Our Guide to the Summer 2022 Issue
These summaries will help you navigate our summer 2022 lineup.
Unlock the Power of Purpose
Álvaro Lleó de Nalda, Alex Montaner, Amy C. Edmondson, and Phil Sotok
Key Insight: A new framework can help companies implement a corporate purpose that engages employees and drives their daily actions.
Top Takeaways: To benefit from corporate purpose, leaders need a deliberate, sustained approach to implementing it. The authors developed the Purpose Strength Framework, which provides a set of three processes for doing so. Purpose knowledge ensures that employees understand the purpose and its connection to business strategy. Purpose internalization connects the purpose with employees’ values. Finally, purpose contribution measures how the company has fulfilled its purpose and identifies how it can continue to do so.
How a Values-Based Approach Advances DEI
Anselm A. Beach and Albert H. Segars
Key Insight: A new model provides a structured and measurable framework for transforming the workplace through diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Top Takeaways: Leaders seeking to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in their organizations need approaches that frame DEI as an opportunity for all employees to meaningfully engage with. The authors advocate a new approach: the Values/Principles Model, or VPM. It is based on cultivating four values — representation, participation, application, and appreciation — along with seven guiding principles, including “Build a moral case” and “Develop new mental models.”
Why We Don’t Talk About Meaning at Work
Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, Catherine Bailey, Adrian Madden, and Lani Morris
Key Insight: Managers can move beyond four key barriers to talking about — and cocreating — meaningful work in their organizations to improve employee engagement, productivity, and innovation.
Top Takeaways: The more employers try to tell employees where to find meaning in their work, the less likely people are to find it. An authentic sense of purpose is discovered, not imposed. But first, managers and employees must learn how to talk with one another about this broad and somewhat existential issue. The barriers that make such conversations difficult include discomfort talking about big issues in a work context, questions around the definition of meaning, trouble articulating the pain points that inhibit meaningful work, and a sense that only leaders deserve to find meaning at work.