A decade ago, computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called the “godfather of AI,” told an audience, “People should stop training radiologists now.”

Hinton’s prediction was based on AI’s increasing ability to analyze complex images, one of a radiologist’s core tasks. His prediction echoed an often-repeated assumption: that automating major parts of a job eliminates the need for the job itself.

But a decade later, the problem facing radiology isn’t that there are too many radiologists without jobs. It’s that there are too few radiologists to meet growing demand.

So, what happened?

Artificial intelligence didn’t eliminate the radiologist’s job. It changed its composition and skill profile. Labor economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo have shown that technology doesn’t simply eliminate work. It changes tasks humans perform, and, in turn, the relative value of the skills required to perform them.

In 2026, radiology professors Frederico Bruno and Alessandra Spelendiani wrote in an article aptly titled “Soft Skills in Radiology: The Human Core of a Technological Specialty” that as AI automates imaging tasks, “uniquely human strengths such as judgment, ethical reasoning, empathy, and leadership will become even more central to radiologists’ value.”

The shift in radiology work reflects a broader change underway in many occupations. Artificial intelligence is changing job compositions and, therefore, which skills matter most.

While there’s been much commentary about the importance of human skills in the age of AI, emerging evidence suggests one skill set may become especially critical: relational skills. Unlike other job-specific human capabilities, nearly every job requires working with other people.

As AI takes on more technical and operational work, relational work may command an increasing premium. The problem is that many organizations aren’t prepared to develop, measure, and reward the skills to do it.

The Relational Premium

Imagine two lawyers at the same firm. Both are experts in their field, but one is especially skilled at analyzing complex documents, and the other excels at building client relationships. Now imagine this firm begins using AI for document analysis tasks.

AI won’t eliminate the need for lawyers, but it will shift what they spend their time doing and, as a result, make relationship-building skills (and the lawyers who have them) more valuable.

Economists Lukas Freund and Lukas Mann recently modeled this dynamic, using data on the tasks people perform across occupations to estimate what happens to workers and wages when AI automates some of their tasks. They project that as AI takes on more information-processing tasks, “the return to social skills rises, that to analytical skills falls.”

Social skills already carried a premium long before generative AI. Harvard economist David Deming and Yale economist Lisa Kahn analyzed millions of job postings from 2010 to 2015 and found that jobs requiring more social skills were associated with higher pay and better firm performance, with evidence that employers especially valued jobs that required both.

This was echoed in a 2026 study by Oxford University labor market researcher Elina Mäkelä and colleagues, who analyzed over 30 million job postings and observed that AI-related roles requiring skills for “working with others” tended to offer higher salaries than AI roles that didn’t.

In the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs survey, the share of employers identifying social influence and leading others as a core skill increased by 22 percent in two years. This was the largest increase of any skill category measured.

This doesn’t mean technical skills are becoming unimportant. But as AI takes on more technical work, relational capability may become a key differentiator.

And if relational skills are becoming more economically consequential, organizations need to stop treating them as noble personality traits or “soft skills” and start treating them with the same rigor as technical skills.

The problem is that many organizations don’t appear ready to meet this growing need.

The Relational Skills Gap

In a 2024 poll of over 2,000 employees, just 35 percent said their organizations offer relational skills training, while nearly half reported that managers and team leaders have a major skills gap in communication and interpersonal skills.

On the employer side, a National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2025 survey showed 96% of employers rated communication as highly important for new graduates, but only 54% rated recent graduates as highly proficient in it.

In my experience working with leaders across diverse types of organizations, this isn’t an awareness problem. Most leaders and organizations know relational skills are important. It’s a rigor problem.

We’ve collectively called relational capabilities “soft.” Any time we see something as “soft” or “simple,” we tend to approach it with less intention and rigor. As a result, much of the existing “soft skills” training is optional or looks like a one-off workshop, leadership development series, or a few online modules.

Most organizations would never treat technical skills that way. For example, consider training someone on the technical skill of financial modeling. We’d break the capability down into specific, demonstrable skills like constructing formulas, building models, and analyzing scenarios. Then we’d give real problems to solve to practice those skills, evaluate the quality of their work using agreed-upon criteria, and require demonstrated proficiency to occupy a role, get promoted, or get paid more.

Now consider how we tend to train someone to do something like give developmental feedback. We send them to a workshop, teach a framework, or have them go through a required supervisory course. But it often stops there.

How often do we break relational capabilities down into discrete skills, give people real scenarios to practice those skills, observe and provide feedback, and require them to demonstrate proficiency before occupying, say, a leadership role? What are the consequences for not doing it well or the rewards for proficiency?

The problem isn’t that people simply lack relational skills. It’s that many organizations lack rigorous systems for developing them.

Treat Relational Skills Like Technical Skills

To solve this problem, organizations should apply the same rigor to relational skill-building as they do to technical skill-building by defining, developing, measuring, and rewarding them.

1. Define. Start by developing more specific, operational definitions of the relational skills required, rather than using broad labels like “people skills,” “communication,” or “emotional intelligence.” For example, “active listening” is a category of skills, not a skill itself. “Before responding, accurately summarize the other person’s perspective and check for understanding” is an observable skill. Relational skills can usually be grouped into four major categories: skills for understanding, skills for connecting, skills for communicating, and skills for navigating relationships.

2. Develop. Knowing how to do something isn’t the same as being able to do it. Relational skills require observed practice to hone. Give people real opportunities to practice specific skills, evaluate their performance against set criteria, provide feedback, and repeat. The Cleveland Clinic, for example, trains clinicians in this way by operationalizing specific relationship-centered communication skills and having clinicians practice them in realistic scenarios with observation and feedback. In a study of more than 1,500 physicians, patient communication ratings, perceived empathy, and burnout improved significantly.

3. Measure. Measure proficiency in relational skills regularly. Move beyond assessment instruments that measure employee sentiment, such as engagement surveys, and start measuring people’s experiences with each other’s observed relational skills. For example, instead of determining if someone is a “good communicator,” assess the frequency with which others observe them demonstrating the skills that meet the criteria of good communication through direct observation and evaluations.

4. Reward. Finally, demonstrated proficiency in relational skills should have clear consequences. If someone wouldn’t qualify for a technical role without demonstrating the technical skills to do it, they shouldn’t qualify for a leadership role without demonstrating the relational skills to do it. Tie promotions and pay to relational proficiency, along with technical proficiency. This shift in rewards is already occurring. In August 2026, Ernst & Young announced a $100 million investment to recognize skills and behaviors it believes will differentiate the firm in the future, including collaborating with and leading others. As its chief talent officer put it, “How we reward our people defines what we value as a firm.”

Rethinking What It Means to Be Skilled

It’s been over a decade since Hinton predicted we should stop training radiologists, but we still need radiologists. What’s changed is what it means to be a skilled radiologist.

As AI takes on more technical work and is deployed in more organizations, the ability to complement that technology and understand, connect with, communicate with, and navigate relationships with other people will only become a more important part of the job.

The question is whether our organizations, and the people who comprise them, are prepared to capitalize on that shift.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., researches purposeful leadership, meaningful work, and mattering, and wrote The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance (Harvard Business Review Press). He helps leaders and organizations create cultures where everyone feels noticed, affirmed, and needed.

Explore more of his research, writing, and resources at zachmercurio.com.

Are Relational Skills Becoming More Valuable Than Technical Skills? was originally published in The Academic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A couple of years ago, a supervisor asked me to work with a group of supposedly “unmotivated” maintenance workers.

One of their daily summer responsibilities was washing the buildings' bottom floor windows in a large complex. I interviewed each employee and asked, “If you were running this place, what would you do differently?”

These were not “unmotivated” workers but wise people with opinions on how to make their work better. I felt the energy. I barely had enough time to listen to all their ideas. After an interview, one of the workers pulled me aside and asked if we could talk.

What she told me next explained the “motivation” issues on the team.

Her supervisors tasked her with the daily cleaning of the bottom floor windows of the complex. She came in, did the task, and then finished her day. After about a week, she noticed a confusing pattern. Every afternoon at 3 o’clock, the sprinkler system turned on.

