Wes Adams & Tamara Myles: How to Create Meaningful Work in Every Employee

Episode recap: 

In this episode, Marcel sits down with Wes Adams and Tamara Myles, co-authors of A Meaningful Work, to explore what truly makes work meaningful in the age of AI. Drawing from positive psychology and organizational research, they unpack how leaders can move beyond removing obstacles and instead foster environments of high well-being, challenge, contribution, and connection. They highlight the role of positive, timely feedback in reinforcing meaningful contributions and show how challenge, paired with strong support, creates a “zone of possibility” where people thrive. Together, they make the case that meaningful work is a business imperative. Listeners will walk away with actionable ways to spark purpose and connection in their own workplaces. 

Guest Bio:

Wes Adams, CEO of SV Consulting Group, partners with Fortune 500s and growing companies to develop leaders and create effective structures for high-performing teams. He researches positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on leadership practices that help employees thrive. 

Tamara Myles is a speaker, author, professor, and entrepreneur focused on human flourishing at work. She helps leaders and organizations like Microsoft, KPMG, and MassMutual unlock meaningful work to boost performance, innovation, and resilience. As faculty at Boston College and at the University of Pennsylvania, her work shows that meaningful work leads to thriving teams and lasting impact.

Quotes 

• “Leaders are responsible for almost half of each individual’s experience of meaning at work.”   
• “Community says, I matter here.”      

Takeaways 

• Leaders must intentionally foster community, contribution, and challenge to create meaningful work.  
• Simple practices—like synchronized breaks, positive feedback, and development conversations—can transform team culture.  

Timestamps

[00:00] Marcel’s introduction: why meaningful work matters in today’s world   

[04:19] Tamara’s personal story: what makes work meaningful (or not)   

[06:26] Wes’s journey: purpose-driven work isn’t always meaningful   

[09:33] Defining meaningful work and debunking misconceptions   

[12:41] Has the meaning of work changed post-pandemic?   

[23:43] Research on social connection and productivity   

[28:22] The “friendship effect” and overcoming challenges together   

[28:31] Contribution—understanding impact and purpose at work   

[52:21] The power of saying “thank you” and recognizing others 

Conclusion 

Wes Adams and Tamara Myles make it clear: meaningful work is not about what you do, but how you experience it—and leaders play a pivotal role in shaping that experience. By focusing on community, contribution, and challenge, and by practicing care, feedback, and support, leaders can ignite passion and performance in every employee. The call to action is simple: start today, with small steps, to make work more meaningful for your team and yourself. The ripple effects can transform not just organizations, but lives. 

Links Mentioned 

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-Work-Passion-Performance-Employee/dp/1541704533 

Website: https://www.makeworkmeaningful.com/  

Transcript

Marcel Schwantes  00:04 

Hey gang, welcome back. Glad you are here. I'm excited about today's episode because I feel well, it's going to be applicable to every leader listening or watching right now. And I really mean that that's no exaggeration. Okay, think about all the changes in transformation that we have experienced in the last five years. I mean, think about it, global pandemic. We the whole world went remote, right? And then there's this loneliness epidemic that has come with it, if you track the data. And then we had this thing called the Great resignation. And if you want to call it quiet quitting, not to mention, well, all of the political division and violence that we have seen, it's all over the news, etc. And some of that kind of seeps into the workplace, right? And now we have these fears as well as the excitement. However you look at it, with AI and how to even navigate this new landscape. So that's a lot. It's a lot, right? So it makes sense that the places where we spend the majority of our awake hours, that's our work and our businesses, and whatever you want to call your office would be a place that inspires us, that brings out the best in you as a leader, because most of you listening are leaders, but also in your teammates and your employees, right? And a place where we are learning and we are growing, and where people are realizing their full potential, where work has meaning, and that kind of segues to the rest of this conversation, because a fascinating new book came across my desk, and it's called meaningful work, how to ignite passion and performance in every employee and the authors, Wes Adams and Tamara Myles, they leverage the science of positive psychology to show leaders why and how to make meaning central to their leadership practice. And that's why I feel this is an important conversation for every leader listening. And by the way, that book has been named one of the top leadership books of 2025 by Fast Company. Let me introduce our distinguished guests today. Okay, Wes Adams is the CEO of SV Consulting Group. He partners with Fortune 500 and scaling companies to develop high impact leaders and design operating structures that support high performing teams. He is also a positive psychology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies the leadership practices and organizational structures that help employees thrive. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, by the way, which is only about an hour and a half from me. Tamara Myles is a speaker, author, professor and entrepreneur specializing in the science of human flourishing. At work, she helps leaders and organizations like Microsoft, KPMG and mass mutual unlock the power of meaningful work to drive peak performance, innovation and resilience. A faculty member at Boston College and a researcher and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, Tamara's work challenges assumptions about work, showing that when leaders make work meaningful, they create thriving teams and lasting impact. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts, and I am stoked, yes, that's Southern California, surfling that I use when I'm really excited about something. I am stoked that Wes and Tamara are both here, and they now join this welcome to the love in action podcast. Thank you to be here. Likewise, and I again, can't wait to get this going. I think this is going to be a fun conversation. So this is how we start. You guys, ready? Ready? Dive in. Yeah. All right. Well, there's two of you, so I'll start with Tamara. What's your story?  

