Leadership: Flourishing for Mission
“I hope you had the time of your life”
Good Riddance.
By: Billie Joe Armstrong, Tré Cool, Mike Dirnt (1997)
© Green Daze Music, Reprise Records, Warner Brothers Music Corp.
So, did you recently have ‘the time of your life’ at work? If not, why not? If so, what are you doing that others aren’t? What could you be doing to ensure you enjoy going to work? Consider these questions. In the year so far, how has the organization contributed to the betterment of humanity? How have people been empowered to succeed in their work? How have people been given the opportunity to flourish at work? If we spend one-third of our day (8 hours) at work, then every individual who engages with the organization should be able to flourish.
According to research from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, there are six dimensions of Human Flourishing. The good news is that this well-researched model recognizes that you are not expected to be perfect in every domain of flourishing all the time. Each domain should be good, but that doesn’t mean every day it is great.
There are six Domains to Human Flourishing.
- Happiness & Life Satisfaction
- Mental & Physical Health
- Meaning & Purpose
- Character & Virtue
- Close Social Relationships
- Financial & Material Stability
There are four Pathways to the Six Domains.
- Family
- Work
- Education
- Religious Community
Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University (ND). Domains & Pathways to Flourishing.
According to this research, work is one of the four pathways to flourishing. It can support and contribute to each domain of human flourishing, as cited above. There is a vast array of literature that highlights the connection between productivity and employee well-being. Work is perhaps a pervasive, highly relevant activity when it comes to flourishing. It can be done on a daily basis and: bring happiness and life satisfaction, improve health outcomes, give meaning and purpose to life, build character and develop virtue, nurture close social relationships, and contribute strongly to financial and material stability. The four pathways that lead to these six domains are: Family, Work, Education, and Religious Community. Because work is a daily activity for many and can easily contribute to all domains, it stands out.
In his excellent 2020 paper, Professor Tyler J. VanderWeele, the Director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, introduces the concept of Job-Crafting. The premise is that when people can shape their work, workflow, and workday, well-being and flourishing can begin. They are, in effect, shaping the work to suit their way of operating, giving a sense of ownership over the work at hand. This is about ensuring that challenging tasks have sufficient time and resources, while recurring ‘admin’-type tasks can serve as a bit of a circuit-breaker in a busy day.
“The idea of job crafting (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001) is that one reflects upon one’s work environment and takes actions at work to try to (i) structure one’s tasks so that they can be done more effectively, or so that tedious tasks are no longer necessary, or so that more challenging tasks are available; (ii) have better, more meaningful, or more effective social relationships and interactions at work; and (iii) find meaning and purpose in the work being done. The longitudinal studies on job crafting and meta-analysis of these studies have suggested that the use of job crafting increases work engagement and performance and may also have effects on meaning in work and various measures of psychological well-being (Frederick and VanderWeele, 2018).”
VanderWeele,Tyler. J. (2020). ‘Activities for Flourishing: An Evidence-Based Guide’ in Journal of Positive Psychology & Wellbeing 2020, Vol. 4, No. 1, 79 –91.
Of course, VanderWeele wrote this in 2020, just before AI/SI exploded onto the scene and upended work practices as we have known them. This underscores the need for the Leadership Team and governing Boards of any and all organizations to ensure they control the impact, use, and even the nature of AI/SI within their organization. Organizations that are not on top of AI/SI and introduce it in an almost ad hoc manner will find that AI/SI starts to control them and their employees. Ultimately, employees displaced by AI/SI from the workforce will soon find that their health outcomes and skill set begin to diminish the longer they remain out of the workforce. The social dislocation that this can cause, and that, from the view of Anthropology, will happen, should be of concern for all. For people who are displaced through their job being abolished and replaced by AI/SI, retraining and even pivoting into a different profession, where the current skill set is valued, needs to be planned today. This should be a joint exercise between the employee and the employer. People need to find meaning and purpose in their work. In the work VanderWeele and his team have done on flourishing, meaning, and purpose, they’ve made some fascinating connections.
“The importance of having meaning is also reflected in surveys of the general public. For example, a survey of 2,285 American professionals found that the average respondent “would be willing to forego 23% of their entire future lifetime earnings in order to have a job that was always meaningful.” Meaning can also affect other aspects of flourishing. For example, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan published a paper in 2019 that found considerable longevity benefits to having a sense of purpose in life for adults above age 50.”
VanderWeele, Tyler.J. (2017). Meaning in Life and Human Flourishing: Distinguishing meaning, purpose, and their varieties.
According to research from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, there are six dimensions of Human Flourishing.
How might someone go about identifying their personal mission and purpose to determine whether they align with the mission of the organization they work for? In his excellent article for Psychology Today, psychologist Dr. Daniel Marston provides these helpful tips.
- Work not only on identifying goals but on identifying what you generally value in life
Look at what you already find meaningful and ask yourself, “What does this tell me about what I truly value?”
- Commit yourself to engaging in meaningful activities instead of waiting for activities to appear
Finding meaning and purpose often develops through continued involvement in important things like work, relationships, caregiving, creativity, and community activities.
- Actively look for ways to contribute something beyond yourself
Sometimes determining meaning does not come from your initial internal response but comes from how other people respond to what you are doing…this does not mean that you base meaning on what people tell you is meaningful, but rather on what you experience from how people respond to you.
- Use your experiences to develop a coherent understanding of meaning and purpose
Reflect on each experience that you have and look at it in the context of other experiences to try to develop a coherent personal philosophy of meaning and purpose.
- Treat meaning and purpose as things that can change through time and experiences and not something you have to get absolutely right the first time
Finding meaning and purpose is very much a process and will often involve modification to what you think is meaningful and purposeful.
Marston, Daniel. (2026). 5 Steps to Finding Meaning and Purpose: Suggestions for helping access the most important parts of human existence (Psychology Today. September 2, 2026).
The trick, of course, after doing all this work on yourself, is to determine what alignment, if any, there might be with the organization’s stated mission, vision, and values. For some, it will align easily with their current organization; for others, it might be a lifelong process. For others, it might be a moment of revelation that you belong elsewhere, to flourish as a person. For many, it will be the realization that their current mission and purpose can be found in their current work, though that may change in the future. A good leader will have these discussions with their team, coach them, and identify what team members see as their individual meaning and purpose, their personal mission. The good leader will seek to find alignment with the organization’s mission and vision. The good leader will discuss what professional and personal development opportunities they could provide, so as to bring the jigsaw puzzle that a team is into focus. Allowing each individual to transcend themselves into the best iteration of self they can be is critical to the overall anthropology of any organization. In the end, you should find that you can have the time of your life at work.
“The complete consort dancing together.”
T.S. Eliot. ‘Little Gidding’
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