She observed that the sprinklers were all aimed to splash every window. Dried water splotches quickly appeared. Each subsequent morning, she began by cleaning an avoidable mess. She soon realized that this was why the windows had to be washed daily.

Excited about the discovery, she asked to meet with her supervisor. She explained that if they could readjust the sprinklers’ aim, they could save much worker time and energy. She eagerly awaited praise for her time-saving idea. But her supervisor responded, “That’s the sprinkler people’s problem. That’s not our problem. I need you to do your job.”

She was dejected, shut down, and silenced in a few seconds. She shared her voice and idea but was told to “do your job.”

That was five years ago.

Anti-Mattering

When we share our voice, we share part of ourselves. When our voice is unheard, we become unheard. That worker later told me, “…in this job I feel pointless. Why do I bother?”

So, she “put her head down” and just did her job and nothing more.

Was she “unmotivated?” No. She experienced what psychologist Gordon Flett termed “anti-mattering” — feeling insignificant to those around us.

Anti-mattering is the inverse of mattering. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find that many “motivation” or “people” issues in our organizations and society are anti-mattering issues.

To someone who doesn’t feel like they matter, it’s easy for nothing to matter.

Anti-mattering destroys energy, undercuts self-worth, reduces self-esteem, and can predict unhealthy stress, clinical anxiety, and depression. Feeling unimportant also contributes to chronically low engagement, commitment, and performance. In workplaces, data show that close to 30% of workers feel invisible at work, 27% feel ignored, and almost half feel undervalued.

Feelings of not mattering result in acts of withdrawal or acts of desperation.

Acts of Withdrawal

In March 2022, a career coach and influencer asked his TikTok followers, “Do you have a job you don’t want to quit?” Then, he recommended, “Try being lazy instead. Many people are just kicking back and taking it easy instead of quitting their jobs, and it’s working.”

The “quiet quitting” trend was born. Around the same time, in China, a user on the social media site Baidu wrote, “Lying Flat Is Justice,” spurring the viral “lying flat” movement. The “lying flat” movement is a collective renunciation of work or effort by overworked, stressed younger workers who feel undervalued and unsupported by society.

The fact that these terms went viral is not evidence of a lazy, entitled generation. Instead, their virality is evidence of the ubiquity of anti-mattering in modern work and society.

Acts of withdrawal are survival and coping mechanisms and are the inevitable byproducts of feeling insignificant. Silence, withholding, and isolating are other common withdrawal behaviors.

The eventual and terminal withdrawal behavior is leaving, commonly labeled in organizations as “turnover.”

Acts of Desperation

When feelings of anti-mattering become consistent and persistent, people often act out in desperation.

Desperation is a state of despair that results in extreme behavior.

Disagreeableness, gossip, complaining, blaming, and protesting are often frantic attempts at getting attention and securing significance. In my practice, I find that many employees whom leaders have labeled “difficult employees” are usually the most unseen, unheard, and under-recognized employees.

Take “gossip,” for example. Research shows the two most prominent predictors of negative gossip are what’s known as “psychological contract violation” and abusive supervision. A “psychological contract” is the unwritten, informal expectations of support and fair treatment that exist between an employer and their leader or an organization.

Abusive supervision is characterized by disrespecting, controlling, undervaluing, and manipulating. Surveys show that outright abusive management affects nearly 13% of workers, and almost 84% of people indicate they’ve worked for a boss who exhibits uncivil and degrading behavior.

When people can’t speak up to a leader, they’ll eventually speak out to one another.

Gossip and complaining are usually symptoms of a silencing culture or leader, not simply a “bad employee.”

Decades of studies in psychology show that the most common predictors of attention-seeking behaviors are the unmet emotional needs of validation, support, and positive reinforcement and the resultant low self-esteem.

But we often mislabel these attention-seeking behaviors as “people problems.”

Nearly every “people problem” is a cultural and systems problem. In many of these cases, the actual underlying problem is systemic anti-mattering.

When people feel unseen and unheard, they typically resign themselves to helplessness or act out to secure a sense of significance they don’t experience.

The Answer

According to Flett, the term anti-mattering pays homage to the physicist Paul Dirac, who developed the modern theory of antimatter. In physics, “antimatter” is ordinary matter with an opposite electric charge.

People get a powerful charge from experiences of mattering and the same equally powerful, yet harmful, charge from experiences of anti-mattering.

It’s tempting to think the maintenance worker’s supervisor was just a lousy boss. But all our teams, organizations, and communities have “sprinkler issues” — small, banal moments that cause people to feel unseen, unheard, and unvalued.

To counteract experiences of anti-mattering, we must root out these insidious moments and consciously work to create experiences of mattering and ensure those around us feel noticed, affirmed, and needed.

This article contains excerpts from Zach’s forthcoming book on the power of mattering.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., is a purposeful leadership, mattering, meaningful work, and positive organizations researcher, speaker, and author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”

There’s no shortage of “be caring” advice for leaders — and for a good reason. Surveys show that about 50% of people don’t feel valued at work, almost 30% feel “invisible,” and just 24% think their employer cares about their well-being.

For organizations, the caring deficit is consequential. Feeling disrespected and undervalued can be almost ten times more predictive of turnover than pay or benefits. One study found that “uncaring leaders” was one of the most common reasons people left a job without another lined up.

For individuals, feeling uncared for by their leaders can be crushing.

A new study found that for 70% of people, their direct leader had a more significant impact on their overall mental health than their doctor or therapist. A 2021 American Psychological Association study found that 59% of employees experience adverse mental health outcomes because of work experiences. Between 2014 and 2018, rates of depression and anxiety among employees rose by 18%, and between 2022 and 2023, rates increased by 25%.

A key contributor to a higher risk for clinical anxiety and depression is “anti-mattering” — feeling insignificant to others.

There’s a reason why the national suicide prevention lifeline is titled the “You Matter Lifeline.” When people feel like they matter to others, studies show that objective indicators of chronic stress abate. Research including thousands of adolescents and adults repeatedly shows increased feelings of mattering correlate with a lower risk of depression.

The solutions proposed to leaders for addressing the caring crisis are maddeningly simple: Recognize people. Check in with people. Show empathy. Be compassionate.

My job is to research and help leaders do these things, but my second grader gave me pause when he asked me, “So, is your job just to help people be nice to each other?”

Well, yes.

Modern leadership development seems akin to restoring elementary school morality.

However, his question gets to something more profound and raises more important questions we’re not asking enough: Why don’t or can’t leaders care? What makes it hard for leaders to do something so simple? Where have we gone wrong? Why do I have a job?

I refuse to believe leaders wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, today I’d like to be an ‘uncaring leader.’”

I’ve spent the last several months researching the root of uncaring leadership in work organizations. Five significant barriers to caring kept emerging.

To create more caring in work, we must create systems that enable caring.

1. Skill: Common Sense Isn’t Common Practice

As my second grader reminded me, caring is “common sense.” It’s “common sense” that we should be kind to people, respect them, check in on them, support them, or affirm them. But look at your “to-do” list today. Which one of those actions made it on your list?

There’s a gap between what we “know” is important and what we strategically and intentionally do. If you need evidence, scroll up and read the statistics in the first few paragraphs. The “common sense” approach to caring isn’t working.

Good intentions require great skills.

You (or your organization) probably evaluate skills aimed at performing and producing. Do you assess your ability and skills to care? What is your personal and professional development plan for noticing others or ensuring they feel heard? What is your technique for authentically checking in on people?

One of the most prominent mistakes leaders make is obsessing about lagging indicators like performance and productivity and neglecting the leading indicator of everything: people. That’s why we tend to have processes and practices for everything else in organizations except for what genuinely matters to human beings.

When it comes to leadership and caring for others, we can’t rely on people’s “intuition” anymore.

A leader’s craft is people. Great leaders hone their craft.

Intuition doesn’t scale. Practices and skills do.

A recent survey found that 60% of employers say new employees (and future leaders) lack basic interpersonal skills.

Developing the “hard skills” to care at all levels must be a priority.

A key question: What are the skills, practices, and processes you have in place to ensure the people around you feel cared for?

2. Attention and Energy: The Scarcest Resources

Human attention and energy are the scarcest resources on the planet. Leaders care when they have the attention and energy available to care.

