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We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between “go to school” and “get a job,” work became the central node of our lives—the very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness.
That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isn’t found in the busyness of the grind—rather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has greater meaning, we change our relationship with it and, more importantly, with ourselves.
On our latest episode of the From the Culture podcast, we spoke with Lenore Skenazy, cofounder and president of the nonprofit Let Grow, about finding meaning at work. And she offered a unique framing for how to rethink work and find alignment. In response to the public backlash she received after penning a 2008 column in the New York Daily News about letting her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone, Skenazy founded Let Grow with NYU business school professor Jonathan Haidt to help parents rethink the job of parenting.
In our venture to become parents, we didn’t imagine our job would be that of a supervisor or a concierge to our children. Instead, we imagined ourselves as guardians who would help our children grow. For Skenazy, the meaning of parenting is to prepare our children for adulthood, not to protect them from it.
A deep rethink
Although this may seem like a simple repositioning, it’s actually a profound recontextualization. When we think about parenting as a job of preparation as opposed to protection, it gives our work new meaning and, as a result, we engage in it differently. As Skenazy argues, when the work of parenting is about preparation, we grant our children freedom and independence to navigate the world on their own. Not in a way that endangers them but, rather, challenges them. When this happens, not only do they grow into more resilient humans who will likely be better prepared for the world, but we—as parents—get more fulfillment from our work.
The benefit of this recontextualization also applies to our professional work. When we reframe the meaning of work, we change our alignment with it. The result of this framing not only improves our well-being but also improves the work. The behavioral science is unambiguous to this fact. When work is more meaningful, we’re more engaged, more committed, and more satisfied. Moreover, these effects produce greater productivity and higher effort because we’re more willing to “go the extra mile” when we feel more fulfilled.
A win-win
This phenomenon happens on the individual level but scales when we consider the greater work of the organization. When workers collaborate in shared meanings, their collective outputs are optimized, and the organization is more likely to flourish because of it. This isn’t about “touchy-feely,” “woo-woo” vibes to make people feel good. This is a renegotiation of work that empirically changes how we work, the impact of our work on the organization, and its impact on us. It’s a win-win across the board.
But that’s not the world of work we occupy. Instead, our current framing of work is one that valorizes grind and prioritizes compensation—which is transactional at best, but in most cases adversarial. That’s not to say that labor should not be sufficiently compensated, but that the exchange between wages and work should be more than just monetary. They should be meaningful as well.
Suffice it to say that work is in desperate need of work. Not more grind, more hours, or more late nights, but more meaning. The best part about it is that meaning is socially negotiated and, therefore, we can change it ourselves. It doesn’t require permission or approval—just rethinking. We explore this in greater depth with Skenazy on our latest episode of From the Culture, available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
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