Narrative 1 "my Work Matters"

• Library: Positive Professionals: Creating High-Performing Profitable Firms Through Engagement (ABA) (2017 Ed.)

Narrative 1 "My Work Matters"

"That's the question that keeps me up at night." The answer came from a highly successful senior partner during interviews I was conducting of law firm lawyers about "Good Work." The Good Work Project was launched in the 1990s by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and two colleagues. They were concerned about the deterioration of the professions, which play such a critical role in our society's integrity. They investigated how professionals could maintain the values of "Good Work" while in the midst of rapid social and technological change and while pressured by powerful market forces that exalt profit over all other values. Their research led them to define Good Work as having three characteristics: (1) excellence; (2) ethics, defined to encompass a concern for the social, moral, and ethical implications of work; and (3) engagement, which encompasses both the experience of flow as well as a sense of personal fulfillment or meaningfulness (Gardner & Shulman, 2005; Nakamura, 2010).

The question that caused insomnia for the successful senior lawyer was this: "What do you find meaningful about your work?" He said, "I wish I could say otherwise, but the work really isn't that meaningful." Earlier in his career, he had just focused on being successful. And that was enough for a while. But as he got older, the concern gnawed at him. He talked to a close friend, who recommended Victor Frankl's excellent book, Man's Search for Meaning. The book proposes meaning as a fundamental human need, which fit this lawyer's experience. He eventually moved into a firm management role, and was able to frame his job in a way that was more meaningful: He was helping the firm succeed so that all of the hard-working lawyers and staff could provide for their families and pursue their own dreams.

Another successful senior partner that I interviewed found her work filled with meaning. She developed close relationships with clients, whom she felt she was truly helping. She provided legal advice and also regularly offered her opinion about whether a proposed action was morally right or wrong. Her relationships and how she viewed her job imbued her work with meaning. Her struggle was not in whether her work mattered but whether she mattered to the firm. She generally felt under-valued and treated with disrespect by managing partners in her firm. The result was that she often thought of leaving even though she excelled at her work and loved her clients.

These lawyers' different struggles represent the first two engagement narratives: "My work matters" and "I matter." They illustrate the strong human desire to feel a sense of both impact and recognition (Prilleltensky, 2014). Impact refers to a feeling that what we do makes a difference in the world. Recognition refers to signals we receive from the world that our presence matters (Prilleltensky, 2014, 2016). When we experience both impact and recognition, we fulfill a sense of significance—of meaningfulness. This, in turn, fuels work engagement.

For sure, people differ in how they satisfy these needs. But there are many things positive law firm leaders can do to help. Below, I provide two strategies for boosting lawyers' beliefs that "My work matters":

1. Amplify Job Significance: Frame and design daily work in ways to enhance the experience of meaningfulness.
2. Draw on the Power of Purpose: Broaden firm values to emphasize the purpose of law beyond making money.

1. Amplify Job Significance

What lawyers actually do on a daily basis and how leaders "frame" what they do both play a big role in whether lawyers feel that their work is valuable and valued. As mentioned earlier, framing is simply how we present information. How we frame our world (and how it's framed for us) can have a very real impact on our emotions, motivation, and performance. Through framing, we highlight certain aspects of a situation and minimize others (Cleavenger & Munyon, 2013). The example I gave in Part II compared a doctor's more comforting statement that "You have a 90 percent chance of surviving this surgery" with the more distressing framing that "You have a 10 percent chance of dying during surgery." The power of framing is well-established in social science research—sometimes with striking results.

For example, in a study of gender differences in math performance, similarly skilled male and female college students were given a difficult calculus test (Spencer et al., 1999). All participants were told that a controversy existed about gender differences in math ability and that prior studies had reached mixed results. But the next instruction varied between the study's two groups. In the first group, participants were told that the test had shown a gender difference in the past. The second group was told that the test had never shown gender differences.

