Research Paper By James Rosseau
(Executive Coach, UNITED STATES)
I am grateful for having gone through the certification program at ICA. Prior to attending ICA my understanding of coaching was a bit uninformed, though I was admittedly forewarned by a good friend that I would be enlightened through the program.
Core to the ICA journey is creating a coaching model that is unique to each of us. That model may be naturally influenced by our experiences, the clients we intend to serve and other factors. My coaching model and approach centres around the career environment as my passion is to empower others to reach their potential and I believe that core to that journey for a person is the discovery of his or her passion and creating an action plan to pursue it.
This research paper seeks to form the connectivity between the coachee’s passion and purpose and the implications to the coaching profession.
What do people want?
In the 2010 edition of the Journal of Management Education, the editor, Jane Schmidt-Wilk, opened with a series of thoughts. Most notably, she quoted the Dalai Lama’s observation,
Whether one is a professional, or whatever line of work one is in, each of us from birth to death is just working to take care of ourselves. That’s our main task. (Dalai Lama & Cutler, 2004, p. 2).
I felt as if I knew Jane as what followed were many of the questions I often pondered relative to careers and leadership, none more top-of-mind than the fact that there must be a connection between a person operating within his or her passion and a heightened level of successful outcomes.
Sufficeth to say that the world is challenging more rapidly than ever before and in fact is expected to do so in a more autonomous way given the advent of artificial intelligence. There are many sources of information that will go into this paper and one such source that I believe sets the stage well is this chart I reproduced from the back cover of It’s the Manager from Jim Clifton and Jim Hart (Gallup, 2019) representing the changing demands within the workforce.
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Changing Demands of the Workforce |
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Past |
Future |
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My Paycheck |
My Purpose |
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My Satisfaction |
My Development |
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My Boss |
My Coach |
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My Annual Review |
My Ongoing Conversations |
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My Weaknesses |
My Strengths |
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My Job |
My Life |
Clifton and Harter share that the new will of the world is to have a good job, which was defined as working full time for an organization, with 30+ hours a week and a living-wage paycheck. However, they go on to say that people, particularly the young and increasingly women, want the “best life imaginable.” That raises the stakes considerably as to have that, one must have a great job, which includes everything previously mentioned in addition to being engaged in meaningful and fulfilling work and feeling that they are experiencing real individual growth and development in the workplace. Further, many want their jobs to offer a pathway to the purpose and an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the common good (Dik, Byrne, & Steger, 2013).
What are the benefits and impact of purposeful and meaningful work?
It is noted that people who operate within “meaningful work” have very different life outcomes. They tend to be problem solvers, they inspire teams, they volunteer in their communities, have far better health and well being, and have fewer workplace accidents and little to no mistakes and defects. However, according to the data provided by Clifton and Harter (Gallup, 2019), only 15% of the world’s workers appear to have great jobs.
As coaches, it is important for us to understand these metrics and their broad-reaching implications. For the 85% that do not have great jobs, it goes beyond not being in a euphoric state. The feelings that these people cite range from being disengaged; to just going through the motions; to hating their jobs, managers, and companies. What is more concerning is that in the new millennium, job worth is equivalent to their life’s worth. Thus, as they express that their job has no meaning, they are simultaneously stating that their life has no meaning. While disconcerting, it is totally no news, as meaningfulness has been conceptualized as one factor from with happiness arises (Lent, 2013).
For years as a people leader within large organizations, I have sought to help members of my team perform at their best by not only helping them grow in their technical abilities but by seeking to understand what truly motivated them. However, it is not lost on me that as a younger manager, when faced with direct reports with performance challenges, the counsel I was often provided was to probe for matters of “skill or will.” In other words, did the person have the technical ability to get it done or did they have the “gusto” to get it done? Over time, for me, the bigger question became, “did the person have the desire to get done?” However, I never quite understood the severity of not digging into this matter as it relates to potential health risks.
There is on-going work to understand the connectivity between this idea of purposeful and meaningful work, levels of satisfaction and health outcomes. As an example, Clifton and Harter (Gallup, 2019) take their statements relative to worldwide dissatisfaction (people not engaged or actively disengaged at work) at 85% a step further, noting that in Japan it rises to 94%. As a result, the government has intervened with new policies and laws to address the stress and clinical burnout in the workplace and tragically high suicide rates.
