How do you make sure that members of your team are happy, committed, and satisfied with their situation in the workplace? Do you just give them praise or have you been able to grow some internal force within them that helps drive them forward even when things get difficult. Doctor Gabriella Rosen Calluman is a Harvard trained physician, the chief innovation officer Better Up, and the co author of the international
bestseller Tomorrow Mind with Martin Seligman. In their book, they tackle the challenges of thriving in our modern world of work and offer guidance for leaders who are looking to arm their workforce with the capabilities that will future proof their company's success. So what does Gabriella's research say we need to do to help you and your team thrive in tough times? Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, ritual and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm
your host, Doctor Amantha Imper. On today's quick Win episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out a quick win that you can apply today. In today's show, Gabriella reveals the key to unlocking meaning in the workplace and how you as a leader can inspire your team to find it.
So meaning is what my co atho Marty Salomon calls a flabby concept. By what do you mean? There's a lot of different meanings to the word meaning. The psychologist make cal Stieger has this definition that there's three different components to meaning. There's purpose, there's coherence, and there's significance. So significance is that you know, my life has meaning, there's some significance to me being here. Coherence is this idea that there's a greater integrity of my actions with
something larger that it all somehow fits together. And purpose is that there's something bigger than I'm kind of working toward and pushing for. Mattering is what we think of as like a very bare minimum level of significance, whereby I feel that the labor I'm putting out there in the world is for a purpose, it's seen, and it's not forn and at a clinical psychological level, and people lose a sense of mattering, they can't even get out of bed to start the day, right. So the extreme
end of not mattering is depression in the workplace. Some of our professions, some of our labors, are meaningful in a colloquial sense of they might be attached to, let's say, as a healthcare provider saving a person's life, and some of us are doing labors that feel much more removed from immediate meaningful impact for other human beings, for sense
of integrity, for service to the planet. As managers, whatever we're asking people to do, we need them to be able to feel that their labors have registered to us, that they matter, that we see them doing that thing.
That is the bare minimum of a person continuing to be motivated to keep putting in the effort day after day, and in this day and age, when we as managers are very often asking people, hey, that thing that you work so hard on for six months, remember that stop doing that thing and start doing this totally different thing because the industry change, the world changed, what the market change,
whatever it was. That's a crisis of mattering. That's a crisis where the employee is asked themselves, why did I just do that for six months? And why is it going to matter for me to do this next thing?
So that's where we define the sort of bare minimum of what a manager needs to do to help people stay motivated, and really what we owe people if we're asking them to work on something, we owe it to them to witness that work and to have it be seen and to have them feel that that was not all for not.
How do you approach that as a later in terms of remembering that, Because there's so much to remember and to do to be a great leader these days, I feel like their responsibilities are greater than ever. It seems very basic, but I can imagine that a lot of ladies don't do it. How do you think about it in your role?
Yeah, by the way, I think about it all the time, and every time I share this insight and this idea of as managers, when we ask people to pivot, I think about at that exact moment, where am I asking my team to pivot and where do I need to remember to go back and do this. So I do try to pay attention to it most at these pivot moments.
I try to pay attention to it. When we are reading out on metrics and performance, you know that's a moment where your team might miss a metric, but it might be a for a reason that was out of their control or despite the fact that there was a lot of effort that was put in and so how do you witness the effort, how do you witness the intent even while helping the team grow and evolve to
the next chapter. So I try to narrate the utility of the effort as much as I can when I know that we're shifting away from or trying to learn something about where it could be better, because I know that's when it's the threat happens. And then in general, when we have good hygiene and good practices around recognition, which is something I think all of us can get better at. But recognition is an antidote, and it's almost
a vaccine for a crisis of mattering. If people feel you're someone who's recognizing them and who's seeing what they're doing, then they'll be more trusting about leaving something behind and going to something new.
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Gabriella. If you would like to listen to the full interview, you can find a link to that in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you you'd follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the warrangery people of the cool And Nation