You’ve arrived. You started down a path to pursue work with meaning and purpose. There is no magic formula that is guaranteed to work every time. Do you think Raphael Nadal can get in the zone every time he steps on the court? Meaning is not static. It’s the unique state created when what’s critical to you, the group of individuals you’ve built deep relationships with, and the opportunities you pursue together ignite. It’s the joy that’s liberated, whether it’s instantaneous or over a period of time.
As a Ladderburner, you have chosen this role, a maker of meaning. This is your job, not your title, position, or credential, although it would probably look great on your business card. At one level, you can view creating meaning as leadership, responsible for building the capacity of your team by building the capability of each team member. At another level, you’re on constant lookout for building meaning into situations as they arise. Let me give you an example.
From Engineer to Lightning Rod
Mert Aktar
Head of Corporate Development
Mert Aktar is the Head of Corporate Development for a pharma organization specializing in genetic research. I first met Mert over 10 years ago, when he was an engineering manager, and we were preparing for a professional development initiative with the larger department. Mert showed up at our first meeting with a notebook full of his ideas on leadership. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “Isn’t that my job?” It was clear then and it’s even clearer today that leadership is his strength, and engineering was just the starting point. He quickly moved up the ranks, partly for his technical competence, but more so for his ability to build capacity for the organization and engagement and meaning for the people working around him. Along the way he and I worked together on several professional development initiatives that he commissioned, not the larger business. One of those resulted in one of the highest engagement scores in the company and the lowest turnover rate (like zero) over a four-year period. A few years ago, Mert was at a cross-roads, having accomplished what he set out to do in his engineering career. He describes it as wanting to have a broader impact, moving from the “value creation” to the “value capture” or commercial side of the business. He applied for a position in corporate development, the arm of the organization that looks at mergers, acquisitions, and new business development. He got it. And he’s since moved to another company where he has even broader responsibilities. A traditional career path? Hardly. Here’s how Mert sees it: “There is no more altruistic purpose or mission than helping others … to live better lives through your contribution … to make a maximum contribution to human well-being .” Recently, a colleague said to him, “You’re always talking to people. When do you do your work?” He was hysterical when he told me that.
How to Create Meaning
Find and Connect With Givers
Wharton Professor Adam Grant describes two types of people—givers, those who put the needs of others at the center, and takers, “those who look to get more then they give.”1 Givers are not pushovers and are no less ambitious than takers. They just have a different way to pursue what they need to do. Find givers. See how they make you and others feel. Then go find more. As Grant describes, “Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them.”2 They sound like Ladderburners to me.
Creating meaning and the ripple effect—we’re talking apples to apples.
Embrace Breadth and Diversity
Breadth is a measurement of range and potential. Author David Epstein bucks the tide of specialization, citing the challenge for “how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyper-specialization.”3
Ladder Climbing is a process of subtraction, favoring depth over breadth. Most people experience a narrowing of their interests as they climb. Even more obvious is the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion that pervades the workplace culture, the blatant unfairness of who may climb the highest. Ladderburning is a process of addition, celebrating diversity, belonging, and the need to reassemble the range of interests extracted in favor of promoting only achievement. Breadth plays its biggest role in creating a learning environment based on different ways of thinking.4 It’s back to the playground and Lab for inspiration to move forward. In today’s world, breadth is breath, and we need to take it all in.
Strengthen Connections
With infinite data at their disposal, Google wanted to determine how to build the perfect team. Through a study they commissioned, Project Aristotle, they discovered there was no single profile for the “perfect performer” on a team. In fact, the findings showed that successful teams had less to do with individual attributes and more to do with the nature of how people engaged each other within the environment. As Shaun Anchor describes:
Indeed, their research found that a team on which each person was merely average in their individual abilities but possessed a collective intelligence would continually exhibit higher success rates than a team of individual geniuses.5
Liberate Intrinsic Motivation
Deci describes the requirements for intrinsic motivation: (1) the autonomy “to feel free and self-directed,” (2) mastery or a “sense of perceived competence,” and (3) the connectedness to others in something bigger than themselves. Think about it. Making meaning gives license and a place for people to fully engage by accepting and liberating what’s critical and important, meaningful, and purposeful.6
Deci calls these moments “spiritual”:
It has to do with life itself: It is vitality, dedication, transcendence. It is what one experiences at those times that Robert Henri called “more than ordinary moments of existence.”7
Creating meaning is the essence of Ladderburning, how you make your dent in the universe. Ladderburners don’t believe, “Build it and they will come.” They believe, “Here we are, now let’s go build it.”
Food for Thought
1. Ladderburning is unleashing your intrinsic motivation on the world. Do you believe that’s possible? If so, what would be different about you and your world?
2. Ladderburners choose not to Climb the Ladder in the traditional way. Instead, they pursue work with meaning and purpose by finding people who are also motivated for the same reason.
3. This requires finding and connecting with givers, people who share the belief that other people, not themselves, are at the center.
4. Breadth and diversity in all its forms are enriching. We need to embrace both.
As promised, the two questions I began with:
5. What does “make meaning” look like for you?
6. In the words of Dr. Clayton Christensen, how will you measure your life?