In the United States, suicide rates have increased nearly 30% in less than 20 years according to the CDC, making it the 10th leading cause of death among all Americans, and third among youth and young adults (Swan, 2018). The research here probed on the connection to the increased demand for drugs such as marijuana, opioids and psychiatric medicine, which makes sense as the mortality rate from drug poisoning increased by 52% between 2000 and 2014. The research showed that among the suicide deaths with a toxicology test, 80% had one or more substance in their system. All told, Swan concluded that the majority of our U.S. population is under the influence of some form of psychoactive substance or drug, whether prescribed or not, or whether legally used or not, that essentially impairs a person. It is rational to believe that this is driven by the stress that eight in ten Americans report that they feel throughout the day (Gallup, 2019)
How do you find purposeful and meaningful work?
Given the potentially broad-reaching impacts, the real questions we need to answer, or better stated potentially help our clients answer is, how do they find meaningful and fulfilling work?
Let’s start with the definition of meaningful work as in and of itself, there is a level of subjectivity involved. Research conducted by Michael Steger and team (Steger, Michael F., 2012) led them to define Meaningful Work as work that is significant and positive in valence (meaningfulness), with that valence having a growth and purpose-oriented focus. In my translation, it means it contributes to a collective good and is not work for work sake.
Over the years and through a number of efforts, researchers and authors alike have been presented numerous aids to help people steer themselves towards Meaningful Work, albeit that may not have been the title used. Today, titles are often simply focused around Passion, Purpose, or Life’s Direction as illustrated by such books as Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Success on Your Own Terms: 6 Promises to Fire Up Your Passion, Ignite Your Career and Create an Amazing Life, or A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. It is quite common for these books to help create the context for the reader, stir the interest to pursue meaningful work and then provide a model to pursue it.
One of the first broadly shared models was “the wise choice of a vocation” by Frank Parsons (Parsons, 1909). Within this model he focuses on three distinct parts:
Part 1: The Personal Investigation
Part 2: The Industrial Investigation
Part 3: The Organization and the Work.
The opening of the book perfectly frames Parsons’ thoughts on this matter:
No step in life, unless it may be the choice of a husband or wife, is more important than the choice of a vocation. The wise selection of the business, profession, trade, or occupation to which one’s life is to be devoted and the development of full efficiency in the chosen field are matters of the deepest moment to young men and to the public. These vital problems should be solved in a careful, scientific way, with due regard to each person’s aptitudes, abilities, ambitions, resources and limitations, and the relations of these elements to the conditions of success in different industries.
This opening syncs rather nicely with the aforementioned definition, punctuating the idea of valence and basically states that if you are going to combine your efforts for a greater good, that should absolutely be a conscious decision, not one to be taken in a light-hearted manner.
Considering that the first model was introduced in 1909, it stands to reason that over the past one-hundred and ten years there has been no lack of research and theories presented on this topic. To deconstruct them, comparing and contrasting the differences in those theories within this research paper would not prove useful. However, in my review, I have found that Steger et al, adequately capture the essence of how to carry this work forward within their work of The Work and Meaning Inventory (Steger, 2012).
Outlined are three facets that the team asserts need to be included in future research and developed approaches in order to have comprehensive representation:
- Psychological meaningfulness (PM). This is subjective and is about the person feeling that what he or she is doing has personal significance. It harkens back to the point of personally taking care of oneself, but also goes to what Rick Warren notes in his book, The Purpose Driven Life, is the most basic question everyone faces in life, which is “Why am I here?” That answer is driven by an internal journey.
- Meaning-making (MM) through work. As previously mentioned, research has shown that work is frequently an important source of meaning and with more recent generations even more so.
- Great good motivations (GG). This about the person’s desire to make a positive impact on the greater good.