The result? The researchers found that women greatly underperformed in relation to men in the first group—the group that was explicitly told that the test had produced gender differences in the past. For the second group, women performed the same as equally qualified men. This was true even though all were given the same test.

What we can learn from this study (and many others like it) is that framing has a real impact on our thoughts, which, in turn, influence our behavior. You'll see this same idea pop up multiple times in subsequent parts of the book, discussing, for example, optimism, resilience, stress, and positive challenge. Here, the point of discussing reframing is to explain how leaders can use it to help cultivate a sense of meaningfulness in work for themselves and others.

Leader Strategies: Framing and Designing Work to Enhance Meaning

Through their words, actions, and symbols, effective leaders can have a big impact on perceptions of meaningfulness by helping lawyers understand how their work is valuable (Cleavenger & Munyon, 2013). Effective leaders also give tangible support. For example, leaders can try to design jobs to eliminate trivial or pointless tasks, add more meaningful ones, and reframe tasks that can't be changed. Hundreds of studies show that certain aspects of jobs play a particularly important role in the experience of meaningfulness (Oldham, 2011). It's these aspects—summarized in Figure 11—that leaders should target for a redesign or reframe.

For example, a job's social impact refers to the degree to which it impacts other people. Context arises from our understanding of how our piece of the work fits into the bigger picture. Variety means that the job allows us to do different types of tasks and use different strengths and skills. All are linked to engagement through their capacity to foster meaningfulness, and each is discussed more below.

Context and Variety

To apply this learning to fuel work engagement, leaders should try to help followers squeeze all the available meaning out of their daily activities. If followers are performing work that doesn't make sense or is not needed, eliminate it. Structure work so it's as engaging as it can be (Goffee & Jones, 2013). When followers feel that their work is unimportant or futile, productivity and motivation plummet (Ariely et al., 2008).

Some inner skeptics may have just popped in to say: "But these lawyers are paid a lot of money. That should be enough. Why should I have to go to all this extra effort to insert rainbows and unicorns into their days?" The short answer is this: You don't have to. It's totally up to you. I assume you're reading this book because you're interested in maximizing work engagement—in getting the best work from lawyers who are energized to help clients and the firm grow over the long haul. Piles of studies show that simply reminding people of their paychecks is not the best way to reach that goal.

The work of Dr. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke, underscores this point. He and his colleagues set up two studies to investigate whether even a minimum level of meaningfulness affects motivation and performance—or whether a profit motive is enough (Ariely et al., 2008). In their experiments, they did not set a high bar for the infusion of meaningfulness. A task was considered more meaningful if some other person simply acknowledged the completion of the work and if participants understood how their work might be linked (even tangentially) to some objective.

In the first experiment, a group of MIT students were handed sheets of paper with simple word puzzles that they were asked to solve. They were paid a declining wage per unit (e.g., $0.55 for the first puzzle, $.050 for the second puzzle, and so on) until they decided to stop working or reached $.05. Three different groups participated. In what was labeled the "Acknowledged" group, when participants finished each puzzle, they handed it to the researcher who examined it closely and then filed it away in a folder. In the "Ignored" group, when participants handed in each puzzle, the researcher placed it on a big stack of papers without looking at it. For the "Shredded" group, when participants handed in each puzzle, the researcher promptly destroyed it in a paper shredder—zschhhhip—without even glancing at it.

Can you guess what happened? The result was that participants in the Acknowledged group completed significantly more puzzles (an average of nine) than participants in the other two groups (who finished an average of about six). Almost half of the participants in the Acknowledged group worked until their wage dropped all the way to zero. The participants in the Ignored and Shredded groups could have made more money by continuing to do more puzzles. But they chose not to. The perceived futility of their work killed their motivation.

One striking finding was the lack of much difference between the Ignored and the Shredded groups. The researchers expected that the Shredded group would complete the fewest puzzles because of the violent destruction of their work. In fact...