. To stay and to go. To speak up and to shrink back. To get this done and to get that done. When we’re stressed, our brains undermine our well-being and we’re unlikely to find flow, joy, or significance. But tension? Tension is the feeling that leads to forward motion. Tension is a symptom of Pressfield’s Resistance. Tension is a countdown, a deadline, or a budget. Tension is the process of finding an answer to a riddle or the question that opens up a possibility. We know how to relieve tension. We can do it with reassurance, time, and insulation. We can pamper our guests, ease up on our requirements, or settle for average. But tension always accompanies change, and change is the hallmark of significance. The tension is good. It’s a sign we’re onto something. And tension is a tool. We can use it to make change happen.

If you’re not doing things that don’t work, you’re not trying hard enough.

But the org chart is brittle. And it can create three problems: 1. People who are just doing their job might end up doing horrible things. When we ask employees to suspend their own judgment and simply do what the boss says, then we’re relying on one person with power to have control over others. 2. The deniability of “just following orders” isn’t always about committing a crime, though. It can be an airplane stranded on the runway for hours, with little attention paid to passengers, or a company that simply waits, quietly, for the manager to tell them what to do. 3. Centralized decision-making is usually slow and ineffective when it’s time to offer action and solutions to local, decentralized customer needs, particularly in fast-moving environments. If employees are unable to act without direction, they won’t act without direction.

And the companion to taking responsibility is relentlessly giving away credit. When we offer others a chance to shine, they’re more likely to connect, to enroll in the journey, and to join in the next chance they have to do so.

From the time we are toddlers, criticism is personalized. It takes patience and wisdom to separate the project in front of us from the person who created it, and the shortcut of personal attacks is far too common. As a result, we hesitate to ship the work, to respond to the work of others, and most of all, to seek out more feedback. Feedback feels like criticism, and criticism feels fatal. The thing is, feedback is a gift. Feedback transformed into generous and useful criticism is priceless. Organizations that understand how to improve the work without undermining the worker create more value.

But the feedback that actually matters is in the marketplace. If we make something that works for our customers, we get the chance to do it again.

And the same is true for the work of making change on behalf of others. Feedback—from the marketplace and from our coworkers—is the only way to get better. But useful feedback is not the same as personal criticism. We care about the change that’s produced, not who made the work.

If we’re already living in a gig culture, it’s productive to embrace it. We can say to our team, “Join us if it works for you, leave us when it doesn’t. And if you leave with more knowledge than when you came, it’s a symptom that we did well together.” Encouraging employees to keep their LinkedIn profiles and resumes up to date ensures that they are part of the team voluntarily, not because they believe they have no options.

  1. Mutual Respect Is Expected Respect is not the exception. It’s not reserved for high performers. It doesn’t get suspended when there’s a tough quarter or a shipping emergency. Bullies aren’t welcome because bullying is the killer of connection.

Significance is a choice. And it’s built on respect.

The opportunity of significant work is to set out because we can, not because we’re ordered to. To enroll in the journey and to eagerly take responsibility for what happens next.

We need consistent, measurable, external benchmarks of quality. We can establish expectations for our work and meet them. But that’s not the same as obedience. Obedience is personal, status-driven, and inconsistent. Obedience is an end unto itself, a way for the boss to ensure that the employees are doing everything they are told, regardless of whether it matters. When we do the work when the boss isn’t looking, we’re adhering to standards. But if our behavior changes when we’re under surveillance, that’s simply because we’ve been harassed into tolerating the performance of obedience. Obedience is about the passion or power of the manager. Standards revolve around the values of the institution.

Following your passion is a luxury. Following your values is a necessity. Passion is a fickle magnet: it pulls you toward your current interests. Values are a steady compass: they point you toward a future purpose. Passion brings immediate joy. Values provide lasting meaning. Adam Grant

At Automattic, the home of WordPress, founder Matt Mullenweg says that they have a “reading and writing” culture. A completely distributed workforce, very few meetings, and very little private 1:1 email. Instead, you’re expected to understand what has come before, to read the thread, to contribute to the written conversations, and to make decisions. In return, you get agency, respect, and significance.