Tamara Myles  04:19 

Sure. So I grew up in Brazil, so born and raised down there, but moved here to the US as a teenager, and finished college here, started working, and so I started my career in advertising and doing the same job. I worked at three different agencies, and sometimes I experienced that same work as really meaningful. I was connected. I had friends at work. I knew the impact I had on, you know, on the clients that I serviced. I was challenged with opportunities to grow and in other experiences. And other agencies doing the same exact job, I felt empty. I was counting the hours until I could go home. I had the Sunday scaries, and so I started really being curious about like, what is it about the experience that's making this meaningful or not? It's not the work that I'm doing because I'm doing the same work. And so then my career meandered for a while. I started my own business. I did a lot of productivity consulting. I published my first book, which was all about productivity consulting, and I started seeing a very strong relationship between productivity and meaning, the more productive we were, the more systems we had in place, the more time we could spend on work that felt really fulfilling, and the more time we spent in that work, the more productive we were. And so there was a virtuous cycle in place. And so I decided to go back to school to study that cycle. And that's when Wes and I met at graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, studying positive psychology. And so I will stop here and let Wes tell his story until that that moment where we met, and she's been stuck with me ever in the best possible she's also very good at segueing right? She's like, transition right to you took me out of the other 

Wes Adams  06:26 

we're doing your job for you. Yeah. I mean, I had a bit of a different experience, but ended up coming to grad school for kind of similar reasons. So you know, my my my background is entrepreneurial, so I started and grew a number of companies, and, you know, at one point, started working more in the social enterprise space. And when I got into that space, I think I somewhat naively assumed that, oh, because these are purpose driven or mission driven organizations. They're going to be great places to work. Every one of them is going to be amazing, and the people are going to be inspired to do these things. We're going to work together. And some of them were like that. But, you know, this idea of having a, you know, like a higher calling, didn't always make work meaningful. You know, some places were not great places to work for various reasons. And you know, as I was experiencing this and learning this, I started working more internationally. And so I was exposed to people in different countries who had very different ideas of what work should be like, or how to engage. And so I got more interested in Organizational Psychology. And what does it take? Can you deconstruct, you know, the elements that make a really great place to work, somewhere like Tamara said that you show up, you're lit up like you want to, you know, get out of bed Monday morning and go because you're excited about it. And so I, you know, that's also what took me to grad school, and we were in a positive psychology program together. And just for listeners who may not be familiar with that term, you know, if you're if you think about traditional psychology, what we usually think about is clinical psychology is focused on removing road blocks to our well being, right? It's depression, anxiety, PTSD, those things. That's not what we do. It's really important work. You know, we definitely want to focus on removing those roadblocks, but if we do that, just gets us to neutral. Right? And neutral is not enough. It's not what we're all hoping for. You know, just to get by, we want to have high well being. We want to do our best work, you know, to achieve excellence in our, you know, our jobs or our lives or whatever. And so positive psychology is the study of those behaviors, practices, mindsets that help us get to, you know, high well being to great work. And that's what you know Tamara and I focus on is especially applying those philosophies and practices in the workplace. 

Marcel Schwantes  09:06 

Yeah. And I'm telling you, University of Pennsylvania, I think, is at the leading edge of, I believe, as being one of the top hubs for positive psychology and learning. Absolutely. Yeah, it's fantastic. 

Tamara Myles  09:19 

Okay, it all started. Yeah. Oh, okay, good, yeah. So we are lucky enough to study under Marty Seligman, who's a mentor, and we love him. We get to see him often, and he, you know, founded the field, so it's amazing, yeah. 

Marcel Schwantes  09:33 

Well, let's, let's start with, you know, let's take the term meaningful work because or even meaning, that term is tossed around so loosely in, you know, in the in the business lexicon, right? So Tamara, what is a meaningful work and maybe, why is this so important? 