A new Mckinsey study found that middle managers only spend about 28% of their time managing people. Individual contributor (31%), administrative (18%), and strategy-related tasks (23%) consume the rest.

The increasing expectation for caring without increasing resources that enable caring can result in burnout and the depletion of the very energy leaders need to redeem workplaces.

That’s likely why 35% of managers say they feel burned out often or always. Leaders are human beings with vivid and complex lives and face the same stressors outside of work as everyone else.

Sometimes, with added responsibility also comes added invisibility.

Caring for people takes time and energy. We must ensure our systems create more time and regenerate the energy to care.

A key question: Are we creating time and regenerating our (and our leaders’) energy to care?

3. Environment: What’s Possible and What’s Determined

Environment impacts leader behavior in two ways: It can make behavior possible (called environmental possibilism) or determine behavior will occur (called environmental determinism).

If I have an hour on my calendar every week that’s free, my environment makes it possible for me to check in with my team members. But suppose my organization requires me to have regular check-in meetings with my team members and evaluates me on the quality of my relationships with them. In that case, the organizational environment determines that the behavior will occur.

Many environmental conditions in organizations don’t even make it possible to care. If you’re in a distribution center that tracks every minute of your day, taking the time necessary to care becomes nearly impossible. If you’re the clinical leader in a hospital and you’re understaffed and over patient capacity, the possibility of caring behavior occurring is significantly reduced.

Many environmental conditions in organizations make it possible to care but leave enacting care up to chance. For example, suppose leaders are expected to create psychologically safe climates, but they’re not measured and evaluated on how safe their people think it is to speak up. In that case, behaviors of ensuring people feel heard are possible but not determined.

We can’t add more for leaders to “do” without ensuring the environment makes the action possible and determines it will happen.

Formal or informal rewards are one of the most potent ways to influence human behavior through an environment.

We can’t rely on leaders to be morally good in a system that incentivizes them not to be.

If we incentivize and promote self-serving achievement and acquisition, we’ll get leaders who achieve and acquire for themselves. But if we recognize, incentivize, and promote caring behaviors, we’ll likely have more caring leaders.

A key question: What environmental factors may be getting in the way of making caring behaviors possible? Are there ways to reconfigure the environment to ensure caring behaviors occur?

4. Underestimating Impact: The Self-Esteem Problem

At the individual level, many leaders underestimate their impact on others’ lives, preventing them from initiating many small acts of caring that go a long way.

In a recent study, psychologists Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley set up several experiments that allowed people to be kind to others through small acts. For example, in one experiment, the researchers had people write affirming notes to people they knew. In each experiment, the findings were clear: the person doing the act of kindness underestimated its positive effect on the receiver every time.

One primary reason for this miscalculation is chronic low self-esteem. Studies show almost 85% of the world’s population has low self-esteem, which is the judgment of our worth. Forty years of research finds leaders with low self-esteem are more likely to create toxic work environments because of a lack of awareness of and belief in their impact.

Self-esteem is built through experiences of mattering to others.

We can’t expect leaders to care if they don’t feel cared for.

When leaders themselves are or have been treated like they’re dispensable or just a resource to help someone else produce more, they act as if they’re a disposable resource and then treat others the same way. This well-studied phenomenon is called the Pygmalion effect: We become how we’re treated.

One reason leaders may feel like a mere resource is the evolution of work as a “transaction” in our lives. We see the perpetuation of the transactional idea of work in the false separation of “work” and “life.” But “life” happens wherever and whenever a person is alive. Work is part of life, and life occurs at work.

When we perpetuate a false separation between “work” and “life,” it becomes easier not to care about workers (“It’s not personal, it’s just ‘business’”), and workers are conditioned to expect less (“It’s ‘just’ work”).

When leaders realize that people bring their inherent dignity and every human psychological and emotional need into work and have an immense impact on meeting those needs, we build the self-esteem needed to care.

A key question: How do we show leaders how they matter?

5. Courage

The barriers above can seem overwhelming. I was talking to my friend and brilliant systems designer Mack Fogelson recently about these barriers to caring. She told me, “Leaders also need the courage to care.”

Courage is the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.”

For leaders who are becoming aware of the weight of their impact on others’ well-being, want to change but don’t know how, or who are in systems that make it hard to care, we need your courage.

We need your courage to ask for support in learning the skills of caring. We need your courage to redesign systems that enable the attention and energy to care, to seek out and understand your impact, and to fully acknowledge people’s inherent humanity at work.

Abraham Lincoln wrote, “It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”

To fully meet the needs of human beings in organizations, we also need leaders themselves to dare to do what’s right.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., is a purposeful leadership, mattering, meaningful work, and positive organizations researcher, speaker, and author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”

Last month, the U.S. Surgeon General named “mattering at work” a top priority for improving mental health. The announcement reaffirms what we’ve known for many years: Mattering and well-being are inseparable, especially where humans spend 35% of their waking lives.

The official call to prioritize mattering at work is the culmination of several conspiring forces reshaping what work means to and in our lives.

Survey research shows that the pandemic prompted people to reflect more on the quality of their jobs and their lives. Data from the past two years indicate that people left their jobs not for more pay, benefits, or flexibility but largely because of disrespectful cultures, non-inclusive climates, and uncaring leaders.

People deemed “essential” workers are now asking, “Do I feel essential?” We’re experiencing compounding health and job insecurity. The unemployed are returning to work, with studies showing that feelings of worthlessness constitute a significant risk factor for those transitioning from joblessness. Feelings of being forgotten and loneliness are at an all-time high amidst rising calls for social justice and inclusion.

Upheaval events amplify people’s search for meaning, and we’re seeing a grasp for significance and demand for dignity in work. Creating mattering is a necessary answer.

What is Mattering?

Mattering is the belief that we’re significant to the world around us. Psychologists and sociologists find that mattering arises from two primary experiences: 1. Feeling valued by those around us, and 2. Adding value to those around us.

Mattering isn’t the same as self-esteem. Self-esteem is confidence in our worth and abilities. Self-esteem is one internal outcome of experiencing mattering to others. Mattering isn’t interchangeable with “belonging” either. When we feel like we belong, we feel welcomed, accepted, and approved by a group. When we feel like we matter, we feel significant to members of that group — we feel seen, important, and needed through how others treat us. A sense of belonging increases the chance we experience mattering and vice versa.

When people do feel valued and know how they add value in life and work, decades of studies show they’re less likely to experience unhealthy stress, anxiety, and severe depression and much more likely to experience increased self-esteem, motivation, and overall well-being.

In contrast, the perpetual belief that one doesn’t, can’t, and won’t matter is a hallmark of low self-esteem, disengagement in life and work, withdrawal, and clinical depression. One study of 1,026 Tennessee residents found that feeling insignificant predicted objective stress indicators like higher cortisol levels and blood pressure.

It’s easy for nothing to matter to someone who doesn’t believe they matter.

The Mattering Instinct

The need to create mattering at work is not a new well-being trend or “touchy-feely” idea. Creating mattering is about as “touchy-feely” as feeding someone who’s hungry. When we create mattering for others, we meet a basic human need and fulfill a primal survival instinct.

Mattering comes first. When we’re born, our survival depends on whether we matter to others. As a newborn, one of your first reflexes was to lift your head and scan the room to search for someone to care for you. You then reached out to grasp that caretaker. We need the care of others, and our primal need for attachment doesn’t go away as we move into and through adulthood.

The survival instinct for attachment grows into the social need to be noticed and included by others. Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary label the desire for caring interpersonal relationships a “fundamental human motivation.”

New York University philosopher and Humanities Medal recipient Rebecca Newberger Goldstein goes further and deems mattering a core instinct that drives all human behavior. “Our mattering instinct is inseparable from pursuing a coherent human life,” she said in a recent interview.

Mattering is an animating force of life.

That’s why, when someone doesn’t believe they matter at work, it’s easy for nothing to matter. People won’t share their voice if they don’t believe their voice is significant. People won’t use their strengths if they don’t believe they have strengths. People won’t contribute if they don’t believe they have something to contribute. People won’t care until they feel cared for.

Mattering comes first and filling people’s need for significance must be a core practice for redeeming work and revitalizing our organizations and society.

