A few summers ago in the foothills of the Himalayas, a Dutchman named Richard was teaching meditation at Tushita, a retreat center near McCleod-Ganj, the hill station turned tourist trap that since 1960 has been the capital of Tibet in exile. Weeks later, the Dalai Lama himself would be giving instructions in his home temple, a 20-minute walk down the mountain. But for now we are in a 10-day retreat. The room is a broad, open space, equally temple and classroom. A grand golden Buddha sits behind Richard, with about a hundred or so students sitting on cushions before him. They are here to be introduced to Buddhism, that nontheistic religious tradition that so many Westerners find enchanting. But they’re not here to hear Richard, exactly; he’d be the first to tell you that they’re not listening to him, they’re listening to 2,500 years of research into mental life.

In the vernacular of the U.S. Midwest, Richard would be described as a beanpole, a young man of exceptional height and thinness. He wears his long, light-brown hair tied back in a bun. He is given to T-shirts and open collars, flip-flops, and kindly laughter. He was once scared of everything, he says, but we can’t believe him, since he just finished a retreat in the mountains of the Everest region of Nepal, surviving on only potatoes. He was so weak by the end of it, he says, that he had to be helicoptered out. He says he also used to be extremely inflexible, though he now sits cross-legged in a lotus position, his hips wide open. All the tension in your body is emotional, he says. His looseness seems to be some proof of that.

Today, as usual, Richard is talking about the nature of the mind. The temple is full of students—men and women in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties from elsewhere in India, Israel, Europe, East Asia, Australia, and North America—though the room still feels spacious even with all the attendants. The walls are the soft canary yellow that Tibetan Buddhists love. Motes of dust spiral in the early afternoon sunlight. The room’s stillness is tight with the rapt attention of the students. It’s the kind of tranquillity you come to India hoping to find.

Then: whoop! Richard hops from his cushion as if he had just been hit with a water balloon. “There’s a sentient being there!” he says, miming the reaction of someone realizing that there’s an entire person sitting next to him. The class, you see, is learning about compassion, and as Pema Chödrön says, compassion is not a sorrowful, pitying feeling but a matter of realizing the kinship you have with other beings, like, for instance, the person sitting next to you in this almost silent meditation retreat. They, like you, are experiencing life; they, like you, are alternately proud and worried, anxious and courageous. And when you meditate—especially while sitting in rows together—you can begin to feel that the others are experiencing things just as you are. For nonmeditators, similar realizations can be found in the nearest airplane cabin, train car, or, as we like to discuss, office. Unless you are in total isolation, wherever you go, sentient beings are there, and sentient beings experience things the same way you do, give or take a personal history.

This is key to our conversation: leadership implies that someone is being led. In the context of an organization these are people—beings of sentience—who are participating. To truly lead, then, is to relate to and respect that they are sentient, that they are able to feel or perceive things. Every individual within an organization is a person with consciousness and memory: favorite colors, foods, and childhood smells; first loves and heartbreaks; parents and grandparents; ambitions and fears; known and unknown capabilities. If an organization wishes to get the greatest contributions from its individuals, it must not only respect their individuality but appreciate their sentience. Interwoven sentience is the path of innovation, creativity, and sustainability for the organization, as we have argued throughout this book and as we further detail in the following pages.

In Chapter 5 we introduced the notion of the cluster: it’s our answer to the problems of ossification that plague small and large companies trying to cope with the flowing, paradigm-unraveling nature of our present working life. If the world you live in is fluid, you better be, too, but only when that dynamic energy is harnessed with rigor will your outcomes be what you’re looking for. In Chapter 6 we began to fill in that organizational structure with details about how to free individual workers from creativity-stifling systems and work together in a way that encourages personal and commercial growth. In this our seventh chapter, the last chapter in this middle section, we will dig deeper into how people work when they’re doing their best work—and how leaders can arrange for a flourishing culture. At the center of this process is appreciating the sentience of the beings with whom you are working.

What does it mean to lead sentient beings? First, it entails fully appreciating the interior complexity of the people with whom you work. Then, by appreciating that complexity, you can make explicit the links between a person’s individual motivations and those of the organization, from which alignment will arise. What we’re doing is linking the individual dreams like career trajectories to collective goals like innovation, revenue growth, and affecting the world. To do this we will need to understand what people need from their work in order to do their best work and how leaders can help arrange that for them. These, then, will be the three movements of this chapter.

