A leader builds a sense of meaningfulness among his members
To become a great leader, you should be able to build a sense of meaningfulness among your members. There are four core strategies that can be deployed to instill a sense of meaningfulness:
• Clearly identified passions
• Exciting vision
• Relevant task purposes
• Whole tasks
Clearly Identifying Passions
The team needs to identify its shared passions for a number of reasons. Identifying passions moves them to the foreground in the team’s thinking about motivation. Without the clarity created by identifying and naming passions, a sense of meaningfulness is a mysterious, hit-or-miss experience at work. Once the team understands the contents of its passions, it can pursue meaningfulness in a more systematic way: “Aha, that’s what we care about. Now let’s go after it.” Finally, understanding its shared passions is a powerful unifying force for a team. Teammates are likely to think more highly of each other and to treat each other as allies in pursuit of a common purpose.
Providing an Exciting Vision
A vision is a big purpose for the team?a macro image of a future that the team wants to create. It crystallizes the team’s passions into an audacious and exciting possibility that captures the team’s imagination. It is a shared, realizable dream that team members can harness their efforts to achieve. Without this shared vision, the team’s passions lack a focus or target and can be dissipated in different, uncoordinated directions.
Ensuring Relevant Task Purposes
While a vision is a big purpose for the team, team members’ day-to-day work is made up of smaller, more concrete tasks?making things, ordering supplies, filling out reports, attending meetings, and so on. It isn’t enough to lave an exciting vision if many of these micro work tasks remain mundane or pointless. To energize one’s work, it is important that these day-to-day tasks clearly contribute to the vision. Otherwise the drag of the mundane tasks saps the energy provided by the relevant ones.
Providing Whole Tasks
Finally, it is important that work tasks be designed or allocated so that individual workers are given whole projects where possible, or at least major, identifiable portions of a project. This established principle of job design allows workers to make a larger, more identifiable contribution. It also provides workers a larger potential source of pride.
Source: explorehr