Three primary drivers of mattering at work are: 1. Feeling Noticed, 2. Feeling Affirmed, and 3. Feeling Needed.

Noticing

Noticing others is the deliberate act of seeing someone’s uniqueness, paying attention to the ebbs and flows of their lives, and taking action to show them you see them.

Noticing someone isn’t the same as “knowing” someone. You can know your best friend but not notice that they’re struggling. You can know a team member but not notice that their parent is in the hospital or that they’ve been struggling with a project.

Feeling seen is necessary for mattering, yet it’s often overlooked. Global surveys find close to 43% of employees feel “invisible.” When it comes to taking an interest in others, it seems common sense isn’t common practice.

Here are several practices and skills to ensure people feel noticed:

• Do regular check-ins with employees that focus on their personal lives, stress levels, and work struggles. Simply changing questions from “How are you?” to questions like, “What has your attention right now?” or “What do you need help with? How can I help?” can give you more insight into people’s lives.
• Note critical events and news in people’s personal lives and schedule time to check-in. Remember people’s full names or find out how your employee who was sick a couple of weeks ago is doing.
• Create space for people to share how they’re doing before you discuss what they’re doing. One researched practice is implementing a green, yellow, or red check-in to assess people’s stress levels. Green means you’re feeling in flow and have low stress. Yellow means you’re feeling stressed, and red means you’re overloaded. Studies show that awareness of others’ moods can create a culture of empathy and compassion.
• Practice compassion. When you notice an employee struggling, offer an immediate action to help. Compassion is empathy in action. Spend some time thinking about employee needs or struggles. What can you contribute to help? For example, if you hear an employee say they’re feeling burned out and overloaded at the beginning of a meeting, offer them the opportunity to miss the next meeting to get caught up. Small acts of compassion go a long way to creating mattering.
• Tell people why you missed them if they were gone. When you show someone the significance of their absence, you’re showing them the significance of their presence.
• Make sure people can share their feedback, ideas, or mistakes without fear of retaliation by committing to a climate of psychological safety.

Affirming

Real affirmation is showing people how their unique strengths make a unique impact. In workplaces, meaningful gratitude and affirmation are infrequent, and most workers report feeling perpetually underappreciated and undervalued.

Affirmation is more than an awards ceremony, simple acknowledgment, or a pay raise. Real affirmation is creating an environment that regularly provides people the evidence of their significance.

Here are some essential practices to affirm others:

• Collect and tell stories of people’s impact on others. Ensure that people can regularly see, hear, and feel their work’s upstream effect on teammates, leaders, and end beneficiaries.
• Any time you say “thank you” or “good job,” make sure you show people the difference they made or how they made it. A simple way to start is by giving what I call Purposeful Affirmation. First, remind the person of the specific situation in which they made a difference for you. Next, name the unique strengths they used and their particular behaviors. Finally, and most importantly, show them their impact on you or someone else.
• Make sure that before you tell someone what to do or how to do it, you show them why it matters. There are three researched qualities of a meaningful task. First, people should experience how the job benefits others (Significance). Second, people should be able to describe how the task is necessary for a bigger outcome or project (Necessity). Finally, people should know how to use their unique strengths to do the job (Strengths).
• Ensure you can name each employee’s differentiating strengths and that each person has an individualized development pathway to build on and develop those gifts.

Show People How They’re Needed

Human beings are at their best when they’re needed. In our research, when we ask people to describe the moments of mattering in their lives, we often hear people talk about becoming a caretaker, a parent, or being called on to assume responsibility for someone else. It’s no different in work; when people feel irreplaceable, they act irreplaceable. They show up. They commit.

On the flip side, when people feel replaceable, they act replaceable. They won’t show up. They won’t commit. Ensuring people feel indispensable and needed is key to creating mattering.

Here’s how to show people how they’re needed:

• Make sure people see how indispensable they are to delivering a bigger purpose. Famously, when John F. Kennedy was about to give a speech to launch the Apollo mission, he asked a space center janitor, “What do you do here?” The janitor replied, “Putting a person on the moon.” Wharton School researcher Andrew Carton found that one way NASA made people feel indispensable to that big purpose was through a “ladder to the moon,” which leaders scrawled on blackboards in NASA facilities. At the bottom of the ladder were the group’s tasks. The next rung was a tangible, measurable objective that the tasks made possible. The next rung was the concrete, quantifiable goal that the former objective made possible, and so on until the top rung: “To put a person on the moon by the end of the decade to advance science.” People vividly saw how their work was indispensable.
• “If it wasn’t for you….” are some of the most powerful we can say to one another. Say, “if it wasn’t for you…” to people regularly. One leader I worked with at a large bank told me that on Fridays, she messages a person who helped her get through the week and says, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have made it through the week,” and then describes why.

Try it right now. Think about the people you need. Take a moment today to tell them, “if it wasn’t for you…” and watch what happens.

You’ll see and experience what the research indicates: Few things are more powerful than when a human being realizes they matter.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., is a purposeful leadership, mattering, meaningful work, and positive organizations researcher, consultant, and author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”

I can’t forget the smell, like the aftermath of banging two rocks together as a kid. This time, it was the reek of the driver’s side of my pickup scraping across the asphalt after it flipped. Pieces of glass sprayed my face and settled in my weekend slip-on shoes.

The right side of my face tingled from the impact and the firecracker that was the airbag saving my skull. I was on my way to buy my six and three-year-old boys firecrackers on the fourth of July, the little grey ones you snap on the ground. My eardrums vibrated as I tried the driver’s side door. It was stuck. I climbed out the passenger door and checked the two car seats in the backseat. They were empty.

“I dropped them off at home,” I remembered.

The witnesses say he ran the stop sign.

The first person who showed up did his job. He was there in just six minutes and parked the fire engine at a precise angle to block traffic. As if my once-and-a-lifetime traumatic event was like brushing his teeth, he did a full-body check. He called out, “One victim is green here, no others!” to the second firefighter already sweeping glass off the road. A third covered the fluid spill with the fire retardant.

The fourth person who showed up did her job, too. A police officer put her arm around me, asked how I was, and then initiated another full-body check. She took my statement and later called me with updates on the other driver and checked how I was doing. Another officer collected witness statements and directed traffic.

The sixth and seventh people to arrive were the Emergency Medical Technicians. They guided me to the back of an ambulance, took my vitals, and reassured my stunned wife that I was okay.

Then came the tow truck driver. He expertly elevated my car onto the flatbed within five minutes. The driver’s gruff voice asked if I was okay. He investigated my truck and, before he left, imparted his hard-earned wisdom: “Leave the car seats and get them replaced. They’re not safe anymore.”

I also became part of the insurance claim handler’s and junkyard workers’ holiday weekends. In seconds, each of these people became part of my life because of their work.

I study the meaning of work, and that day was a jolting reminder that our jobs bring us in and out of others’ lives we would otherwise never know. Society’s jobs are like organs in the body, integral to the functioning of the whole, whether we momentarily like our function or not.

There were thousands of invisible workers who saved my life that day, too. Because my truck rolled on its side, the firefighter said the curtain airbags prevented a head injury.

The people I didn’t meet who’ve become part of my life include Yasuzaburou Kobori, a Japanese automobile engineer who developed the safety net airbag system in 1964, every legislator and staffer who researched, wrote, and passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 which standardized side airbags to protect the heads of drivers and passengers, the engineers who designed the curtain airbags in my pickup to deploy with 10 to 20 milliseconds of a detected rollover, the engineers who designed those airbags into my car, the wage-earning manufacturing line workers who assembled and installed them, the quality control professionals who tested them, the delivery drivers who delivered the parts, and all the other people comprising the infinite stream of jobs that came together in a moment.

Everything worked that day because everyone worked. I went home to my two young boys and my wife because of line workers I’ll never meet, an engineer I’ll never know, and first responders I’ll never see again.

Work gets a lot of bad press. Aristotle called it a burden, and a whole cadre of people now boast about shirking work in favor of “lying flat.”

Yes, there are bad jobs, underpaid jobs, repetitive jobs, and “bullshit jobs,” as popular anthropologist David Graeber claims. Still, the reality is that most jobs do exist to solve a human problem or fill a human need. Most jobs make the human community possible.

