Meaning and Purpose in the Workplace
There is a strong and growing trend towards the importance of meaning and purpose in the health and social care sector. New starters want careers that are meaningful, talented individuals can be retained if they feel they are appreciated and making a difference, and leadership teams and shareholders are increasingly aware of the need to deliver more than just saving cost or increasing profits.
Individuals and organisations that are led by a powerful sense of purpose tend to leverage greater performance and commitment, and when people can see how their role contributes to something more than themselves, they generate meaning from what they do.
Our meaning and purpose solutions
Our experience has shown that leaders in the health and care sector require skills across the different levels of our leadership model to develop the knowledge, skills and mindset for a deeper sense of purpose and to create more meaning in the workplace.
We work with organisations to co-create a bespoke solution that fits the specific needs of the organisation, spanning one or more of the leadership levels:
Personal Leadership
At a personal level, having meaning and purpose means deeply understanding your personal ‘why’ and knowing how you find meaning in what you do. Our approach involves supporting health and care leaders to: identify their values and guiding principles and explore how these relate to their work; challenge people to consistently put their values into action across all their activities; and develop skills for maintaining their connection to what is meaningful, through every-day and higher purpose meaning.
Relational Leadership
Leadership that grows meaning and purpose requires relational skills that are appreciative and support people to see how their contributions are important. Our solutions involve: learning about how different people understand the concepts of meaning and purpose; building skills in emotional intelligence; understanding how to have conversations about how people find meaning and purpose; and learning about a positive psychology approach to leveraging strengths through appreciative conversations.
Team Leadership
The ability to create a sense of meaning and purpose in groups and teams involves leadership that can align individuals around the collective expression of values. Our approach involves: supporting leaders to develop skills so they can help team members to align their personal aims to a group purpose; align team activities with organisational aims; develop synergies and collaborative working; and develop practices that enable the team to congruently express their values through their actions.
Systemic Leadership
Developing a leadership culture underpinned by meaning and purpose means developing systems and processes that align to making a contribution beyond the direct interests of the organisation to the wider local and global community. Our programmes involve: supporting organisations to identify a shared purpose and agree on their collective values, develop processes through which they can measure whether they are living to those values and hold themselves to account; and share and celebrate their successes for the benefit of the organisation, stakeholders, employees and communities.
Our programmes are designed to support individuals and organisations to:
- Achieve a greater understanding of the importance of meaning and purpose
- Examine and clarify their values
- Identify patterns in how they find meaning in their life and work
- Understand the factors implicit in leading others toward a purpose
- Develop appreciation for the opportunity to be of service to others
- Develop mental strategies that support growing a sense of meaning
- Understand and gain practical skills in supporting colleagues how to extract a sense of meaning from what they do
- Gain a practical understanding of how to generate more meaning in the workplace
- Develop action plans for themselves and their organisation