‘How leaders kill meaning at work’ by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, McKinsey Quarterly, January 2012

This article focuses on an issue around strategy that does not always get enough coverage, the importance of communicating and engaging key people to achieve implementation.  However it tends to have a negative approach, focussing on what top managers often do badly rather than positive suggestions to get it right.

Nevertheless there are some interesting insights and examples, taken from a recent book by the authors ‘The Progress Principle’.  The central theme is that, to achieve fulfilment at work, managers and employees have to see meaning and progress in what they do.  Yet this meaning is often undermined by top managers who keep shifting goals, failing to keep people informed and being dismissive about the importance of the work that is being done.  To be fully motivated managers require incentives, recognition, clear goals and interest in progress of their work; but too often they fail to receive this kind of support.

The essential factor is for the person at the top to be seen and heard doing and saying the right things.  The article quotes four traps that CEOs frequently fall into and which should be avoided; these are based on interviews with 669 managers in a range of companies.  The labels for these traps are:

• ‘Mediocrity Signals’ - talking the talk about innovation and investment, then cutting costs in the areas needed to achieve these goals
• ‘Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder’ - shifting from one initiative to another, not allowing time for initiatives to succeed
• ‘Corporate Keystone Cops’ - lack of coordination, complex structures, lack of functional coordination
• ‘Misbegotten BHAGs’ - grandiose plans (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) that are unrealistic and not based on rational analysis

There are some suggestions of ways to avoid these traps but these do not emerge from the research and come across as rather obvious and unoriginal; for instance strategic clarity, taking the employees perspective, early warning systems, higher purpose, support talk with action.

On the evidence of the article, I would not recommend moving onto the book.  There is too much emphasis on the negative and the positives feel too much like motherhood and apple pie.

Click here to view the article in full:

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_leaders_kill_meaning_at_work_2910