Your opinion isn’t nearly as important as how you came to your decision. Your status in the hierarchy doesn’t matter if you can’t show us your work. By clearly stating our intentions, methods, and measurements, it may seem like we open ourselves up to criticism. Actually, we’re holding our work up for improvement, which couldn’t be more different. When your work improves, so does your reputation—and with it, your options and your status.

If you’re building something, why avoid the chance to build it better?

If you find a piece of litter, pick it up. Because you can.

What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work. Culture defeats strategy, every time. Measurable skills without productive attitudes aren’t worth much.

We know how to measure typing speed. We have a lot more trouble measuring passion or commitment. Organizations give feedback on vocational skill output daily and save the other stuff for the annual review, if they measure it at all.

If you’re wondering why the opportunities you seek aren’t materializing, it might be worth looking hard not at the skills that are easy to measure, but at the ones that are important to have.

Let’s Get Real New Skills for a New Way of Work You got the gift, but it looks like you’re waiting for something. the oracle

  1. Real Skills Are a Way Forward If an employee at your organization took home a brand-new laptop every day, you’d have them arrested or at least fired. If your bookkeeper were embezzling money every month, you’d do the same thing. But when an employee demoralizes the entire team by undermining a project, or when a team member checks out and doesn’t pull his weight, or when a bully causes future stars to quit the organization—too often we shrug and point out that this person has tenure, or key vocational skills, or really isn’t so bad. But they’re stealing from us. The “us” is the key word. Not from the boss, not from the company. From us, together. Once we agree to get real, then the work changes. It begins by celebrating, amplifying, and rewarding real skills as a standard for all.

Vocational skills can be taught: you’re not born knowing engineering or copywriting or even graphic design, therefore they must be something we can teach. But we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision-making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring, and being willing to change things. We underinvest in this training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught. Perhaps they’re talents. And so we downplay them, calling them soft skills, making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent. At scale, organizations pay less attention to soft skills when hiring because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure. If it’s easier to test for, it seems more important when selecting our team.

They’re interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. The skills of charisma and diligence and contribution. But these modifiers, while accurate, somehow edge them away from the vocational skills, the skills that we actually hire for, the skills we measure a graduate degree on. So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead. Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need today. Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down or program a computer to do. Real skills can’t replace vocational skills, of course. What they can do is amplify the things you’ve already been measuring. Imagine a team member with all the traditional vocational skills: productive, skilled, experienced. A resume that can prove it. That’s a fine baseline. Now add to it. Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring, and motivated. Generous, empathic, and consistent. A deep listener, with patience. What happens to your organization when someone like that joins your team?

Communicating with employees is uncomfortable because we’ve built systems of compliance and dominance that make it difficult. We ask people to leave their humanity at the door, then use authority to change behavior. We overlay corporate greed and short-term thinking on a human desire to create work that matters.

The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one another. Not to manage, belittle, intimidate, or control. Simply to seek to be understood, and to do the work to understand. Once people understand, they can join the journey or not. They can enroll or walk away. But first we should be clear about the work to be done, and how we will interact around it.

  1. The Power of a Confident Coach The coaching mindset, as author Michael Bungay Stanier points out, is one of mutual trust and direct communication. A confident coach doesn’t worry about losing a client, athlete, or student. They focus on serving them with clarity and encouragement. They create moments of discomfort in service of a lifetime of empowerment and possibility. An effective career coach has a tremendous advantage over most managers. That’s because their client’s engagement is voluntary. The client signed up for coaching, is paying for coaching, and is showing up because they want to accomplish something. This receptive posture is available to anyone who chooses to lead. The coach isn’t doing the work, the client is. It isn’t easy, but it’s simple. Enrollment in the process of development opens the door for change to happen. Companies like Shopify and Automattic have normalized coaching by making it part of the job. As long as the emotional enrollment is there, the trust will follow. We don’t need a coach as much as we need to want to be coached.

Telling people what to do is not the same as communicating together to build resilient, powerful systems.

A significant organization is aligned in culture and in goals, and the result is that all of us end up getting further and faster than any of us could on our own.

Our goal in making change with our work is to help our customers and coworkers become what they seek. This requires empathy. The empathy to realize that others don’t know what we know, want what we want, or see what we see. And the empathy to understand that the work we do isn’t for us, it’s for someone else.