Tamara Myles  09:54 

Now, great. I'll tell you what it is, and then I'll also debunk a couple of misconceptions. Actions. And so the way we define, excuse me, the way we define meaningful work is work that provides a sense of community, that helps us contribute to something that matters and that challenges us to learn and grow. Right? So these 3C, Community, Contribution and Challenge are the three pillars of meaningful work that emerged from our study. Now, one of the things we get asked all the time is whether meaningful work is the same as purpose driven work, and you'll see the two terms being used interchangeably, often in the same article, in the same sentence. And we found that, well, Wes' example is a perfect example of that, like he told his story about how he worked in purpose driven organizations, but work didn't necessarily feel meaningful. So purpose is a part of meaningful work. It falls under the contribution, see, but having a purpose isn't enough to make work meaningful. We need to know how we contribute to that purpose, what is our impact, and so we like to say contribution activates the sense of purpose for us. And of course, there's a few practices that do that, and we can dig into that later. Another misconception is that you know meaningful work is about the work that you do, so that you have to be saving lives or curing diseases, or, you know, teaching children for work to feel meaningful. And what we find is that meaningful work is not as much about what you do as it is about how you experience what you do, and that, you know, you can think back to my own story about doing the same job at different agencies, and sometimes it felt meaningful and sometimes it didn't. So I think, is there any other misconception that I left out, Wes?  

Wes Adams  11:56 

I think you, you nailed the big ones for sure. 

Marcel Schwantes  11:59 

Well, okay, so here's what's interesting for me as well. Is, you know, meaning meaningful work might have been something different before the pandemic. I don't know. So that's my assumption. So challenge this assumption, if you will. Or maybe it It hasn't changed. So talk, talk a little bit about here.  

Tamara Myles  12:25 

We are almost wrapping up 2025, we're now possible, 

Marcel Schwantes  12:27 

exactly so, post covid, age, hybrid settings for most of us, AI revolution taking over. Okay. What does meaningful work mean to both of you today? Wes, I'll start with you. 

Wes Adams  12:41 

I think that's a great question. And you know what we found? You know, we've been looking at research that's, you know, in addition to doing our own research, over the last number of years, we've looked at decades of research on meaning and meaning at work. And so the definition of it hasn't changed really significantly in that time, and it's something that we all want, that we all define similarly, regardless of where you come from, what generation you're a part of, whether you're working remotely or in person, you know, it's something that we all want. And I think what the pandemic did was it accelerated this demand for meaningful work. We all had a chance for the first time in probably 100 years to really take a step back and say, Is this working for me? Like, is this the is this job or the way that my organization is structured? Am I getting something out of it other than a paycheck, right? And I think for a lot of people, the answer was no. And so we saw things like the great resignation and that sort of thing, that movement for meaning was growing before the pandemic, but I think we just hit a big acceleration point there because of, you know, the unique moment that we found ourselves in. And I also think it's important to maybe take a step back and point out that one of the reasons that Tamara and I chose to study this isn't just because it feels good, right. Meaning is the upstream factor that drives all of the outcomes that we're looking for, both as employees and also employers, right? The belief that your work matters is what drives your own well being, engagement, job satisfaction, but at the team and organizational level, this is the thing that drives productivity, innovation, resilience. There's great new research out of Oxford showing it drives profitability and stock price. So this is a especially in a world where people are demanding it, this is a business imperative if you want to succeed moving forward. 

Marcel Schwantes  14:47 

Yeah, yeah. So I definitely want to dive into those three C's, right? You touched on Community, Contribution, and Challenge. But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about the biggest barriers that stop people from from really having meaningful work, or maybe it's the biggest barriers for leaders to understand, what are they creating that doesn't lead to meaningful work? 

Tamara Myles  15:15 

Yeah, so one of the things that we found in our research was that leaders are responsible for almost half of each individual's experience of meaning at work. That was an exciting finding. Nobody had looked at the impact of leaders in, you know, in creating meaning at work. It was looked at mostly as an individual phenomenon. And so I think that is one of the barriers so many people are promoted to leadership roles because they are great individual contributors, but they don't get the training that they need in order to lead people well, right? You go to business school, you get an MBA, there's not a lot of training on being a great leader, how to lead with meaning and all of that. So I think that's one of the barriers. And one of the organizations that we studied, or continue to study, and interviewed the chief people officer there at the time, Katie Burke, so the organization is HubSpot, and she told us that, you know, so they're very intentional about their culture. They have a culture code. They're known for having a great culture. They attract the best talent. People stay there. People are happy to go to work there. I mean, their numbers are incredible. And she told us that, you know, they were noticing that the leaders just weren't always following these practices in the way that they wanted to. So they retrained every single leader in the organization, and then everyone that gets promoted to leadership gets training on, you know, how to lead with. Meaning, what do they these practices look like in action? So I think that's one of the barriers. 

Marcel Schwantes  16:58 

Yeah, Wes, Do you, can you think of any of the barriers? 