Let’s get moving.

WHAT IS IT TO WANT TO WORK VERSUS HAVING TO WORK?

This distinction is rooted in intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. If you are intrinsically motivated, there is something inside you that pushes you to work; if you are extrinsically motivated, something outside you brings you there. (Most people, of course, experience a mixture of both.) Intrinsic motivations include the inborn needs for mastery, autonomy, and purpose, as Daniel Pink details in his 2009 book Drive.¹ Extrinsic motivations, as we know, are often what’s being suggested when managers talk about incentivizing a task: money, promotions, and other dangling carrots. We’ll build on Pink’s and others’ insights to understand how to organize around an individual’s growth, from which the collective will grow, too.

When that mixture of motivating factors is right, miraculous things can happen. An organization can become like a garden in aggressive bloom where people are following Nietzsche’s advice “to become who one is.” The best companies have a handle on this sense of self-realization. For instance, Apple gives new hires a memo in which the company contrasts work and life’s work. “People don’t come here to play it safe,” the memo, as reprinted in the New York Times, reads. “They come here to swim in the deep end. They want their work to add up to something . . . that couldn’t happen anywhere else.”²

Apple’s confidence is intoxicating. We think that organizations should have a similar swagger in their own field, should be exemplars of doing the absolute best work. This is what the top performers are attracted to: fully exerting their talents in an environment that encourages and cultivates that skillful exertion. Coincidentally, this is the Star model that was described in Chapter 1—the kind that hits home runs.

This is what, we think, Evernote CEO Phil Libin means when he talks about how his company doesn’t engage in any projects unless they are “sufficiently epic,” the kinds of projects that you’ll dedicate yourself to, organize your life around. When pressed for where that terminology comes from, he laughs and talks about growing up with the works of Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, and indeed, when organizations are in their highest-functioning state, they are a fellowship of adventurers.

This is at the center of doing work as an extension of your individual emotional convictions, as an expression of your interior life, as spiritual life by way of commerce. This is also the emotional center of the organization: its culture. The culture is made manifest in everything the organization creates—in the continually considered excellence of Mayo Clinic, the multivalent innovation of P&G, and the eminent coolness of Apple. An organization, as we’ve noted before, is a shared endeavor, one that we can build mindfully.

BUILDING, BUILDING, BUILDING

People produce culture. Then, naturally, the most immediate way to form an innovative culture is through the people you hire. This is especially true of the first few hires. Their demeanor will radiate out into the organization, becoming the default set of actions for new employees.

GitHub, the social coding company, takes this to the extreme. CEO Tom Preston-Werner says that he spends most of his time with hiring, evaluating candidates’ autonomy and self-direction, and their desire to improve as a person, in products, and in supporting users. Because of that sense of alignment, GitHub becomes a group of self-directed teams doing work that the leadership would have never come up with.³ With this keen attention to these values, Preston-Werner shows an understanding of the way employees experience his organization.

Just as user experience—the way people interact with a product—is becoming increasingly important in the development cycle, employers need to become more mindful of the way employees experience the organization. This, one could say, is a primary way to acknowledge the sentience of the individuals that compose it. To do that, we need to consider what people are looking for in an employer and in their working experience.

Yes, a paycheck is an obvious motivator, but it is not the ultimate one. A growing body of research shows how the correlation between monetary wealth and self-reported happiness drops off over time. A 2010 study led by the economist Angus Deaton and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman made headlines with its finding that a salary of $75,000 was the threshold for day-to-day happiness, with the conclusion that at that income threshold, people could better absorb adversities as diverse as asthma or divorce,⁴ thus predicting happiness. A 2012 poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found that respondents with an income level over $50,000 reported higher levels of satisfaction with their safety, health, employment, community involvement, and spiritual life, suggesting that that is the threshold.⁵

To put it into technical philosophical terms, being paid well is probably a necessary part of being happy and fully engaged—it certainly provides a strong signal—but it is not sufficient to ensure that state of well-being. There’s more going on in engagement than just compensation. This presents a follow-up question: what else are people looking for in their jobs, how do we give it to them, and how does this relate to doing amazing, innovative work?