When we listen, we enter into a relationship—an agreement that we bind ourselves to. In this relationship, we learn how to live in reciprocal respect with all that surrounds us, both the seen and the unseen. We must live in a state of active relationship, not only taking but also giving back. This giving back may take literal form or manifest itself in observing, learning, and gently interacting. If we listen, those stories are always available to us. All those around us—the plants, animals, trees, water, air—are our patient and willing teachers. We must remain open to this knowledge that is so willingly shared with us so long as we listen. Christine Luckasavitch, Algonquin and mixed settler educator

And one way we deal with our noise is in the words we choose to say (or don’t say). And one way that people deal with their noise is by how they choose to hear the words we say. We think we’re communicating, but we’re really not. Often, significant work requires us to develop more empathy than we might be comfortable with. Our understanding might not be their understanding.

Part of the work of getting real is to acknowledge that we’re dancing with humans, not writing computer code. If we can agree to be clear, specific, and kind in our language, we’re off to a good start. If we can go a step further and agree to give each person on our team the benefit of the doubt—and to ask for clarification when we’re confused—we’re much less likely to cause pain, confusion, or simply a disruption in our journey. Pilots developed very specific language to be used when talking to the control tower. It works at any airport, in any country, anywhere in the world. Agreeing to be clear is a fine place to start.

Helen wasn’t tough. She was reasonable. She made it clear to every single employee that they had an important job, and that the standards mattered. She explained her reasons and then persisted until the promise the organization was making was kept by every single person who worked there. Clarity, honesty, and direct feedback. If you couldn’t do that, or if you didn’t choose to do that, then you weren’t in the right place. Significant doesn’t have to mean soft or smiley. It’s work worth doing, clearly described. If we’re not reliable, what are we?

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. abraham lincoln

The three hurdles that a federated system can overcome are: Once an innovation involves more than a few elements, it gets complex. Complex problems seem intractable. Once a team has more than a few people on it, communication becomes difficult.

The modern alternative is to build multiple systems that interact with one another, since systems advance regardless of the actions of any single node in the network.

At Automattic they say that API stands for “assume positive intent.”

The open API lets us create a federation, an intentional system of mutual benefit that is far more resilient than a centrally controlled authority ever can be.

There are more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s in the United States. The reason is simple: Chinese restaurants are a federation, an open API instead of a centrally controlled institution. If you sign up for the culture and mission of a Chinese restaurant, you can start one, and no one can stop you.

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own! Number Six

A few decades ago, organizations stopped keeping the career promise. They stopped honoring the commitment and obedience of their employees, looted their pensions, and “downsized” people by the thousands. As a result, the illusion of a career has been revealed as a fraud. We might not like the endless job carousel that starts and stops, but it’s what we’ve got. Perhaps we can learn to love it.

Significant work involves tension, change, and the transitions of starting and finishing. What we’ve done will change what we do. What we do will change who we are. And the cycle continues. The challenge of leadership is helping people put that history to work in a positive way. There’s an old joke about a woman who goes to see a doctor. “You’ve got to help us, Doc. My husband thinks he’s a chicken.” The doctor asks how long it’s been going on. She says, “Three months.” “Why didn’t you come see me sooner?” “Because we needed the eggs.” Organizations have used surveillance to depersonalize and scale their organizations, claiming they need the eggs. And now they’re discovering it’s a dead end. If the cost is a lack of connection, not to mention the drama and tension that comes from a lack of cohesion, the eggs are rarely worth it. We’ve hurt people, and we can’t be surprised when they hurt others too.

At the state finals, the participants in the 100-meter hurdles know exactly how they’re doing. There’s a digital stopwatch and it never lies. But when we’re seeking change, when we’re inventing the future, we don’t have something easy to measure, so we naturally seek reassurance. The only desired answer to the rhetorical “How am I doing?” is GREAT! Which isn’t much help if you seek to do better. Not false proxies. Not personal attacks. Not a remedy for what ails you, or a chance to vent your feelings. Simply feedback that helps us move forward, please.

The conflict over labor has been going on since the first manager hired the first worker. The boss wants more effort and time for less money. The worker wants more money for their hard work.

This works fine until it doesn’t. Yes, it’s more efficient for forty people on the line to repetitively do a single task than it is for one person to take forty steps to build each part of a car. But if you make the slices thin enough, job satisfaction, insight, innovation, and yes, even customer satisfaction decrease. Patients get better when one caregiver is fully present. Customers are happier when one salesperson understands the big picture. Donors are happier when a single human engages with them. We’ve now built multipurpose AI systems that can take over many of the thin slices we’ve created. Value remains for humans when we make the slices thicker, more complete, and more remarkable.