Wes Adams  17:03 

I think there are a number of them. I mean, if we're talking about, you know, our focus on leaders, I think there is, like Tamara said, like, we promote people for being great individual contributors, but we don't necessarily teach them or even ask them if they want to be people leaders, right? And that's a completely different set of skills than being a great accountant or being a great developer, and you have to invest in that and continue to learn and grow. And I think very often, leaders get put in the position where they have to deliver and also lead people, but they're not measured on the people leadership piece. They're only measured on the piece that they have to deliver. You know? It's like that, the fallacy of the player, coach. Oh, I can do both of those things, and that's really difficult to do, especially when you're not being evaluated on your leadership, right? And I think some of the companies that we've studied that have done this really well and nurture and grow, meaning driven leaders have a focus on it in their evaluation process. It's something that's talked about. It's something that people get feedback on, you know, it's not just the what, you know, what did you deliver? But how did you get there? What was the and how are you growing other people? How are you investing in folks, and so I think making that explicit is really powerful.  

Marcel Schwantes  18:27 

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So listeners, this is the part of the conversation where you know you might want to pull out a pull up a notepad and a pen, or pull up your laptop with the word, because you need to take notes here. This is the part of the conversation that turns into education, maybe even some coaching for you. Okay, so we're going to break down the three ways that leaders right now can create meaning at work, for not only themselves, right? I mean, as leaders and managers, you also have to have meaning, but also for your employees as well. All right. So should we break them down, folks, the 3C of meaning, okay, start with community. 

Tamara Myles  19:04 

Community, yeah, great. I'll say community. Community is all about feeling like you belong, you know, to with the people that you work with. You feel a sense of belonging. You can show up authentically, which means you can be who you really are, but also you can say what you really think, right? And so community says, I matter here. And so some of the practices that unlock community, I think, tie really nicely with the title of this podcast, right? Love and action. I think it's, it's expressing caring concern for people, expressing building trust, letting people speak up, developing growth mindset and psychological safety and so one so in our research, you know, we developed a questionnaire, an assessment that everybody can take for free on our website, but the question and. Assessment that predicted the highest sense of community was, does your leader care about what's happening in your life outside of work? So for the listeners who are listening now, think about this. You know. Think about your co workers, your colleagues, the people who work on your team. Do you know their kids names? Do you know their birthday? Do you know the book that they're currently reading? Do you know what they do on the weekends for fun or their hobbies, and what they like to cook? You know, these are simple things to know, but they're really important, and they make us feel like we matter. And so I would say, you know, if you want to do something tomorrow to build more community in your next interaction, in your next meeting, ask people what they're doing this weekend. 

Marcel Schwantes  20:50 

Yeah, yeah. Do you have any examples? Wes about how to create more maybe connection and belonging at work, really, in a way that makes business sense, right? That we're not just going rah, rah, and just being cheerleaders all day. 

Wes Adams  21:03 

There's a great one that we talk about in the book that's from Vivek Murthy, who was the Surgeon General at the US, and who studied the loneliness epidemic that you mentioned in your intro. And it's something he instituted in his office called the inside scoop. And basically, it's really simple. It's just taking five minutes at the beginning of every weekly team meeting, and someone from the group brings in an item that's meaningful to them, you know, or, if they're it's a remote meeting, they grab something and they show it on screen. It's a, oh, this is a photo of my family at the Grand Canyon. And this is a trip that we took, or, you know, here's the scarf that my grandmother knitted me that, you know, I wear every winter, and it means a lot because of, you know, my relationship with her, you know, very short five minutes, you know, sort of like a show and tell situation. And what he found was just taking the time intentionally to do that, allowing people, inviting people, to bring a bit of themselves into the conversation, helped build connection. People found things that they had in common that they didn't realize they had in common. They started to see people more as people, and not just transactional relationships, and it really improved collaboration, especially across silos, which is in our consulting work, something that we're trying to help people navigate all the time. You know, as people in different functions in the organization aren't talking to each other, and how do we build more cross functional or cross silo communication? And one of the first ways to do that is just get people to get to know each other, so that they feel like they can call each other and talk. 

Marcel Schwantes  22:47 

Yeah, that's good. I want to get one of you maybe to comment on this one, because I saw that you cite research by MIT professor. Is it Alex Pentland? I think yes. And so what I found fascinating is, is that you can increase social connection and bring people together with this idea of what I think he calls a synchronized break. I know the I know the research was at a call center, so lots of people right, but share a little bit about the idea of people coming together all at once in a synchronized break, but we don't think about that. We're, you know, people are in office environments that are still, you know, manufacturing maybe, or call centers, yeah, we all take different breaks. But I guess the point is, what is it? What's a synchronized break, and how did that lead to increasing meaning and social connection. 

