Welcome to all the new Showing Up subscribers! I hope wherever you are working today and reading this, you feel connected to your team and your organization. If not, you couldn’t be in a better place to fix that.
November was the second of five months in the “Season of Connectedness” on the Showing Up newsletter, when we focused on finding Meaning in our work as a distributed team.
The “Season of Connectedness” is all about finding connection across team members who work at a distance from each other — hybrid, remote or working across different offices, the effect is the same: despite physical distance, you have a desire to gel!
The “Season of Connectedness” is about learning the five power mindsets of distributed teams: Belonging, Meaning, Faith, Clarity and Joy.
Why these mindsets? Research from more than 100 sources and interviews with dozens of workplace experts, pyschologists and leaders led to these mindsets as the tools of empathetic leadership for hybrid teams, tools that can help far away members of teams feel like they are side-by-side every day.
We all want to feel a sense of togetherness, but the physical world has changed. We need to find a new way to connect. This new set of mindsets is the starting point to bring us together.
November’s Wrap-Up of Meaning Tips
I shared four tips with you this month about how to create Meaning if you work at a distance from your teammates, adapted from “Your Resource Is Human: How empathetic leadership can help remote teams rise above.”
Why is Meaning so important? Research has found that one of the greatest barriers to engagement in workplaces today is simply boredom, and work losing meaning. In fact, it’s the #1 reason people leave companies today according to a study by Capterra. Meaning is a powerful antidote to boredom. It pulls us back into our work and reminds us why we do it.
Meaning Tip #1: Discuss your purpose
When we see each other every day in the same place, we take for granted the physical artifacts of our values—things like imagery, wall art, signage, even decor—that remind us what the organization is about and what our work means. The only way to reproduce the physical artifacts of meaning as a distributed team is to intentially discuss our purpose. Make purpose a priority in your team. Write it down! Say it out loud.
Meaning Tip #2: Prioritize your 1-to-1 meetings
There are many aspects of work that drive meaning, but managers need private conversations with the people working for them to really get to the heart of what work means to their people—or could mean. Those private conversations are wellsprings of information, including routes into meaning. Meetings between managers and team members need an intentional focus they never had before now. We can’t rely anymore on “management by walking around.” We simply need “management by talking.”
Meaning Tip #3: Encourage and facilitate your team’s development
What helps a person travel down a path of development is being able to articulate the meaning behind their career, to know where they want to go, and importantly knowing that their manager is signed up for the journey. Even if we are separated by thousands of miles, when we know our manager is signed up for our career journey, we feel on the same road together.
Meaning Tip #4: Visualize the impact of your team’s work
When we are involved in projects with long delivery timings, many of which involve a complex matrix of stakeholders and dependencies, it can be difficult to see anything getting done, let along anything changing, and what our personal impact is. The challenge is compounded by physical separation… many trees, no forest. One of the easiest ways to connect teams to the impact they are making is just to show it. What is your “fundraiser thermometer”? How do you see your impact?
How are we feeling about Meaning?
These three pulse questions will help gauge how you and other readers of “Showing Up” are feeling about Meaning… have a go (and be honest with yourself!):
[The poll will be live for 1 week from the date of this letter posting. Individual votes are anonymous.]
These quesitons only scratch the surface of how much boredom might be affecting us, and how distanced we are from our own work’s meaning. If we’re feeling a steady sense of Meaning, however, there is only one right answer to all three: Always. When you can answer that way, you are motivated, content and feel valued regardless of how far a distance you work from the rest of your team. If you couldn’t answer “Always” to one or several of them, click back and review the tips from November. If you have tips, reflections or questions, hit reply and let me know, or leave a comment below.
Looking forward to December and Faith
Of course we will turn to Faith in December. I hadn’t planned to write the chapters of Your Resource Is Human in a thematic order with the months of fall and winter, but it has worked out that way - Belonging in October, Meaning in November and now at the end of our year, when so many of us celebrate our respective faiths, we turn to Faith. Trust is often pointed to as being the reason that remote and hybrid work doesn’t work. In December, we’ll explore why Faith is an even stronger expression of trust than trust is, and how important it is for distributed teams to have Faith in each other.
I hope you finish November with a renewed sense of how to connect to your meaning for work, and the meaning work has for others you work with. I’d love to know how it’s going, hit reply or leave a comment!