I’d say, in a given week, I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work… . My only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired. Peter Gibbons

Consider that MBA applications are down as much as 25 percent at the most famous business schools. Where are these folks going instead? Why is a business degree so unattractive now? We need to offer people work worth doing. We need to find ways to create significance. What is the change we seek to make? Who would miss you if you were gone? What are you doing that is special? How do your unique skills and passions help this work go better? Does this work matter? Are you making choices that create an impact?

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Significance is where high trust meets high stakes. Significant work leads to impact and change.

There is, as in most things, a sweet spot. When the trust offered or the stakes involved are too low, it’s simply trivial. But if we’re way out on a limb, feeling insufficient, unsupported, and ready to fail, the trust and stakes might feel too high. On the hook, but not too much.

  1. A Word List

Pathfinding If we walk far enough, we shall sometime come to someplace. dorothy gale

Significant work can be timed, and of course, the time matters. But the stopwatch isn’t the point. We’re here to make a change happen.

If We Make Decisions … Then let’s acknowledge that decisions are far more important than tasks.

Show me your agenda for today, and I’ll show you what you value. If your team spends almost all of its time on chores with known solutions, then you’re probably in the stopwatch business. Find the cheapest, fastest, most reliable people (or computers) available, then put them on your assembly line.

But if we’re seeking to make change happen, then our job is to get from here to there. To find a path. To identify the next best thing to work on, describe an opportunity, and then make it real. If you’re a pathfinder, call it that, organize for it, and measure it.

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  1. Pivots and New Paths Starbucks didn’t used to sell beverages, only beans. Nintendo made playing cards. But why call this a pivot? It’s the point. All the great stories involve pivots. All the organizations we admire are doing something they didn’t plan to do when they began. They are pathfinders, not excuse-makers.

Meetings Are a Symptom Actions speak louder than meetings. lee clow

By this point in our rant, many managers are saying, “We’re doing pretty well at building a significant organization, under the circumstances.” But you’re not under the circumstances. You are the circumstances.

  1. Before the Digital Age, We Came Together In Person
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  1. Zoom, Wasted We no longer need to disrupt our schedule or our location to have a meeting. Zoom is a miraculous technology that allows us to ignore space if we choose. If you want to have a conversation with anyone on your team, if it’s worth syncing your calendars, here they are. While we’re at it, prerecorded video memos can effectively replace lectures. They can be rewatched, sped up, and transcribed as well. Free, fast, and easy. Meet with anyone, instantly, for three minutes or ten. Or send them your half of a video conversation, wherever they are. And yet … Instead of putting time and space to work to further our mutual goals, the traditional industrial management structure has taken the worst of both worlds. Ask your employees (I would say “team” but that ignores the real meaning of the word). Zoom meetings are often only meetings in the worst sense. Attendance is taken, someone lectures, a few people ask questions. Exactly thirty or sixty minutes later, people are excused. In most surveys, employees rank endless meetings as the worst part of working from home, and they don’t like them much more when they’re in the office. The reason is simple: no one likes being lectured, and they like it less when it’s in real time and masquerading as a conversation. The social dynamics of your meetings tell us an enormous amount about how your organization works.
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Thomas Seeley describes how this process works. It’s not meetings, it’s culture. We can learn three lessons that apply to our human, non-bee organizations: 1. The bees have clear intent and standards. Seeley’s research has shown that individual bees are likely to have very similar reactions to possible hive sites—one bee doesn’t need to visit every one of the hundreds of options for a consistent point of view to evolve. 2. One reason for discomfort and politics at work is that we often fail to be clear with one another about exactly what we’re seeking to accomplish because we’re afraid that our goals aren’t aligned. 3. For obvious logistical reasons, the bees have evolved to rely on peer-to-peer communication. Instead of one bee sending a memo to all the other bees, the word spreads horizontally. The fallacy of the MBA is that a brilliant memo presented via a PowerPoint is enough to make change happen. But culture beats strategy every time. In resilient organizations, culture drives transformation. In rigid ones, it inhibits it. If we care about the work, we’ll need to focus on the culture.