Tamara Myles  23:43 

Yeah. So in the study, they took call center workers, you know, and they stagger their brakes on purpose, right? So that there was always people there to answer the calls, and different teams get staggered within the team so, so that there's always people there. But they suspected that giving people 15 minute synchronized breaks would increase connection between them, and then, therefore increase productivity. And so they had a control group that was business as usual, taking the staggered breaks, and then the experiment group, where they gave everybody on the team a 15 minute break together, and then they tracked their productivity, the number of calls that they were taking, and then the performance if they were able to resolve the calls. And then, I believe, I can't remember this exactly if it's true, if I'm making this up, but I believe they also tracked the connectivity that employees felt with each other, and the results were pretty astounding. Like the people who took the breaks together were much more productive, felt much more connected, right, and performed at a higher level. And so I think that you know, what we suggest in the book, a practice like to take this forward is what's called Ka, which is a Swedish term for a coffee break, right? So instead of letting people kind of roam around and take their lunch and go get the thing and sit at their desk and then take coffee at different breaks, is to have a time each day for 15 minutes where it's like everybody come together, let's have some coffee, and we talk about quartz, the news organization. They tried that in one of their teams for a week doing this FICA break. And you know, they said it was really awkward. At first, everybody was like, oh, okay, what do we do here? But then as the week went on, people found out that one of their colleagues was moving, another colleague was having surgery, and nobody knew. So like, even in just that week, they all felt like they got to know each other better and felt a little more connected. And, you know, we yesterday, Wes, and I had a book event here in Boston, and Rob Perez was on stage with us. We did a coffee chat with him. He's a great leader in the biotech industry here, and he said that, like 10, like 12 years ago, so way pre covid, they measured, at his organization, the amount of time that people were talking to each other. They brought MIT researchers in, and they were devices, and they were measuring the togetherness of the team and how, you know, how close people were talking by the volume of their voice. And it was like some crazy MIT research. But they ultimately discovered that people were really disconnected in the office, and they really cared and were intentional about their culture. So they invested hundreds of 1000s of dollars to redesign the office. Instead of having multiple small coffee areas where people could go, they centralized it into two larger coffee areas to kind of force people together to walk a little further, go get coffee, kind of run into each other more. And he said it was transformative, you know, and so it's like little things like that, going a little upstream, being intentional about it, can really transform your culture and help people feel more connected. And when we feel closer to our co workers, we tend to help each other out more. We tend to be there for each other, you know, tend to solve problems better together, yeah. 

Marcel Schwantes  27:17 

And it creates a high performing organization, if you are numbers driven and you and you're thinking about financial performance, how does this lead to increasing our revenues or profits, etc? There is a direct link?  

Tamara Myles  27:32 

There is a direct link. There's a study that we, we know we didn't have room to quote in the book, but they, they took people to the bottom of a hill, and asked them to estimate how steep the hill is. How hard would it be to climb that hill right? And when people stood there alone, they estimated the hill to be much steeper than when they stood there with a friend, and the closer they were to the to that friend, the easier it felt to climb that hill right. And the researchers call this the friendship effect and the point is that, you know, we are solving hard problems and facing daunting challenges, like the hill at work every day, but when we feel connected to the people we're doing these hard things with, they feel more doable, more manageable. We feel more motivated and empowered to do it together. Yeah? 

Marcel Schwantes  28:22 

All right, let's talk about the second C of creating meaning, and that is through contribution. Wes you want to break that down for us? 

Wes Adams  28:31 

Yeah? Although I was just thinking like, I don't know if I would have made it through writing this book without Tamara came into play in the process of, yeah, just creating this book. So that's great. Yeah. I love that study. Yeah. So contribution. So this is understanding how your work matters, how you're having a positive impact, whether that's on your customers, clients, colleagues, how your work ladders up to a larger organizational goal or strategy. And so this is where the purpose stuff comes in that we talked about earlier. And this is where the story that you're telling yourself, or being able to see your impact, really comes into play. And so one of the examples that I really love that we write about in the book is from the scheduling software company Calendly, which probably most of us are familiar with. A lot of us use it to schedule our meetings, and it's one of the most transactional pieces of software there is, right? It's just back and forth. Let's get this on the calendar. And so on the face of it doesn't feel super meaningful, right? But the way that the CEO Tope Awotona thinks about it is that Calendly is a way to save people time, right? You save yourself that frustrating back and forth of scheduling, and that frees up time to do other things that are more important to you, whether that's more important work. Work, or maybe you got, you know, time with your family. They estimate it saves people about an hour a week of the back and forth. And that adds up to a whole work week over the course of the year, which is pretty substantial. And so he does a great job of asking people, What are you doing with that time when he's working with, you know, talking to clients, what are you doing with that time that you got back? How are you using that, and then he'll capture that, he'll record a video telling that story, and share it with the rest of the organization, so that people who are, you know, maybe not connected to clients directly, like maybe you're coding, you know, one of the apps, or, you know, you're working by yourself all day as a developer, you get to see that connection, you can draw the line between the work that you're doing and the impact that it's having on, you know, customers or clients. And so I think that storytelling piece is very powerful. And one of the things that is also incredibly powerful in the contribution bucket that we often forget about is positive feedback. Are you saying thank you? Are you appreciating your co workers or your direct reports for what they're doing? Are you telling them why it mattered to you? This is very underused and a huge high leverage practice that you know takes about five or 10 seconds to employ. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Marcel Schwantes  31:21 

And I'm glad that you said positive feedback, because so so much or so, I should say, not every leader knows how to give feedback, or even frequent and timely feedback or or give it the right way. So I'm glad that you mentioned but so that makes a question, though, is there a good example of giving positive feedback? What would you say? 

