Seth Godin’s latest book is out. As with every book he’s written, I preordered it without seeing it. I have that much faith in Seth’s work. He’s never disappointed me, either.
While this book is not significantly (pun!) different from his others, focusing on the term significance in the title means the book lives up to its name.
The Song of Significance is about creating work that matters. While that’s not new, his framing of the reasons for it and why this matters now is. Being kind to your employees and colleagues and designing healthy workplaces is nothing new, either. Nor is shaping your destiny through connecting with your values and skills. There are rows of bookshelves and tens of thousands of online posts that make the same case.
What’s different with this book and its message with its timing. We are coming out of the most significant health event the world has experienced in a generation (COVID-19). The implications of this are still being felt and will be for years.
We leave the COVID emergency and immediately find ourselves confronted with climate change. In 2022 we wore masks to protect ourselves from COVID-19, while in 2023, we did it to protect ourselves from wildfire smoke particulates.
Last year, we were talking about returning to the office, and this year we’re talking about that and the role of generative AI in shaping what we do in that office.
It’s no surprise that I’ve seen such as lackadaisical climate in workplaces this year. People are exhausted from change - planned or otherwise - and all that’s come with it and the evidence backs this up.
Practice Implications of Significance
Seth’s point is that we have the tools and technology to do mundane, meaningless work that adds little value to humans. We have no shortage of work requiring human skills and a clear and present set of challenges where our efforts are needed. What’s needed are organizational opportunities to bring human capacity and tasks together.
The age of industrialized work is not over, but it’s becoming less meaningful (if it ever was so) than before. In working with clients who recognize this, the changes are visible and profound. Giving your team trust and power is a gift that is rewarded many times over. Doing work that matters, showing up for each other, and being accountable for the quality of our work, not just the volume produced is a sustainable way to operate. Workers stay. Leaders get more from their team and produce better things.
And the work is better.
To illustrate - and speaking anecdotally — public health organizations I that worked with who undertook some form of after-action or lessons-learned review and integrated those lessons into their post-pandemic planning in earnest, did better. By better, I mean staff were able to heal, plans were more fulsome and suited to the current context (and not just re-doing what was done before) and staff across the organization were more onboard with changes. There’s a lot of variation, but the essence of this exercise was to not just gather data, but to capture significance in the work.
Those professionals who felt they made a contribution, were listened to, and had that contribution recognized — no matter whether front line or senior leadership levels — reported more positive sentiments toward their work.
The more this activity was treated as a ‘box-checking’ exercise, the less these stories were present. When you treat humans as a resource, they respond as such, not as humans.
Seth Godin is right.
Designing for Significance
My work over the past three years with organizations looking to respond to and recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have affirmed the role of significance in shaping our professional lives and beyond. It’s affirmed the need to design in significance to our work.
Leaders that listen. Workers — at all levels — who listen, too, and feel confident and safe to share, learn, and create together. Work that’s designed around products and performance, not false proxies like checks in boxes. This is significant.
It means that the work and the workers won’t be forgotten or lost as so many others are. Those that are cogs in wheels will be replaced by AI or something else because that’s how systems work. Workers know this.
Caring for ourselves and our colleagues is a way to ensure we remain significant because we work hard for those who care for us. When we create significant work that makes a difference to those we serve, our clients or customers care, too. It’s a virtuous cycle, especially in a world where massification is so rampant.
This is a practice lesson for me. When I get discouraged or lost, I anchor myself to significance and that makes all the difference.
Thanks, Seth for reminding us of that.
Photo by Yevhenii Dubrovskyi on Unsplash