Most jobs are purposeful, even if they’re not pleasurable.

All work used to be purposeful. We made shoes for our neighbors’ feet. We farmed for our neighbors’ bellies. After the second industrial revolution, our jobs got smaller and more fragmented. Seeing the immense impact of our small jobs became more difficult.

If you look hard enough, purpose is still there. If your job exists on this planet, human beings are part of and at the end of your supply or service chain.

Even if the manufacturing facility worker who installed my airbag just worked “to get a paycheck,” their job existed to ensure my safety. I’m thankful they showed up to work that day. I hope they know that.

Even if the EMT complained about going to work on the fourth of July, I’m thankful she worked.

Even if the junkyard worker or tow truck driver feels like their job is small, it was significant to me that day, and I’m thankful they keep doing it.

While Aristotle lamented work as a burden, he also called it a necessary burden.

Work is necessary for societal functioning and essential for a community. Regardless of what you do, you’re likely to influence another person’s life today. I hope you see it.

“One ought to not even consider that a citizen belongs to himself, but rather that all belong to the city; for each individual is a part of the city,” Aristotle wrote.

I’m glad the city — the community built by human work — was there for me.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., is a purposeful leadership, meaningful work, and positive organizations researcher, consultant, and author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”

When my second son was born, he didn’t open his eyes.

The nurse told us it was normal; some newborns take longer to part their eyelids. Through excited and exhausted anxiety, I believed her. But by the third day, we hadn’t looked into Jaxon’s distinct green eyes. We started making appointments with specialists.

Jax is now a creative, independent, and infinitely imaginative three-year-old. It turns out he was born without eyelid muscles and has a much narrower eye opening due to Blepharophimosis, Ptosis, Epicanthus Inversus Syndrome (BPES), a rare genetic mutation that affects one in 50,000 people.

With surgeries and other treatments, Jax sees just fine and can do everything any other kid can.

The worst side effect of his condition has nothing to do with his condition. Most people don’t notice or care about his difference. Too often, people stare. Others direct comments at him and call his amazingly designed eyes “weird.”

Given my profession studying leadership and organizational psychology, I scoured academic journals for anything that could help me be a better parent for Jaxon.

I found an answer in a children’s picture book.

As a family, we regularly read R.J. Palacio’s “We’re All Wonders,” a made-for-kids version of the 2012 novel “Wonder,” which chronicles a 10-year-old’s life with a craniofacial disorder.

In the children’s version, the fictional narrator “Auggie” Pullman shares his struggles with being left out and offers simple lessons on coping with feeling different. But on the last page, he has an important realization, saying, “I can’t change the way I look. But maybe people can change the way they see.”

After reading that line, I realized the worst side effect of Jaxon’s syndrome is 100 percent preventable.

You can change the way you see.

I’ve carried this lesson with me in my work developing leaders in communities and organizations. I find that most underdeveloped potential, behavioral concerns, and performance issues aren’t “people problems” but “seeing problems.”

Writer, poet, and German statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.”

If we want people to become better, we must learn to see people better.

The Seeing-Treating-Becoming Loop

I once worked with a high-performing new supervisor of a frontline manufacturing team. We started talking about difficulties he was facing, and he immediately shared, “Well, I have this one woman who always calls out ‘sick.’ She’s difficult and is just here to get a paycheck and leave.”

He saw her as “difficult and there for a paycheck.”

“Who do you want her to become?” I asked. He paused, then told me he noticed her potential and “just wanted her to feel proud of being here.”

“How do you treat her?” I inquired. He hesitated again, “Well, to be honest, I just try to avoid her and make sure she knows that her attendance issues could cost her the job.”

He was unintentionally treating her as he saw her: an issue to be dealt with.

I then asked, “What if you treated her like she had potential and you wanted her to feel proud of being here?”

If we see someone as “difficult,” we’ll treat them like an “issue.” If we treat them like an issue, they’ll think of themselves as a problem. Studies show that people with low self-worth exhibit increased stress, have difficulty in relationships, and frequently underperform in work and school.

The cycle continues.

How we see people is how we treat them. How we treat them is who they become.

Alternatively, if we see someone as “having potential,” we’ll treat that person as having possibilities. If we treat someone as having possibilities, we build self-worth. What do people with high self-worth do? Research finds they take more initiative, are more open to feedback, perform better, and are more resilient.

The critical idea that our perceptions of others influences how we treat them is well-studied.

In 1950, psychologist Harold H. Kelley published a landmark study on how our treatment of people is affected by how we perceive them. He had two groups of students read about a professor described as either “rather cold” or “very warm.” Then, the researchers had the professor teach a 20-minute discussion group with the students, behaving identically for each group.

The students who were told the instructor was “cold” were less likely to participate. They also rated the “warm professor” as much more humorous, friendly, popular, and better.

How we see others affects how we treat others.

So, how do we change how we “see” others and break the loop?

We must first become aware of how we see.

How We See Others

In psychology, the way we see others is called person perception.

Initially, we form perceptions of others by relying on physical and nonverbal cues. The limitation is that we tend to notice and remember negative signals while our brains scan our environment for threats.

In one study, Psychologist Tiffani Ito and colleagues analyzed participants’ brain activity while showing positive, negative, and neutral interpersonal cues. The brain activity was much more significant in response to negative cues. They concluded, “negative information weighs more heavily on the brain.”

Our brains also notice and emphasize characteristics, like clothes and facial features, that don’t fit a specific pattern. That’s why another child at Jaxon’s daycare kept calling him “the kid with the small eyes” instead of calling him “the kid with the normal-appearing nose, chin, ears, hair, etc.”

Second, our perceptions of behavior often result in labeling others by describing them in trait terms. There are over 18,000 trait terms in the English language. We describe others using words like “difficult,” “nice,” “creative,” “fun,” “quiet,” “low-performing,” or “high-performing.”

Studies show we make judgments about people by averaging traits based on our experiences with them. At first, that sounds fair.

The hidden problem is that we tend to average traits based on extremes and weigh experiences of a “negative” trait more significantly than a “positive” trait. We also favor certain traits, called “cardinal traits,” more heavily and tend to ignore moderately positive traits altogether.

Let’s return to the warm and cold example. Imagine you have two employees. A peer depicts Employee A to you as hard-working, on-time, warm, diligent, and practical. That same peer describes Employee B as hard-working, on-time, cold, diligent, and practical.

Researchers consistently find that the person described as “warm” would be perceived very positively, whereas the person described as “cold” would be perceived very negatively — based on one central trait.

Since we’re wired to point out and remember negative behaviors, we’re also more likely to ascribe negative traits to people. Further, the more recent an experience of negative behavior is, the more likely we are to label someone using negative terms.

For example, if “Joe” is late for two days in six months, but generally on time most days, your mind is wired to label Joe as a “late” or “irresponsible” person, despite all of Joe’s other positive attributes likely on display daily. And if Joe was late yesterday, you’re almost certain to view him negatively.

The cycle begins.

How to See Better

Fortunately, the simple awareness of how we see can shift our perceptions. From this new understanding, we can learn to see others better and interrupt some of the brain’s outdated routines.

In the process, we treat people better, and people become better, which is what leadership is all about.

Let’s try it. Take a moment to reflect on someone you might be perceiving negatively (this in itself is a revealing question!).

1. Ask: How do I see this person?

Write down two labels you’ve ascribed to them. Do you think they’re “awkward”? “Difficult?” “Challenging”? You can find labels any time you think or say, “This person is ___________.”

How did you form that perception? What information did you consider? What information might you have missed?

Now, list five positive traits about this person.

How does the way you see this person affect how you treat them? Do you treat them as if they’re defined by their positive traits or by their negative ones? How might your treatment be encouraging the behaviors you say you don’t want?

2. Ask: Who do I want this person to become?

Write down who you want this person to become.

Ask yourself: Am I treating them as what they’re not or as who they can be? What can I do differently to treat them as they can be?

3. Regularly reevaluate your perceptions.

Are you overweighing negative traits and under-weighing positive traits? Have you overemphasized a physical feature that doesn’t fit with your patterns of “normal”? Do you have recency bias, are you judging someone because of what they did this week?

To become a better leader, change the way you see.