Zapier is a successful web software company with a distributed team. As an experiment, they suspended all regular meetings for a week. Instead of real-time 1:1 weekly check-ins or group meetings, they shifted to asynchronous reports, updates, and questions, giving each employee the time and freedom to get actual work done. And actual work got done. More than 80 percent of the team’s established written goals for that week were achieved. Here’s a quick summary from one of their leaders: Instead of my weekly 1:1, I consolidated questions for my manager and sent them to her in a direct message on Slack. Instead of a project check-in, all team members shared their updates in the relevant Asana task list. Instead of a one-off strategy call, stakeholders shared their thoughts (and comments) in a Coda doc. Instead of a project kickoff call, our project manager sent a Slack message that shared the project charter, timeline, and next steps.

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Beyond that, though, was the shift in culture. Instead of taking attendance (you need to be in front of your computer, at the appointed time, to be in a real-time meeting), they paid attention to contributions. Instead of rewarding a combination of obedience and sparkle, they amplified individuals who were able to pay attention to what needed to be done and then do it. If you were one of the many people who completed that week without meetings with a schedule you controlled and output you were proud of, would that be something you’d want to repeat? Would you want to be part of that culture of trust and connection? The truth is simple: The meeting culture was designed to exert control and to simulate a shortcut on the difficult path to actual connection. But most meetings aren’t very good, because no one ever put in…

  1. A Significant Meeting Is Different It happens in real time because it can only work in real time. It’s a conversation in which everyone listens and speaks. Only the people who need to be there are there. It leads to a decision, not the delivery of information. It creates energy, it doesn’t destroy it.
  1. Toward a Zoom Agreement If you promise not to check your email while we’re talking, we promise to not waste your time. If you agree to look me in the eye and try to absorb the gist of what I’m saying, I agree to be crisp, cogent, and on point. If you are clear about which meetings are a waste of time for you to attend, we can be sure to have them without you. If you can egg me on and bring enthusiasm to the interaction, I can lean into the work and reflect back even more energy than you’re contributing. The purpose of a meeting is not to fill the allocated slot on the Google Calendar invite. The purpose is to communicate an idea and the emotions that go with it, and to find out what’s missing via engaged conversation. If we can’t do that, let’s not meet. Multitasking (especially during meetings) isn’t productive, respectful, or healthy. Being present in real time is a waste unless we interact. Reaffirming your status and control isn’t worth an hour of my day.
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Creating a Significant Organization You don’t need more time. You simply need to decide.

  1. Management Is Not the Same as Leadership Management is the hard work of getting people who work for you to do what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. It requires authority—a hierarchy that gives the manager the power to insist. Leadership is voluntary. Voluntary to perform and voluntary to follow. It’s the work of imagining something that hasn’t happened before and inviting people to come along for the journey. Without voluntary enrollment, it’s not leadership, it’s only management.

Culture defeats strategy, but culture is more difficult than strategy. It requires clarity, commitment, and daily persistence. The moment you embrace a shortcut by sacrificing enrollment to satisfy short-term profit objectives, your culture of significance takes a substantial hit.

  1. Leaders Create the Conditions for Culture That’s the job. Not to manage—management is easy and cheap, a shortcut when you are unable to earn enrollment. Your culture is more powerful than your strategy or your tactics. Combine “what things are like around here” with “people like us do things like this,” and quite suddenly your team has leverage beyond the industrialist’s imagination. When the culture embraces enrollment, possibility, and change, new opportunities quickly arise. Work gets done because it’s important and desired, not because a surveillance system insisted.

Simplify Clarify Triage Decide

Start with a problem, and make it as simple as possible. Then clarify the goal. This work you’re doing, the change you seek to make—who is it for and what is it for? Most recalcitrant problems are caused by a lack of clarity about what change is being sought. Triage is the work of figuring out what to work on next. Sort the incoming and work on the important, difficult, influential parts first. As the essential gets done, the rest follows naturally. And finally, decide. Decide to move on. Decide to focus on the critical parts. Decide to ship the work.