WHERE THE INDIVIDUAL MEETS THE ORGANIZATION

As we’ve contended, part of leadership is having organization-wide mindfulness, not only regarding how customers experience the organization, but how the team does. What presence does the organization have in their lives, and how do they relate to it? How do the ideas and narratives they hold about themselves relate to those of the organization? Part of this is alignment—the taste that GitHub vigilantly seeks—and another is the time people are spending with our organizations. Specifically, we need to be transparent about the way organizations and individuals link themselves together.

The idea of the company man is resting peacefully in the dustbin of history: though we value commitment, the organization is no longer a parental redeemer figure that will nurture an employee for a lifetime. The innovation economy is also, it seems, the gig economy: people are working for shorter and shorter periods with specific organizations. We need greater transparency about this situation.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn fame and his collaborators Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh have proposed a solution: a new compact between employers and employees that they like to call “tours of duty.” While maintaining trust and investment between the individual and the collective, the tour of duty appreciates the impermanence of the employer-employee relationship. Rather than sharing loyalty, they say, both sides have an alliance.

“As allies, employer and employee try to add value to each other,” they wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “The employer says, ‘If you make us more valuable, we’ll make you more valuable.’ The employee says, ‘If you help me grow and flourish, I’ll help the company grow and flourish.’”⁶

There is an honest, Hammurabi-like clarity to the arrangement: I help you guys get better, you guys help us get better. It’s an honoring of the temporality of working together and of life, a deromanticization and defixation of organization as savior. Instead we have an arrangement that appreciates the fluidity of our working lives.

Why is this effective? Since an organization is made of people—not the name of the brand or the building housing it—we can contend that if the people grow, the organization grows. Over the last few chapters we have discussed the ways in which people grow in their personal and professional lives. As leaders, we’re trying to arrange our organizations so that there’s a mutual flourishing between their different parts, as a gardener does with a garden. This is what the word engagement is beginning to scratch the surface of: when people are doing the work that expands their skill sets and sense of self and feels meaningful to them and impactful, they will be deeply invested in the work they do. This is the difference between “having” to work and “getting” to work, between having a job and developing a vocation. We want all the people in our fellowship of adventurers to be practicing their vocations.

Adjacent to this is recognizing that every professional is engaged in managing his own career. Every person is yearning for advancement. The savvy leader, then, is the one who recognizes how to help his employees advance themselves by way of the organization. Nihal Mehta, the former CEO of LocalResponse, is one of those leaders.

Mehta is a serial entrepreneur, and like many serial entrepreneurs, the most ready description for him is a ball of energy. He’s handsome, quick to laugh, and whip-smart: LocalResponse, a targeted advertising start-up, was his fifth company—though he’s now moved into venture funding. But over the years the true role of the CEO has become apparent to him.

“My number one job is to make sure everyone is operating at their absolute potential,” he says on a sunny October day in New York. Mehta says that his job is to make sure that all the employees are “incredibly passionate” about what they do; everything else falls into place after that.

In noting this, Mehta models one part of what leaders in the innovation economy need to do. If we are trying to organize teams of people who will give their fullest effort—not in a punishment-oriented extrinsic reward system but in a fulfillment-oriented, intrinsically motivated context—we need to find people who will throw themselves into their work and configure our organizations to encourage that intensity.

“I assume you’re a rock star engineer because you’ve gotten this far,” Mehta says. “But are you super passionate; is your life mission to do what you’re doing?”

From Mehta’s fervor it’s clear that he is.

“And also, can I give you a growth path into something you would like to be in two or three years?” he continues. “Would you like to run the tech team? Would you like come up with new patents? Would you like to create new algorithms?”

Mehta wants people who have, like him, found their niche in the universe. In this way, much of the job of the leader is to become a curator of talent: to find the talented people who can do their best work in the environment of your organization. Curation has, in our hypertexting world, had a change in meaning: when bloggers aggregate and repurpose existing material, they are curating it. (Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, Annie Murphy Paul of the Brilliant Report, and Jason Hirschhorn of Media ReDEFined are examples of the best in the young craft.) But of course, the term has much older roots: from the fourteenth century, the medieval Latin is curate, a person responsible for the care of souls, or curator, an overseer, manager, or guardian—originally the person in charge of minors or lunatics. Then in the sixteenth century, it took on the meaning of an “officer in charge of a museum, library, and so forth.”