And above all, before you make a negative judgment about anyone — an employee, a student, a passerby — remember this:

To someone, they are loved, and they are everything.

Jaxon thanks you.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D. is a purposeful leadership, meaningful work, and positive organizations researcher, consultant, and author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”

He writes a semi-monthly newsletter on purposeful leadership, work, and life; subscribe here.

The Art and Science of Noticing Others: How to Become Better at Making People Feel Seen

Consider the people who comprise your routines. Who do you need to notice more?

Noticing is the act of seeing someone’s uniqueness and showing an interest in their full life.

Feeling noticed is the opposite of feeling invisible, the inverse of being forgotten. When others pay attention to us and remember us, our essential lives’ hidden vividness and nuances become known.

Studies show that being seen is necessary to feel like we matter and promotes mental and emotional wellbeing, including a reduced risk for anxiety and depression. Social psychologists Morris Rosenburg and Claire McCullough wrote that feeling noticed is “the most elementary form of mattering.”

Yet, it’s the most fundamental human needs that we most often neglect. Or, as leadership educator Stephen Covey wrote, “common sense is not always common practice.”

Noticing others is not common practice.

In 2018, health insurer Cigna surveyed 20,000 Americans and found that 47 percent of respondents reported feeling “forgotten.”

Global surveys of workers find that 43 percent of employees feel “invisible.” A study on over 66,000 students in grades six through 12 revealed that only half of the respondents think their teacher would care if they were absent. Just 46 percent of students said they felt valued at school.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander’s question should level us: “Are we not of interest to each other?”

The distress and desperation caused by feeling unnoticed are well-documented. Psychologists find feeling unseen and unknown by others undercuts self-worth, motivation and can even predict depression.

In the classic novel “The Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison compared feeling unnoticed to living in a hole, writing, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Now, think again about the people you see every day or every week.

Do you know their goals, vision, and dreams? Do you know their struggles? If so, have you checked in with them about how they’re doing? Do you remember their full names?

Do you know who they rely on and who relies on them? Have you checked in on how their people are doing? Do you know their kids’ or spouse’s or partners’ names? Do you know what they do when they’re not working? Do you know their hobbies?

Who do you unintentionally or intentionally refuse to see?

Noticing others is a skill, a practice, and should be a public and occupational health priority.

Ask About and Remember Personal Details

What makes overlooking others so insidious is that it’s easy to do, a habit born out of our increased individualism and decreased social connectedness.

Do you know your postal worker’s name? Do you know the name of your coworkers’ kid, who you sometimes see in the background of that Zoom call?

For many, it’s these tiny lapses of curiosity that add up to perpetual invisibility.

I’m certainly not immune.

One recent afternoon, while facilitating a virtual workshop on, yes, mattering, I looked out my window. I saw my neighbor, with whom I’ve interacted hundreds of times, walking outside to get his mail. He’s retired. But at that moment, it embarrassingly struck me: I’ve never asked him what he did before he retired; how he spent the forty-five years before I started living a couple of hundred feet from him.

After my realization, I asked myself, “What else do I not know about others’ lives?”

For me, the answer turned out to be a lot.

One of the most basic ways to help others feel noticed is to ask about, remember, and check-in on personal details.

Know people’s full names. If you see a dog jump into someone’s lap on a virtual call, don’t just sit and stare; ask what the dog’s name is. Learn what your delivery driver’s family members’ or friends’ names are. Check-in on them when your next package comes. Find out how your coworker’s family member is doing who was sick a few months ago.

Notice, remember, and check-in.

Show Your Interests in Others’ Interests

David was a 5-year old in Brooklyn, raised by a single mother who had many jobs to make ends meet. One of his favorite possessions was an ordinary deck of cards that he carried everywhere, including the local library.

One day, a librarian noticed him playing with a deck of cards and said, “We just got a self-working card trick book in. Do you want to learn something?” The librarian showed him a simple card trick. That day, David’s mom picked him up after work, and he showed her the trick.

“My mom went crazy,” David remembered as he recalled that critical moment on the Joe Rogan podcast 42 years later. “That began my love of wanting to learn tricks.”

That 5-year old boy was David Blaine, now recognized as one of the greatest magicians ever to live.

Noticing others is also about showing an interest in and nurturing others’ interests, regardless if those interests help you.

That librarian noticed David Blaine playing with a deck of cards and remembered he liked cards. When a book came in that she thought he’d be interested in, she remembered David. Then, she followed up and acted on her interest by teaching David that life-changing card trick.

There are countless stories of altered life trajectories because someone took an interest.

I once worked with a team who loved their supervisor more than I’d ever observed. Her team would say things like, “she just gets me” or “she always looks out for me.”

It’s tempting to say she was just a “natural leader” and had relational strengths.

But when I asked her how she created that climate, she pulled out a tattered notebook. In it, she wrote down things she heard each of her team members talk about repeatedly in their conversations. She made it a conscious habit to bring up and talk about her people’s interests regularly.

Noticing others is a practice that’s too important to be left to intuition.

As you think about the people around you, how can you better show your interest? How can you show someone you remember what’s important to them?

Remember and Honor Others’ Presence

The antithesis to feeling seen is being forgotten.

Psychologists Laura King and Aaron Geise conducted two experiments with undergraduate women. In the first investigation, researchers asked the women to participate in a group activity in a lab setting and come back in two days.

When they came back, the experimenter responded to certain women by saying, “I don’t remember you being here,” or “Are you sure you were here two days ago?” Other women were overtly remembered or complimented by the facilitator.

After controlling for numerous variables, the “forgotten” participants who experienced a moment of being invisible were found to feel a significantly lower sense of meaning in their lives and indicated lower self-esteem.

The researchers concluded, “…the innocent act of forgetting another person can exact an existential cost.”

Remember people. If someone misses a meeting, a class, or get together, tell them you noticed they weren’t there and why you wish they were.

Honor people’s presence.

I think the most critical step forward as a society — in communities, organizations, and schools — is to become interested in each other again.

I study and write about purpose, meaningfulness, and mattering in work and life.

Connect with me here.

The Art and Science of Noticing Others was originally published in Curious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As people “return to work,” leaders should be ready to address a hidden issue: a meaning deficit.

Historically, every significant disruption of how we work inflicted profound distress flamed by existential crises and the search for meaning.

At the height of the second Industrial Revolution, in 1897, sociologist David Émile Durkheim published an enduring analysis of suicide. Durkheim found a central cause of acute mental distress was the loss or change of work. Not working, he found, depleted people of purpose, of having a social function and a meaningful contribution.

In 1938, as The Great Depression relented, psychologists Philip Eisenberg and Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that unemployment resulted in a profound loss of identity characterized by brokenness and instability.

Even among a large group of workers who kept their jobs through the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009, Stanford University researchers found in-patient visits for mental health-related services were nearly four times higher than before the downturn.

Feelings of uselessness and worthlessness were the most significant commonalities among those with mental health issues.

Uselessness and worthlessness are symptoms of meaninglessness, a pivotal contributor to feelings of despair.

Unlike these previous challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis of both work and health insecurity intensified by the necessary but inhuman practices social distancing and isolation.

Even more than past economic disruptions, the pieces are in place for distress induced by our collective, unavoidable grasp for meaning in disorder.

And whether we like it or not, work dominates human life and is an inescapable context through which we make meaning of life itself.

Enabling meaningful work should be a priority for leaders and is a learnable skill.

The Coming Meaning Deficit

For the currently employed, the unemployed, and soon-to-be re-employed, emerging research shows the pandemic is prompting serious self-reflection.

New surveys show people who can work from home are spending more time contemplating the quality and meaning of their jobs and lives. Many are reflecting on their roles outside of work and trying to determine how to meet all of life’s demands.

A study from Alicia Sasser Modestino, an economics professor at Northeastern University, found that many, predominately women, have considered quitting their jobs to keep up with childcare and life demands. Yet, even 11% of men surveyed — said they, too, are considering leaving their current position.

For the 55 million essential workers who ensured everyone else could stay home, the sudden and short-lived public praise of their jobs reveals disparities between their value to society and the value their employers place on them.

The millions of people facing job and financial insecurity, unemployment, and those who’ll get hired back after months without work, are more at risk for feelings of meaninglessness, especially as many take less-than-ideal jobs to survive.

Add to these issues the widespread calls for social reform and racial justice that have led many to explore unexamined existential questions, and the ingredients are there for a looming meaning deficit.

Filling The Meaning Deficit Through Enabling Meaningful Work

Experiencing purpose, significance, and mattering in work isn’t a luxury, a generational preference, or a nice-to-have. For centuries, psychologists, philosophers, and now neuroscientists find that meaningfulness is a fundamental human need.

My and others’ research finds that meaningful work is desired and accessible in nearly any job or occupation, including work people take to earn a paycheck.

While it’s tempting to argue, especially in an economic recovery, that people just need income to survive, it’s essential to acknowledge that human beings are simultaneously what they basically need and what they inherently desire.

That’s why leaders and economists need to understand the difference between the meaning of work (i.e., to earn a paycheck) and meaning in work (i.e., to experience mattering, worth, and dignity).

If we’ve learned anything from the aftershocks from each of the significant financial disasters and work revolutions, it’s that a job won’t cure despair if the person experiences despair in the job.

Many politicians and economists obsess about the quantity of jobs, but organizational leaders should focus on ensuring the quality of those jobs.

Decades of studies now show that experiencing work as positive, purposeful, and significant is a predictor of positive outcomes like motivation, engagement, and overall well-being in life.

Oxford University professor Ruth Yeoman writes that meaningful work must be recognized as a fundamental human need because it satisfies the inescapable human interests of dignity, freedom, and autonomy.

When those interests are not met, either because of unemployment or by a degrading job, a sense of hopelessness, desperation, and meaninglessness can ensue, especially in already vulnerable populations.

How to Make Work More Meaningful

A recent study by Mckinsey & Company found that over 55% of what contributes to employee well-being and engagement come from non-financial or job security factors.

The most significant factors in enhancing overall well-being are individual purpose and contribution, social cohesion and inclusion, and trusting relationships. These elements serve as the basis for creating environments that facilitate meaningfulness.

Here are some ways to enable meaningful work:

1. Cultivate a Culture of Mattering

Experiencing significance is found to be a key predictor in overall mental health. Psychologists Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough, in a classic study, find that mattering manifests when someone feels noticed, important, and needed.

While mattering seems like common sense, it’s not common practice. The Gallup Organization finds that upwards of 65% of people don’t feel appreciated at work.

Some actions to cultivate mattering include:

• Authentically check in on the people you see and talk to every day.
• Learn about people’s personal lives and remember those details, and ask about them regularly. Encourage employees to do the same for each other.
• Learn how to foster psychological safety to demonstrate that people’s contributions are valued and needed.
• Continue to invest in personal development and well-being in all positions equally.
• Remind people regularly how their unique strengths are integral to delivering a bigger purpose. Show people how they’re indispensable.

2. Redesign Jobs and Tasks for Meaningfulness

In 1975, organizational psychologists J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham studied 658 workers in 62 different jobs. They found workers need to be able to do and experience three elements in a job or task to experience meaningfulness.

First, they must know the significance of the task to another person. Second, they must be able to identify how the job fits into a more significant outcome, and third, they need to be able to see how they can use their pre-existing strengths to accomplish it.

This model holds up in the research today and reaffirms that leaders can enable meaningfulness in any job.

Some actions to redesign jobs for meaningfulness:

• Through recruitment, training, and onboarding, ensure that tasks and jobs are introduced by first showing why the work matters, what the job makes possible, and how the individual’s strengths are critical to doing the job.
• Regularly collect and tell stories of the work’s impact on others. Bring in the beneficiaries of the work to tell the story of how the work impacted their lives.
• Give regular, purposeful affirmation that directly shows people how their work on a specific task made a difference for you or others.
• Give employees autonomy to adjust how they can best do their jobs using their strengths. Invite people to provide feedback on their work and become an expert.

3. Ensure dedicated time and space to building meaning-giving relationships.

Our research on front-line workers finds that positive relationships maintain meaningfulness.

Meaning-giving relationships can reaffirm mattering, facilitate a sense of belonging, and can facilitate growth and development.

University of Michigan researchers Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy find that these high-quality relationships are characterized when both people in the relationship are known and cared for, gain positive energy from interactions, and experience an equal investment in the relationship.

Creating space for all people in all positions to form these high-quality connections, in-person or virtually, is vital for sustaining meaningfulness.

Some actions to facilitate meaning-giving relationships:

• Create peer coaching and mentoring networks and invest in personal and professional development for people to cultivate mattering and inclusion for those around them.
• Incentivize peer recognition. One of my favorite platforms is Bonusly, a digital platform that encourages affirmation of other’s contributions.
• Intentionally create the time and space for authentic, informal, meaningful relationships to occur, especially on virtual teams.
• Allow autonomy for people to choose who they work on projects with, incentivize collaboration, and work on teams.

Enabling Meaningful Work is a Leadership Skill

Most organizational leaders never formally learn how to cultivate mattering, instill meaningfulness, and promote meaning-giving relationships.

Enabling meaningful work is a skill that I believe will be the next century’s vital leadership competency.

People’s lives may depend on it.

Most leaders want their people to be fulfilled but aren’t sure what will work. Based on years of scientific research, I give you and your team practical and proven tools for cultivating a purposeful and positive workplace that endures.

Learn more, and while you’re at it, get a free chapter of “The Invisible Leader:” www.zachmercurio.com.

Filling the ‘Meaning Deficit:’​ Why Meaningful Work Will Be More Vital in a Post-COVID World was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Think about the first time you realized you mattered.

What happened? How did you feel?

Chances are your moment of mattering impacted and moved you. Most likely, you felt important because of what someone else said or did.

Feeling significant is a basic human desire and a critical factor for mental, emotional, and physical well-being in life, school, and work.

Mattering is also dependent on others, and fulfilling this vital human desire is a community endeavor.

In other words, others around you know they matter because of you.

So, what is mattering? Why is mattering so important? And, how can we learn to create the experience of mattering for others?

The Power of Mattering

For Jane, one sentence changed her perceptions of herself and her job. The self-worth that followed sustained her motivation and pride for 18 years.

Jane hopped around from one cleaning job to the next in what she described as a difficult life. After a family member she was caretaking for died, she knew she had to get a more stable job to survive.

That led her to take a custodial job at the university where I teach. When I spoke to Jane for a study on what makes work meaningful, I asked her, “Why did you stay?”

She told me that in her first training, a supervisor pulled out the dictionary and defined the word custodian for her as “a person who has responsibility for or looks after something.”

Despite being told her whole life that cleaning was an unskilled and dirty job, she said, “realizing I was looking after these buildings and everyone in them changed my belief patterns and has inspired me for the last eighteen years. I finally realized I mattered.”

Jane credits one sentence from a supervisor for fueling her energy and sense of self in work for 18 years.

Jane felt like she mattered.

The Science of Mattering

Researchers find mattering is the feeling that we’re a significant part of the world around us, it’s the belief that we’re noticed, important, and needed — right now.

While studies show experiencing mattering as Jane did increases a sense of self-worth and motivation, research also finds it reduces the risk of severe depression, anxiety, and can save lives.

Why?

First, mattering influences self-esteem, the confidence in one’s worth.

Researchers Robert Chavez and Todd Heatherton from Dartmouth College find self-esteem resides in the frontostriatal pathway of the brain. This pathway connects the medial prefrontal cortex, which deals with self-awareness, to the ventral striatum, which influences motivation.

Individuals with higher self-esteem seem to optimize this pathway, leading to more positive self-knowledge, self-worth, and increased internal motivation and energy.

Feeling significant is also found to increase serotonin levels, sometimes called the “confidence molecule” that influences overall mood and lowers anxiety.

Experiencing mattering also reaffirms that we contribute to others and that we have a purpose. A sense of purpose is associated with increased dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, also known as the “happiness trifecta,” the neurotransmitters that control for mood, movement, and motivation.

Mattering may also help us live longer.

In the 1970s, Harvard scientist Ellen Langer studied two groups of nursing home residents, controlling for numerous risk factors. She gave plants to each of them. Researchers told the first group that they were directly responsible for keeping the plant alive. They told the second group that the staff would take care of the plant.