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In some cultures, bad performance is seen as preordained, the result of a moral defect. But none of this is useful or true. In fact, innovative performance is almost always related to random events (good or bad), and innovations can always be improved. Valuable contributors aren’t consistently right, they’re consistently contributing. Criticizing the work with useful, skilled feedback makes the work better. On the other hand, becoming emotionally attached to the work, considering it an authentic statement of personal performance, makes it difficult to respond and improve. “If I’m no good, why bother contributing?” could not be more different than “We can make this better if we’re clear about what it needs …”

In the liminal moments, when we seek to get from here to there, we will encounter the unknown. As we work to invent a desired future, it’s inevitable that everything will not go according to plan. The future, by its nature, is not a clean, well-lit place until we arrive. Alexander Technique teacher Tommy Thompson suggests that when we encounter the unexpected or the unknown, we embrace the tension and withhold putting the new situation into a familiar box. Once we name it, we know precisely how to handle it. Naming something is useful when we’re right, but it’s a challenge when we’re wrong. Because the act of putting something into the wrong box will prevent us from understanding what it really is. And it also can numb us to the feeling of awe we experience in the presence of something we don’t understand.

“I’m not sure what this is yet, let’s interact and see” opens the door to forward motion and wonder, instead of pushing hard for things to get back to normal.

At Bloomberg, I’m told, they measured keystrokes per minute, time sitting in front of the terminal, and even bathroom breaks. These are precise measurements, but not useful ones. If the work of the organization involves innovation, connection, or the creation of change, then only humans are going to do that work. Treating them like a measurable asset is a trap. The alternative is to measure the health and output of the culture itself. To hold the leaders accountable for enrollment, commitment, and the rigor of shipping work that makes an impact.

  1. Scale Is Not the Point In the industrial age, the math of scale is pretty compelling. More machines and more sales directly translate into more profits, which gives you the ability to buy more machines and generate more sales. But if a significant organization is built on community and innovation, adding more employees doesn’t make you more effective. In fact, it might do the opposite. When Facebook or Amazon lays off ten thousand people at a time, it’s clear that a CFO somewhere is treating people like a resource, not like humans. The internet opens the door to massive scale when an idea is built to spread. WhatsApp had only nineteen employees when it sold for more than a billion dollars. Bigger isn’t the goal, better is.

Instead of hiring based on the performance of interview skills, perhaps we can pay people to do a project with us. The best way to see how someone works is to work with them.

If we’re going to hire compliant cogs with certain traditional attributes, we’re going to sacrifice diversity, passion, and teamwork. We’ll maintain caste roles, limit mobility, and harm our work as well. Bosses lie when they try to hire. Employees get their revenge by lying when they answer. Bosses pretend that they have a fascinating, humane environment that prizes individuality, while selecting people who have demonstrated that this isn’t their goal. And employees swallow their pride when they need a job, because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. The alternative is a set of mutual commitments, together with trial projects, to see what’s really on offer. A key step forward is to find a path to mutual trust. Let’s get real or let’s not play.

As they are about to open the envelope, the auditorium grows silent. Everyone wants to know who the winner is. Tension focuses us, and we eagerly wait for resolution.

The tension changes that. Significance creates change, and change is a dance with tension. Relieve the tension too soon, by offering someone a postcard to mail in, by telling them the punch line of the joke too soon, by resolving the mystery … it’s a waste. The tension is good. The tension might be the point. You can’t walk on a rope unless it’s tight. The best part of a knock-knock joke is the pause after someone says “Who’s there?”

I bring you the gift of these four words: I believe in you. blaise pascal

Our role isn’t to simply fit in or to mimic or to comply. Our job is not to follow precise instructions. The coordinated hum and motion of the hive is a message for each of us, a vivid story about waking up from a culture-induced torpor to get back to what really matters. To not only reclaim the agency that is our humanity, but to open the door for others to find it as well. Thank you for creating opportunities to contribute, to grow, and to connect. Keep leading: it matters. Significance isn’t what we get… . It’s what we do for others.

am not a number. John DRAKE

As the swarm heads to its new home, it moves quickly and directly. Tens of thousands of bees, flying in unison to a place they’ve never been. But looking closer, we can see what looks like chaos. No bee remains at the front—the faster bees fly back and forth, shepherding the others as they protect the colony and the queen at its center. There are no collisions, no dead ends. The bees are consistent, direct, and effective in their work, organized without an organizer. Each bee contributes, singing the song they came to sing, the song that needs to be sung. Lead together.

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