If you walk into an art gallery, from the Museum of Modern Art to a local show, you will find yourself in a curated space such that the overall effect of the works in the room will be greater than the sum of the parts. There will be, in other words, a synergy among the exhibition’s components and their arrangement; an additional value will be added by the way the pieces are put together.

The work of the leader, then, parallels that of the ancient maritime navigator, moving from port to port by drawing the constellations in the sky. We should look for new ways to combine and recombine the talents available within an organization. One of these ways is the clustering that we discussed in the last two chapters: we can find out which people work well together—and perhaps surprise them—by placing them in or allowing them to opt into new working situations. In addition, if we are in a larger organization, we can, as curators, exercise the power of combinatorial creativity by arranging talent from different sectors within the organization and thus relating ideas and potentially entire disciplines that previously would have been distinct from one another, just as P&G did with Crest Whitestrips. They also need to find how an individual’s trajectories converge with that of the organization, as Mehta encouraged. Leaders, then, can discover products lying latent, ready to be catalyzed by a little curation.

THE ARTS AND ARCS OF TRAJECTORY

However, putting together a team that works at its absolute potential involves more than arranging individual talent in novel ways: we must also recognize the drive of the people involved. Engagement is also velocity: if someone is fully immersed in what she is doing, she will work with the greatest force and speed she can. But it is frivolous to think that a worker is spending his scarce time creating value for the organization and making his managers look good; rather, he is trying to achieve something for himself, somewhere along the hierarchy of needs. The most immediate of these is the career arc.

This is where Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh meet with Mehta: this acknowledgment that what an organization gives a worker is the opportunity to grow. However, as any parent will understand, with growth comes departure. A teenager graduates from high school, a young adult graduates from college, and an adult graduates, probably with less official ceremony, from position to position, stage to stage, within a career. This is shown in the way we talk about career development: setting off on her own, the entrepreneur is an alumna of PayPal; the independent consultant, having built his reputation at BCG, becomes an alumnus when he decides to go freelance. Every major shift is a graduation.

The task for a leader, then, is to be direct and open with workers in regard to every person’s trajectory in the organization: Is there a space opening? Would an implementation person make a fine manager (and has he demonstrated leadership qualities rather than simply a prowess at his craft)? In the case of entrepreneurial workers, can they create a greater role from within the organization? Or could they launch their own venture and take on the larger organization as a first client? How do these individual and collective futures fit together?

Some kind of unexamined sense of propriety made these conversations taboo in the workplace: just as it is thought of as impolite to acknowledge that one’s life will one day be over, it’s impolite to acknowledge that one’s role within an organization—and the organization itself—will one day be gone. One of the duties of the humanistic leader, then, is to open this initially uncomfortable conversation, to acknowledge the way trajectories join and part. The other side of trajectory is to show how the progress of the individual links to the progress of the whole.

THE TWO LAYERS OF PROGRESS

When we can take the wisdom from one field and place it in another, we can arrive at novel—yet familiar—insights. Such is the case of ingesting How to Read a Book, the genteel, thoughtful, and thorough guide to critical reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, originally published in 1940.⁷ As a whole, the book is an indispensable guide to reading for learning, understanding, and wisdom, though one passage partway through is particularly germane to the sagacity we seek.

For Adler and Van Doren, books are “absent teachers” and therefore indispensable, since those of us no longer in school must often rely on the written word to accelerate our understanding of life. They make an argument for critical reading over more superficial grazing because, they say, if we are to learn anything from a book-as-teacher, we must become dutiful students; the responsibility rests on us to advance. In this way, the teacher’s profession is parallel to two other noble ones: that of the farmer and that of the physician.

The farmer is in the business of growing plants, the physician that of curing patients, the teacher that of educating students. But the very grammar of those clauses betrays a misunderstanding. The farmer does not grow the plant, the plant does; the physician does not make the patient healthier, the patient grows healthier; and the teacher cannot command the student to learn, that growth must happen within the student.