Wes Adams  31:42 

Well, in fact, I'm glad you asked, because we have a model for it in the book that we call best feedback. So you know saying thank you or good job is great. Absolutely do that, and if you really want to level up your positive feedback game using this model. So best is behavioral, explicit, strengths based and timely really helps people understand what they should do more of, right? This is something that I'm seeing in you that I should double down on. You know, so behavioral, what is the thing that you did? Explicit about what the impact is that it had on the work or on me strengths based what is the positive characteristic that I saw in you that you demonstrated by doing this? And of course, timely, we want to be giving that feedback as soon as possible after the thing happened. We don't want to hoard these things until our annual reviews, because they're not going to do much good six months down the line, and we want to be doing it frequently, right? So, you know what that might look like is, you know, Marcel, I really appreciated how much you prepared for this podcast. It was really obvious to me that you read the book and you really thought about it, and that meant a lot to me, and it just made my job of, you know, being a participant in this podcast so much more fun, and that was very thoughtful of you, and I really appreciated that. 

Marcel Schwantes  33:04 

Yeah, that's a great example, and because it's specific enough, and it hopefully reinforces the behavior that you want to see more of in your workers and community. 

Wes Adams  33:15 

And if you know that that works, probably the next podcast you're going to prepare again, you know, because you got some positive feedback on it right? And it's the same thing at work. We're so focused on trying to correct people and tell them what they're doing wrong, but that doesn't help them figure out what they're doing right. If we give people roadmap for where to go, that is really powerful, and that is what drives, you know, more productivity, more innovation, all the things that we want to see. 

Marcel Schwantes  33:43 

Love it. Love it. All right, should we transition to the third and final? All right? So tomorrow, I'll go to you on this one. The third C of creating meaning is through challenge. Break that down for us. 

Tamara Myles  33:55 

So we as humans are wired to keep learning, growing, mastering new skills, right? We love the experience of like, of learning something new, or kind of reaching a challenge, becoming the best possible versions of ourselves, right? And so we need people who believe in us at work, who see our potential, see our strengths, and give us those opportunities to stretch ourselves, and so that's what we call challenge. And we can do that in two ways, by giving people what we call aligned autonomy, which is autonomy that is aligned to the company's values and the behaviors we want to see, right? But like not micromanaging people, let people solve problems and in their creative ways, right? And then another way to do that is to put people in what we call the zone of possibility. And the zone of possibility is where high expectations meets high support. So if you think about it as a leader, the zone of possibility is where you have one hand on your teammates or employees back, kind of pushing them to become the best version of themselves, but your other hand is under their arm, supporting them as they navigate the tricky terrain, right? And so this balance of having high expectations, communicating your belief in them and your high expectations, but also providing high support. Because what we see often is that, you know, people want to throw people into challenge and give them the hard assignment, but without the proper support, it puts people in what we call the zone of anxiety, right where it's they're fearful and scared of making mistakes. And so there were many practices in, you know, in the book and in our research, to get people in that zone of possibility. And one of them is what's called in the research, the magical feedback, right? So researchers looked at middle school children receiving feedback on a hard essay that they had written, right? They had an essay assignment that was hard, and they wrote it, and half the kids got feedback, and then the in the the teachers kind of marked it all up, tons of writing all over the essay, half of the kids got a post it note that said, I'm giving you this feedback because I believe in your potential, and I know, you know, I know that you can succeed. And then the other half just said, I'm giving you these comments so you have feedback on your paper, right? And what they saw is that the kids who said, you know, I see, who received the feedback that said, I have high expectations for you. I know you can reach them, they put a lot more effort into rewriting their essay, and the quality of their essay, The rewritten essay was much higher, yeah, and it was so much higher that the researchers call this the magical feedback. And so when, when you're looking at assignments to give to your teammates and looking to stretch them, you know, let them know I'm giving you this because I see potential in you. I have high expectations for you. I know you can get there. How can I help you? What support do you need? And if you don't know what assignments to give or what kind of where they want to grow, ask them. We have a practice called discovery conversations, where you just ask you, like, what, where do you want to learn? Is there anybody here that you want to shadow or that you want to mentor you? What other areas of the organization interest you you know? So having these development conversations, I said discovery, right? Sorry. Development conversations with your team is a great way to find out kind of what direction they want to go in and then help them get there.  

