In our first installment we talked among other things of driving leadership down into the organization and encouraging people to experiment. I closed by noting that nothing would happen unless (a) people throughout the firm were genuinely engaged with the project; and (b) there were “guardrails” in place.
Let’s start with engagement, which brings us to McKinsey II, Increasing the ‘meaning quotient’ of work. Here’s the opening premise, and what they’re striving for:
Musicians talk about being “in the groove,” sportsmen about being “in the zone.” Can employees in the workplace experience similar performance peaks and, if so, what can top management do to encourage the mental state that brings them about?
We’ve long been interested in work environments that inspire exceptional levels of energy, increase self-confidence, and boost individual productivity. When we ask leaders about the ingredient they think is most often missing for them and for their colleagues—and by implication is most difficult to provide—they almost invariably signal the same thing: a strong sense of meaning. By “meaning,” we and they imply a feeling that what’s happening really matters, that what’s being done has not been done before or that it will make a difference to others.
I hope we’ve all experienced this in our lives, but what exactly does it mean? Is it anything we could possibly take steps to encourage among our colleagues?
The psychologist Mihàly Csìkszentmihàlyi studied thousands of subjects, from sculptors to factory workers, and asked them to record their feelings at intervals throughout the working day. … He observed that people fully employing their core capabilities to meet a goal or challenge created what he called “flow.”
[…] Bill Russell, a key player for the Boston Celtics during the period when they won 11 professional-basketball championships in 13 years, put it thus: “When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. . . . At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive.
Now, no one would argue with this as a desideratum, but how to actually get there given the day to day pressures and challenges we all experience? Who, after all, can be a Bill Russell on the basketball court being “in the zone”? One way to try to answer that is simply to ask business leaders what they’ve done to achieve it themselves and/or in their organizations:
Flow sounds great in theory, but few business leaders have mastered the skill of generating it reliably in the workplace. An easy first step is to consider what creates flow in your own work situation—a question we have put directly to more than 5,000 executives during workshops we’ve conducted over the last decade. In this exercise, individuals initially think about their own personal peak performance with a team, when, in other words, they have come closest to the feelings Csìkszentmihàlyi and Russell describe. Then they pinpoint the conditions that made this level of performance possible: what in the team environment was there more or less of than usual?
The remarkably consistent answers we’ve received fall into three categories. The first set includes elements such as role clarity, a clear understanding of objectives, and access to the knowledge and resources needed to get the job done. These are what one might term rational elements of a flow experience or, to use a convenient shorthand, its intellectual quotient (IQ). When the IQ of a work environment is low, the energy employees bring to the workplace is misdirected and often conflicting.
Another set of answers includes factors related to the quality of the interactions among those involved. Here, respondents often mention a baseline of trust and respect, constructive conflict, a sense of humor, a general feeling that “we’re in this together,” and the corresponding ability to collaborate effectively. These create an emotionally safe environment to pursue challenging goals or, to borrow from the writings of Daniel Goleman and others, an environment with a high emotional quotient (EQ). When the EQ of a workplace is lacking, employee energy dissipates in the form of office politics, ego management, and passive-aggressive avoidance of tough issues.
While IQ and EQ are absolutely necessary to create the conditions for peak performance, they are far from sufficient. The longest list of words we have compiled from executives’ answers to our peak-performance question over the last ten years has little to do with either of these categories. This third one describes the peak-performance experience as involving high stakes; excitement; a challenge; and something that the individual feels matters, will make a difference, and hasn’t been done before. We describe this third category as the meaning quotient (MQ) of work. When a business environment’s MQ is low, employees put less energy into their work and see it as “just a job” that gives them little more than a paycheck.
And as you’d expect while the rational/”IQ” and emotional/”EQ” components of the workplace experience are concepts we’re pretty well familiar with, “MQ” is new, and it turns out perhaps to be the key missing link to achieving “flow”:
