The Human Need for Meaning: Why Being Kind at Work Matters
In the most dire of human circumstances, what keeps us alive? Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argues that our ability to find meaning in each moment is the key. Frankl was taken prisoner in Nazi concentration camps and he survived to share his story. Throughout his experience, Frankl noticed what helped people endure the terrors they were subjected to day and night. He found that those who had a rich inner life, not necessarily a strong physical presence, were able to withstand the constant pain, hunger and threat of death better than those who lacked spirit.
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explains how he and others survived demoralizing treatment by finding moments of beauty and creativity. A fellow prisoner once rushed in to urge the others to see a spectacular sunset. They watched nature’s colorful splendor contrast with their drab mud huts. Prisoners also put on a “kind of cabaret” performance that helped them laugh and forget their situation for a brief moment. Some prisoners attended the cabaret even though it meant they missed their daily ration of food. Creativity and beauty brought meaning to the prisoners’ lives. Meaningfulness is key to our human will to live, argues Frankl.
He also said it was possible to survive by finding meaning in his own suffering. Many prisoners lost their hold on life because they tried to live in the past to “help make the present, with all its horrors, less real.” But if they tried to strengthen their inner life in response to their circumstance, Frankl says prisoners could find meaning and therefore prevail. For Frankl, the fact that he had a manuscript that he needed to write kept him going. When he was sick with typhus fever, he jotted down notes for his manuscript on pieces of paper in the dark so he would have them if he lived until liberation. He writes:
“I am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of cardiovascular collapse.”
After three years in four concentration camps, Frankl was freed. He went on to publish his manuscript and The New York Times reported that the book, Man’s Search for Meaning, was voted in the top ten of the most influential books in readers’ lives.
Frankl is not alone in his focus on the importance of meaning. Researchers Kara McTiernan and Michael O’Connell studied how terminal cancer patients in Ireland lived as they were dying. They found that a terminal diagnosis did not bring new meaning to patients’ lives. Rather, patients continued to find meaning in what had given them meaning before their diagnosis. One patient enjoyed music, while another appreciated that she was able to see her son go to school. The researchers argue that meaning, alongside support and transcendence, are human needs. “Finding meaning while dying reduces suffering,” they write.
Meaning keeps us alive and here. In its absence, the human will to see another sunrise can falter. In the United States, there continues to be an epidemic of suicides among middle aged, white males. It is a stealthy epidemic, one that is still taboo to discuss in the rural, Western mountain states where it hits hardest. Journalist Tony Dokoupil writes that “every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death.” White, middle aged men account for 70% of suicides in the U.S. writes Stephen Rodrick in “All-American Despair.”
Both journalists found in their search for the reason why these men kill themselves that isolation plays a significant role. These men do not have consistent, meaningful relationships with others. They are alone in facing the dark abyss of their existence. Dokoupil writes that “the life-saving power of belonging may explain why, in America, Hispanics and African-Americans have lower suicide rates than whites.” Our relationships with each other give meaning to our lives. The cowboy culture of not talking about your problems and doing everything yourself isn’t conducive to forming deep, sustaining bonds with your fellow humans.
How to Alchemize Kindness into Meaning at Work
While you may not be enduring life in a concentration camp or battling terminal cancer, meaning is still vital in your day to day. You want to work in an environment where you find meaning. This may come in the form of beauty or creativity in the work you do. However, if you don’t feel that your work has meaning, you can find meaning in your relationships with teammates.
When I was a Special Operations commander in the military, I noticed that when my teammates knew a mission mattered deeply to me, they were more motivated to succeed. Our camaraderie was meaningful to us. High performing teams don’t rely on leadership, vision or huge change initiatives. They rely on social capital, the bonds between people. Those bonds develop over time as the result of granular moments. Therefore you can create meaning, through relationships, in each interaction. Frankl says we need to:
“stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”
What that right action looks like is kindness. Karen Dillon, coauthor of How Will You Measure Your Life? explains that we experience hundreds of micro-stresses throughout our day. These micro-stresses look like “a colleague hastily disagreeing with you in a meeting, or a peer falling behind on a deadline” which “affect your productivity and feelings about your job” explains Rebecca Knight in the Harvard Business Review. You start to feel like your job is meaningless.
That is because, on a deeper level, those micro-stresses degrade a team’s social bonds. If you have a strong relationship with the colleague who disagreed with you, you can talk after the meeting about the situation. If not, that disagreement will create distance between you both. The person missing a deadline represents a loss of trust in that social bond. In the absence of social capital, the team no longer clicks. It no longer offers team members meaning via healthy relationships.
Acts of incivility, even if they are thoughtless actions without malicious intent, impact team performance. Researchers Christine Porath and Christine Pearson polled 800 employees across 17 industries who experienced someone being uncivil towards them. Of these folks who were “on the receiving end of incivility…48% intentionally decreased their work effort [and] 66% said that their performance declined.” In another experiment conducted with researcher Amir Erez, Porath and Pearson found that people who experienced incivility were 30% less creative than folks who hadn’t experienced rudeness.
Kindness given and received amongst teammates is not a whimsical suggestion. Kindness shows that we care about each other and that we matter to each other. Not that all teammates need to be best friends. We know from Q theory that there is an optimum mix of strong and weak bonds — or relationships — in high performing teams.
Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen had an excellent working relationship on the basketball court but didn’t spend time together outside of work. Pippen explains “Our relationship between the lines was impeccable. We pushed each other to be great.” Their on-court relationship was key to propel the Bulls to championship greatness. The weakness of a bond does not indicate that meanness exists in that relationship. Civility, respect and kindness towards each other is always the rule, in each granular moment. Our behavior towards each other impacts our entire team’s performance and our own wellbeing.
