Resources: FAQs
1. Organizations must appeal to shareholders – continually improve financial performance – does Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ recognize this?
6. Is Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ an attempt to bring spirituality into the workplace?
7. Your answer to #6 spoke of a businesses higher-purpose, how is that achieved?
1. Organizations must appeal to shareholders by continually improving financial performance. Does Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ recognize this?
Absolutely. Achieving material success, organizationally and personally, is one-half of what Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ addresses. Achieving productive meaning must consider both external (money, status and recognition) and internal (sense of purpose, contribution to others and relationship quality) drivers.
Successful organizations deliver what society values and are materially rewarded in the process; the same can be said for individuals.
2. Our organization is stretched; many improvement initiatives are vying for prioritization and resources. Is Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ just another option to consider?
No. Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ is not a new program requiring decision-making and/or resource trade-offs. Bringing Meaning Into Monday is a philosophy and approach that augments any activity and/or investment currently underway within your organization, whereby achieving a step-change in return on current investments.
Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ addresses the social and/or relationship elements that underpin any successful initiative, resulting in increased organizational commitment and long-term sustainability.
3. Achieving ‘meaning’ is different to different people, how does Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ address this?
Not only does achieving meaning vary between individuals, it’s also relative to that individual's situation at the time; it’s not static.
Bringing Meaning Into Monday™, while improving organizational performance, improves work-life balance; improving the quality of one's work life will naturally spillover into all other facets of a person's life.
4. Meaning seems to be a rather "soft" or altruistic subject. Initiatives emphasizing people frequently fail or don't sustain themselves. What is different about Bringing Meaning into Monday™?
Achieving meaning is a rather "soft" subject. We are dealing with human psyche and emotions, which vary person to person and situation to situation. For many leaders, who are products of a linear, logical and bottom line world, this is an uncomfortable arena, therefore a frequently neglected one.
With that said, Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ approaches this "soft" subject in a "hard" or structural way. While humanistic or "soft" traits such as empathy, encouragement and acceptance are valuable, we recognize that by themselves they are difficult to connect directly to the bottom line.
By first emphasizing value creation (e.g., new benefits, service ease and cost optimization), Bringing Meaning Into Monday™:
a) Speaks in the bottom line or "hard" language of today's leaders,
b) Focuses attention on the needs and priorities of the recipients (customers and/or coworkers),
c) Surfaces the fact that people, teams, departments and organizations can no longer go it alone.
In today's interconnected and dynamic world, addressing recipients needs and priorities requires greater collaboration versus isolation. As a result, whether people initially like each other or not, they quickly discover they are dependent on the skills, diverse perspectives and contributions of others. This approach tends to result in greater empathy, encouragement and acceptance of others (i.e., the humanistic or "soft" traits outlined earlier).
Similar to sports, successful coaches ensure that the players, often from diverse backgrounds, understand the end-goal of the team. Which is typically scoring and winning (Or, in business terms, generating value and making money). Knowing the end-goal, and being individually rewarded relative to your contributions in achieving it, will enable a performance driven, energetic, creative, productive and meaningful work climate.
Bottom line: Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ first appeals to today's boardroom realities (profit, innovation and growth) by taking a value- and people-centered approach. We are a material world, therefore starting there makes sense.
5. It appears the applicability of Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ extends well beyond work and/or organizations, is this true?
Yes. Historically, people have achieved greater meaning by surrounding themselves with others who share their views. They establish common ground with others of like thought, which validates and reinforces their views and opinions. This is not the way that most organizations, in order to compete in today's interconnected world, now operate.
People need to establish comfort and common ground with people of unlike beliefs, experiences and worldviews; establishing shared goals without requiring each party to sacrifice their inherent self-interests and/or beliefs.
Sustainable success, personally and organizationally, is contingent on welcoming diverse, even opposing, thoughts; respecting alternative worldviews and beliefs.
6. Is Bringing Meaning Into Monday™ an attempt to bring spirituality into the workplace?
That depends on how you define spirituality; in actual fact, spirituality has always been there.
Spirituality is about aligning people to a higher purpose - helping individuals see themselves in the context of a bigger picture. Aligning people with the bigger picture surfaces synergies, leverages resources, increases creativity, reconciles differences and facilitates a greater sense of community and social harmony.
There are four energy sources available within all institutions - physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. The first two - physical and intellectual - are reaching capacity. There are limits as to how hard or how much a person can work and/or how smart they can be. Relative to emotional, there is excess capacity available, and leaders capable of improving relationship quality and tapping into the hearts of their people will uncover a latent reservoir of human motivation. A virtually untapped region of human energy, however, is spiritual. As stated above, this is about providing people with a sense of purpose rather than advocating a particular religious ideology. Organizations capable of unlocking this spiritual region will discover an infinite and self-perpetuating source of energy, creativity and resilience.
When you apply spirituality within the context of work, a higher purpose is achieved by aligning people with the goals and priorities of their organization, priorities that are focused on delivering value to customers, coworkers and communities. The social context of work improves (e.g., teamwork, relationship quality and creativity) as people increase their understanding and fit. Differences are respected, and a person's sense of purpose increases as does their appreciation of the contribution of others.
7. Your answer to #6 spoke of a businesses higher purpose, how is that achieved?
It's important to frame and/or clarify what is the higher purpose of business, which is providing societal value and being materially rewarded in the process. As organizations center themselves - strategies, processes, resources and capabilities - on the needs of their customers and/or fellow coworkers they will discover a sustainable route to continual growth, creativity, teamwork and profitability. Financial success and shareholder value, in turn, are an outcome versus the objective of business.