After 18 months, twice as many patients in the first group were alive.

As a global pandemic continues and calls for social reform expand, mattering is especially urgent, leading many to examine their significance as never before.

I think mattering is a public health issue, and cultivating it is an essential skill.

How to Create Experiences of Mattering

Studies show mattering has three components:

• Attention — the realization that others notice us and that others are interested in what’s going on in our lives
• Importance — the perception that other people care about us and see us as uniquely significant and important
• Dependence — the feeling that someone else relies on us, that we are needed

To cultivate mattering, ensure people feel noticed, important, and needed.

1. Notice others

I’ve had many leaders come to me and say they struggle to find ways to appreciate and recognize their employees meaningfully. I typically reply by asking, “How are your employees doing today?”

If they can’t answer, I advise them to start there.

It’s easy to make mattering and appreciation more complicated than it needs to be. I think it’s because we overlook the importance of feeling noticed right here, right now.

Mattering is much more likely to be fostered in our everyday routines than at an awards banquet. That’s because the experience of feeling visible is a crucial ingredient for mattering.

One of the easiest ways to help someone feel like they matter is by committing to making eye contact and authentically checking in with the people you see every day.

Studies show that simply being told, “Good morning!” by a supervisor can be more potent than formal recognition.

It sounds easy, but actively noticing others is a habit that needs to be built into your everyday routines. We already have a lot of unproductive, anti-mattering habits like when we rush into our office to send one more e-mail before telling a co-worker goodbye for the day.

Or, when we brush past our partner on the way to the coffee maker in the morning without asking if they want a cup.

Try writing down a list of the moments in your day when you pass by or see the same people.

Do you actively notice and check-in on them? Do you remember their name?

If not, start there.

2. Communicate others’ unique significance

We tend to readily recount the negative aspects of a person and give plentiful advice on how they can get better. Yet, we’re slow to recognize and acknowledge people’s unique strengths and talents.

It seems we’re always treating teenagers and students as “what they could become” and not what’s good about who they already are. In the workplace, studies show that meaningful gratitude and affirmation are infrequent and that a majority of workers feel underappreciated.

To know we matter, we need evidence of how we matter.

That means naming people’s specific positive strengths, traits, and behaviors and showing then the difference those gifts make in the world around them.

A simple way to start is by giving what I call Purposeful Affirmation.

Start with describing the situation. Remind the person of the specific instance in which they made a difference for you. Then, spot the behaviors and strengths they exhibited in that situation. Finally, tell them the impact they had on you by using their strengths or enacting those behaviors.

Instead of just saying “good job” or “thank you,” you can show people the difference they make.

3. Show others they’re relied on

Feeling like we don’t matter can induce stress, frustration, and profound despair.

As mattering researcher Gordon Flett depicts in his volume on the research on mattering, people who are more at risk for severe depression tend to recount themes like “nobody would miss me if I was gone” or “no one cares about me.”

In other words, when we don’t feel like we matter, it’s easy for nothing to matter.

Showing others that you need the people around you and depend on them is critical.

As individuals, mattering means making sure the people around us regularly know that they’re needed and indispensable.

In schools, mattering means making sure that every student knows their presence is what makes the classroom complete.

In workplaces, mattering means ensuring all people know that they’re not disposable and that they and their work are essential for the whole.

In society, mattering means rebuilding systems so that every person experiences their humanity as dignified, affirmed, and valued.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D. is a purposeful leadership and meaningful work researcher, professor, strategist, speaker, and author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”

He writes a semi-monthly newsletter on purposeful leadership, work, and life; subscribe here.

I was in the parking lot at my kids’ daycare when I got the notification. I looked down at my phone, and nausea returned.

The first word of the e-mail subject line read, “Canceled.” It was the latest in a string of messages that obliterated my false sense of stability, security, and purpose.

A big part of my work (and income) comes from sharing research through speaking to large groups. It’s not a very pandemic-resistant occupation. A few months of work was wiped out on a Friday afternoon.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck. I don’t face food insecurity. I don’t rely on a front-line service job for my family’s health benefits.

Still, I felt empty. Why?

The true value of something in our lives is often revealed when we lose it.

Though I research purpose and meaning, the pandemic is revealing that I overvalue the things I do, my activity.

It’s always a risky bet to tie our identity to what we do. At some point — because of a pandemic or some other external inevitability — we won’t be able to do it.

Even though I research purpose and meaning, the pandemic is revealing that I overvalue the things I do, my activity.

It’s a risky bet to tie our identity to what we do. At some point — because of a pandemic or some other external inevitability — we won’t be able to do it.

Then what? When the “thing” disappears, our sense of self goes with it.

That’s why psychologists find people who set too many achievement-oriented goals are more likely to feel stressed, anxious, and depressed than those who set contribution-oriented goals.

For many of us over the next few weeks and months, the activities we thought gave our lives meaning will change or vanish.

Parents won’t have the bustle of bringing kids to and from school, rehearsals, and practices. We won’t be able to go to our regular church service, to our weekly happy hour with friends, or take our favorite workout class. Remote workers won’t get to see their co-workers or their customers every day, and many artists and athletes won’t get to practice craft they’ve spent their whole lives honing.

We’ve been forced to pause, quarantined to reflect.

In this newfound vacuum of activity, we have an opportunity to move on to better questions, ones that we know result in longer-term thriving: Apart from what I do, achieve, or produce, who am I?

Why am I?

What is my purpose in the absence of all the doing?

Here are ways to start answering that question.

1. Realize that your purpose isn’t what you do

It’s first essential to realize that your purpose isn’t what you do; it’s the contribution you make through what you do.

School, a job, or a volunteer position are ways through which you make an impact, not the impact itself.

Realizing this difference is powerful because as soon as you can separate what you do with the impact you want to make, new possibilities emerge that aren’t confined to a role or activity (that you may not be able to do anymore).

Purposeful people tend to focus more on the contribution they can make where they are, and not on the things they do.

Research finds the result is more energy, increased mood, better health, and ultimately more resilience.

During this pause, if you want a great way to identify the impact you want to make, my friends at PurposeMatch are offering readers of my blog free use of a powerful tool that helps you identify where your strengths are needed most.

Just head here and enter the code TIMEFORPURPOSE within the next 30 days.

2. Learn to see the purpose in the mundane by crafting a purposeful mindset

A few years ago, my 97-year-old grandfather sent me a card for my birthday. In it, he asked one question:

“How do you improve the moment?”

That is the question for this moment. The one constant on even our worst day is the opportunity to contribute.

Now, more than ever, our lives may be comprised of more ordinary moments.

In my research on how people come to experience meaningfulness in their work, I’ve come to one conclusion: The most extraordinary people do ordinary things with an extraordinary perspective.

Studies show that your approach and your mindset about what you do have more influence on a sense of meaningfulness than the task itself.

And, you can learn a purposeful mindset.

Before each day during these trying times, ask yourself: How is what I’m going to do today going to affect others? Who is relying on me today?

As you think about the tasks you need to do, ask: How does this impact another person? What will be possible because I am doing this? How will this help me make an impact in the future?

At the end of your day, ask: What mattered today? When did I feel a sense of purpose today?

What we pay attention to is what we think about. What we think about is who we are.

3. Redefine success

After reading that cancellation e-mail, I finally got out of my car and walked in to pick up my kids. My first stop was my two-year old’s classroom.

As soon as I got to the door and he saw my face, he dropped the toy he was playing with and toddler-sprinted to me. He latched on to me and gave me what I noticed (or just hoped) was an extra-long hug.

He wasn’t disappointed that my 2020 revenue was down. He was glad I was there so he could tell me about the mouse he finger-painted.

I then went to pick up my 5-year old. He, too, ran up to me and hugged me. He wasn’t frustrated that another keynote got canceled, he was glad I was there and took me by the hand and showed me a Lego tower he was “proud of.”

Then, he turned to me and said, “Daddy, I want to go home.”

“Me too,” I said.

Someone needs you right now, too.

Being there is success.

Being there is purpose.

Zach Mercurio, Ph.D., is a purposeful leadership and meaningful work researcher, adjunct professor, and the bestselling author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.”