Meaning Making Leadership

Over the course of the next few blogs, we will touch on the concept of Meaning Making Leadership. In pursuit of sustainability and profitability, companies create change through downsizing, attempting to do more with less, demand deciphering and implementation of new technologies, and introduce a host of other stressor and destabilizers. Employees at all levels of the enterprise attempt to “make sense” of these challenges and changes in their pursuit of meaning and meaning’s precipitates including higher productivity, better decision making, claiming responsibility for actions, happiness, understanding, and acceptance. Leadership’s principle purpose is to make meaning and to guide others to make meaning for themselves. This and future posts will provide a list of principles and meaning determinants that, if employed in the workplace, will stimulate increased meaning, more productive employees, and the foundation for a high performance organization.

Robert Richer in his Doctoral Dissertation, Meaning-Making by Involuntarily Reassigned Employees http://dspace.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/120/5/dissertation.pdf noted, “Meaning making or sensemaking is what employees do as they navigate through reassignment activities as organizations balance workforce and business demands” (p.1) such as profitability and sustainability. “In this knowledge era both individual and collective meaning making have been identified as important to the success of organizations” (p.2). Although meaning appears to be a critical factor in business success, the key factor of meaning is rarely if ever mentioned or considered in making either strategic or day-to-day decisions. This may be because meaning appears too “fluffy,” too hard to measure, not critical to success, or is simply rejected outright as not important. Alternate metrics (e.g. productivity, sick leave levels, clicks on a website) appear to deliver sufficient understanding of success that it becomes a rational business decision to avoid the meaning quagmire. In response, MyKnowledgeCoach identifies probable meaning making principles and determinants at the leader’s disposal and which are key to the leader’s reach and ability to guide the organization to long-term success. In the next blog we will begin discussing what some of these meaning making tools are.