To take that one step further, that team performed additional research leading to the development of the Work and Meaning Inventory. This study, performed in 2012 at a large Western research university, appears to be the most recent work on this topic. Leveraging previous work, the team created a 10-item instrument with a battery of questions driving to collect data within the three aforementioned areas (PM, MM and GG) in hopes of gaining more precision relative to what characteristics of work help raise “meaningful” to the highest levels and what does the full collective set of benefits look like to organizations.
What does this mean for us coaches?
Regardless of the state of academic research and the harmony or lack thereof in conclusions within that community, one thing is certain. There is overwhelming evidence that human beings value purpose and meaning in their work. Further, there is evidence that to a degree, an individual’s assessment of whether that purpose or meaning exists or not has a translation and effect on his or her life in the broadest sense.
I want to acknowledge the training received in ICA and how I believe it has prepared us to appropriately help our clients. While there are a number of things I could point to, I would like to underscore two take-away items for me during my ICA journey that I am even more determined to improve upon as given this research.
The first is W.A.I.T. (Why Am I Talking?). I think this is a gift that keeps on giving. As we know, today, we are inundated with information, so much so that unmanaged, also every available moment of our lives could be absorbed. Rare if the opportunity to focus upon ourselves. As a coach, to welcome a client into a safe space, where he or she can openly explore, put challenges on the table and with our assistance, wrestle with them and navigate through their journey, is significant.
The second is to coach the person, not the problem as initially stated. We learn in training and see it manifest in coaching, that in many cases, that while the client may state the goal of the session (or even the engagement overall) at the onset, it is through “the dance” with our clients that they are able to see themselves more deeply, gain insight and should they choose, design a path towards transformation.
To be clear, it is understood that as coaches, we will not act as psychologists, nor make in-going assumptions, nor guide our clients through a prescribed journey. However, the techniques we employ allow us to take the client deeper if we truly “dance,” with them. Similar to asking the 5 Whys in order to get to the root of a problem (Mindtools), at our best, we ask powerful questions to our clients to get to their root.
The last recommendation to coaches is that to the extent that your client is expressing challenges that you feel naturally could lend themselves to the use of a tool to understand how your client feels about work, the Work and Meaning Inventory, as well as instructions for use, are available for free via Michael Steger’s website.
In closing, I’d like to suggest that this research hardens our commitment to being present in the dance with our clients, fully utilizing all the tools, techniques and training we have, with the interest of allowing them to get to the root.
Works Cited
“5 Whys: Getting to the Root of a Problem Quickly.” Problem-Solving Skills From MindTools.com, www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_5W.htm.
Dik, Bryan J., et al. “Purpose and Meaning in Career Development Applications.” The Counseling Psychologist, vol. 43, no. 4, 2014, pp. 558–585., DOI:10.1177/0011000014546872.
“The Experience of Meaning in Life – Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversies: Joshua A. Hicks.” Springer, Springer Netherlands, www.springer.com/us/book/9789400765269.
PARSONS, FRANK. CHOOSING A VOCATION (CLASSIC REPRINT). FORGOTTEN Books, 2015.
Parsons, Frank. “Choosing a Vocation. (1909 Edition).” Open Library, Gay, 1 Jan. 1970, openlibrary.org/books/OL7042543M/Choosing_a_vocation.
Saad, Lydia. “Eight in 10 Americans Afflicted by Stress.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 23 Apr. 2019, news.gallup.com/poll/224336/eight-americans-afflicted-stress.aspx.
Steger, Michael F., et al. “Measuring Meaningful Work.” Journal of Career Assessment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2012, pp. 322–337., DOI:10.1177/1069072711436160.
Steger, Michael F., et al. “Measuring Meaningful Work.” Journal of Career Assessment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2012, pp. 322–337., DOI:10.1177/1069072711436160.
Swahn, Monica H., and Monica H. Swahn. “Why Are Americans So Sad?” Quartz, Quartz, 14 June 2018, qz.com/1306176/why-are-americans-so-sad/.
W., Robert. “Career‐Life Preparedness: Revisiting Career Planning and Adjustment in the New Workplace, The Career Development Quarterly.” DeepDyve, Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company, 1 Mar. 2013, www.deepdyve.com/lp/Wiley/career-life-preparedness-revisiting-career-planning-and-adjustment-in-WtPQ3gP4IF#.