Marcel Schwantes  37:49 

Yeah, yeah. Would you add anything to that, Wes? 

Wes Adams  37:53 

I mean, as usual, Tamara, you know, did a great job of covering it. I think the Yeah, I think it's just that, you know, what really, I think I learned in the in the process of researching and writing that challenge, piece of it was this idea of support, you know, like, as Tamara said, I think we often push people to grow, but we don't give them the tools or the resources that they need. And I think we also, you know, the idea of growth mindset, right? So people are going to make mistakes and fail as part of the learning and growing process, and that's normal, and that's okay, and we should just account for that and treat that as, you know, something that's to be expected. And I don't think that's always the culture in some organizations that we've worked with, you know, sometimes you get called out or punished for making a mistake, and that does not give people the space to learn and grow. And so I think just being mindful of that. 

Marcel Schwantes  38:52 

Yeah, I love everything about this, this, this area of challenge. I've been there. I've been under CEOs way, way, way back in my in my corporate days where, yes, they wanted to stretch me and expose me to new areas, but they were there, one in one in particular, who, to this day, is my favorite boss, going back 2025, years now, but he was not. He didn't drop me out of a helicopter into a firetone. He was there, you know, to fight the battles with me. He was a mentor. He spent time with me, but, yeah, he wanted me to go into areas that I was a little freaked out by, you know, where he wanted to take me and but what worked is that he was there to kind of pave the way right to bring in the right people, the right networks to support me and then spend time with the with me, one on one, asked me lots of questions, and I tell you that was one of the one of those, those times in my career where I probably grew as a professor. Professional than any other time, you know, in a corporate setting. So good, good stuff. 

Tamara Myles  40:06 

I love that story. I have goose bumps because we heard in our research so many of those extraordinary stories of these leaders who do exactly that and that. That's kind of where we came up with this zone of possibility concept, right? And it's amazing, because it's been 25 years, and you're like, it's, it's still such an important part of your journey. And I had a leader like that, like 23 years ago, who still stands out to me as my favorite leader, who helped me learn the most at work, you know. And we, we, when we facilitate workshops, this is one of our favorite kind of modules, because we have people kind of tell these stories, and it is so inspiring. 

Marcel Schwantes  40:47 

Yeah, that's great. Well, let me simplify things for our listeners to just kind of give them something to that they can start doing today. Is there any anything that you would say that they must, must focus on to ignite the passion in their people, you know, to bring more meaning into the work. 

Wes Adams  41:09 

I would say, Well, you know, my favorite is the positive feedback. So I think just remembering to say, thank you making a practice of it, some of the most successful people we interviewed or researched had a practice where they wrote notes, you know, like five notes at the end of each week to people on their team and told them what they had did that week that had positively impacted them or created some other practice around sharing positive feedback, which ended up spreading throughout the team. You know, you kind of role model this, and other people start doing it. And I think that is, it's not difficult, and it's just really powerful thing that we can all do. 

Marcel Schwantes  41:52 

Yeah, all right, before we transition to our speed round. And the fun stuff is there any question or anything that that that we should have covered, that we didn't, that's really important for our listeners to know. 

Tamara Myles  42:06 

I would say that, you know, one of the questions we get asked a lot is, you know, these practices sound great, but you know, how can I do that for my team if I'm not experiencing work as meaningful myself, like I'm not experiencing any of this in my own work, and what we say, and what we've seen in the research, and what we've seen in our experience is that start making work meaningful for your team today, for a colleague today, because the best way to increase your own sense of meaning at work is to start making work more meaningful for others. So if you are working for a boss that's not doing that, if you are maybe stuck in a you know, in an environment that you don't feel is super meaningful, try these practices out. Try connecting with your team. Try connecting with your colleagues. Try thanking them. Try seeing something in them that they don't see yet for themselves, and we almost guarantee that you will start experiencing more meaning. 

Marcel Schwantes  43:10 

That's great. All right. Gang strap on the seat belt. We have arrived at the speed round. Okay, here we go. Tamara, who is someone that inspires you right now. 

Tamara Myles  43:23 

So many people, I think my husband, he's such a great leader. I learned so much from him. And yesterday, at the event, you know, so many people were coming up to me and just saying, like, what a great leader he is, how much they love working for him. And I'm just really proud of him. 

Wes Adams  43:41 

How much do you think that's a result of everything you've taught him over, right? 

Tamara Myles  43:44 

Of course, he's a great student of my work. 

Marcel Schwantes  43:53 

I'll let you work. I'll let you two work that out later around the dinner table. Okay, less if you weren't doing the work that you do now, what would you have chosen as a profession? 