Instead, what these noble professions do is arrange the circumstances for the beings they are caretaking—or curating if we use the word in its older Latin meaning—so that they may flourish. Put pithily, you cannot tell a flower to grow, but you can help it to do so. The farmer is mindful of the seasons and plants seeds when most suited; the physician studies a patient’s case history and integrates treatment into that larger narrative; the teacher tailors her lessons to the lives of her students, allowing the material to be as relatable as possible.

The manager can be added to that list. The people we work with are not so unlike the plants the farmer grows, the pupils the teacher teaches, and the patients the doctor treats. To stretch the agricultural metaphor, you cannot tell any of the flowers, cucumbers, or cornstalks in your office to grow. The growing happens within them. But as the forefront of organizational theory tells us, the answer to the question of arranging for people to want to work rather than having to work is actually a matter of managing progress, not people.

PRINCIPLES OF PROGRESS

Teresa Amabile is a professor and a director of research at Harvard Business School. She began her career researching the nature of creativity, though as of late her focus has shifted to the inner lives of people at work. She studies how we relate to our achievements both as individuals and within organizations. She has published in both the academic and the popular press, perhaps most notably with her book The Progress Principle, coauthored with her husband, Steven Kramer.

Her research—including a study of 238 individuals making nearly 12,000 diary entries—skewers the widely held idea that fear and high pressure cultures are what ensure achievement. Instead, as she writes in one essay for HBR, people are more creative when they have a positive experience of work, when they think well of their organization and colleagues, and when they find their work meaningful and thus intrinsically motivating. When they are achieving, they see themselves as making progress.⁸

The progress doesn’t need to be monumental. Although there are indeed heroic moments within a career, Amabile notes that a more commonplace victory can be enough, such as if you’re a programmer rooting out a difficult bug, the nonprofit director making a draft of a grant application, the high school teacher finishing a day without having to raise his voice, the executive wrapping up her tasks in time to have dinner with her family. When people have these slow, steady daily markers of progress, they feel fulfilled and end the day looking forward to the next one rather than walking out the office door like a zombie. Again, workaholics aren’t addicted to work—they crave the validation that comes with success. With that in mind, a humanistic, holistic manager arranges for such moments of progress. In the same way that a farmer tills the soil to help seeds germinate, a manager may till the workflow to allow meaningful progress—and the engagement that follows—to take root.

MEANINGFUL TILLAGE

We can arrange for meaningful progress in a number of ways.

Our first suggestion is to incorporate opportunities for narrated work, mechanisms that allow people to self-report their accomplishments on a daily basis (and thus remove the need for higher-ups to pester them for signs of progress). While a number of services will help you out with this, a start-up called iDoneThis is especially useful. The idea is simple but powerful: at the end of every day, iDoneThis sends you an email asking what you accomplished since the morning. While it’s a small reminder, this little ritual allows people to see their day-by-day growth while allowing the rest of the team to see who did what when. In this way, narrated work allows people to experience an emotionally nourished sense of progress while also forming a database of the work that everyone’s gotten done.

Another crucial element is the time-bound nature of clusters. As we have laid out in the last two chapters, clusters are teams whose life is tied to the task they are completing. Since the cluster lasts for only so long, they conclude with the group breaking up—an event that marks the growth of the people involved, who can then bask in the glory of a job well done and reflect on what did or didn’t go right.

Lastly and perhaps most traditionally is the notion of having soft contact between leaders and direct reports. We’ve spoken a bit about how relationships are the bandwidth by which information transfers; one form of that bandwidth is the normalization of interactions of people across a hierarchy. It should be normal for you to talk to your boss. Ideally, that will make constructive feedback a nonheroic practice, and that normalization of feedback will accelerate the velocity with which an organization may improve. This communality can be built a number of ways, whether it’s an after-work beer or coffee or, perhaps more healthfully, a midday walk taken together. The key is to allow the interactions to become normal enough that it’s not a big deal to spend that time together. That casualness signals trust among the individuals within a group. This is how you build the fellowship; this is how you get these sentient, sensitive, meaning-hungry beings on board for the sufficiently epic quest.