Wes Adams  44:07 

Oh, that's such a great question. To be honest, I love what I do right now, and I haven't thought about doing something else in a long time. My early career, I spent the first 10 years in hospitality, running restaurants, nightclubs, event space in different parts of the country. And I love gathering people together, you know, I love events and that, you know, just that whole the vibe of it and creating experiences for people. And so I think maybe I would be back in that space, or some version of that space, I think would be, would be nice. 

Marcel Schwantes  44:50 

There you go. All right, Tamara, name a person dead or alive that you would love to have dinner with? 

Wes Adams  44:58 

My grandfather. He's such an important part of my life growing up and and he was an incredible, humble leader. He did not even finish high school. He was the youngest of 12 kids, and with one of his older brothers, they built a company in a transportation business in Brazil that is huge, one of the biggest ones, and he was so beloved as a leader. And I wish that, knowing what I know now about meaning, driven leadership and all of that, that I could ask him some questions and hear some of his stories firsthand. 

Marcel Schwantes  45:34 

That's great. That's great. Wes, favorite memory as a child. 

Wes Adams  45:38 

Oh, wow. Who memory as a child that, I mean, that's a that's a tough one. I think I have a, like, a very fun I grew up in Florida, and I have a very fond memory of going to Disney World and meeting the, you know, you can do this breakfast with the characters where, like, you have breakfast and Mickey Mouse comes and Donald Duck and all of that stuff. And I think the at that age, I remember just being like, blown away by the fact that these characters were in the room with me and just kind of getting to experience that magic, I think was something that stuck with me. 

Marcel Schwantes  46:23 

That's great, that's great. All right, this is for both of you. I'll start with Tamara, your biggest hope for humanity. 

Tamara Myles  46:31 

I think my biggest hope for humanity. So part of the reason why Wes and I do this work, a huge part, right, is because we believe that our workplaces are the biggest lever for increasing well being at a global scale, right? We spend, like you said in the beginning, we spend more waking hours working than doing anything else, and our workplaces are one of the last places where people with different points of view from different backgrounds still come together to work towards a shared goal. And so when that experience, when that third of our waking hours can be meaningful, we bring that home with us. We're happier at home, we then that happiness spreads three degrees, our families, our friends, our communities. And so my biggest hope is that more people can have a great experience at work that feels meaningful, and they can bring that home, and that, you know, kind of ripples through an increase in global well being. 

Marcel Schwantes  47:32 

How about you, Wes? 

Wes Adams  47:36 

Yes, like, absolutely to everything that Tamara just said, and yeah, I would say, like, we're living in a really difficult period right now, and it can feel, you know, like I feel overwhelmed at times. Sometimes I'm like, I don't know if there's anything I can do about this, or if I'm having an impact. And I think that, you know, one of the, you know, as researchers at Penn and you know, kind of like students of the school that we are, we've also studied a lot of resilience skills. And you know, one of the biggest things that impacts people's resilience and their outcomes in life is their mindset and the belief that you have agency and that you can change things, that there are things that you can control and that you can make an impact on your own life and others. And so I would say just remembering that you do have, you know, power. You do have the ability to make a difference in the world, whether that's big or small. And if we all remember that, and if we all lean into that in our own way, we can change the direction of things that are happening. We can change the course of how things are moving. And you know, each of us can play a little bit of a role in that. 

Marcel Schwantes  48:56 

Love it. Love it. Well, you have both survived the speed round. Okay. We bring it home with two questions, as we do with every quest every guest, the first one is the love questions. So sticking with themes we've talked about, or maybe from how you lead yourselves you and lead people around you. How do we lead with more practical, actionable love and care, day in and day out, Tamara. 

Tamara Myles  49:25 

It's really interesting. When we were doing coding our study, the first round was a qualitative study, and when we were coding the study, as these practices started coming up, Wes and I were like, This is love, like these people and these examples, they were talking about love, about believing in people, about wanting the best for their team. You know, this is exactly what I say about my children. It's what I want for them. And so I think all the practices in the book and all the 3c have an undercurrent of love running through them. And so I would say one thing that. You can do, besides all you know, all the the tips and advice that we've given, if you just remember one thing is, is go tell someone that if it wasn't for them. So our research partner has a sentence starter that just says, if it wasn't for you, and then tell them what difference they make. 

Wes Adams  50:23 

I love that one, and that's Zach Mercurio, and he just came out with a book The Power of mattering. That's fantastic, and you should pick it up if you have not already. Yeah, I would say put down your phone, step away from your computer and just talk to somebody, how was your day? What you know, what's going on with you? And pay attention to the answer and try to learn more about them. Lean in with curiosity. It's something that, again, is not complicated, but we're so busy we've got all these things to do, and it's hard to pull ourself away from those things. And that's what actually matters at the end of the day. So just remembering to intentionally create the space for that is very powerful. 

Marcel Schwantes  51:13 

That's great. That's great. All right, real quickly, one key takeaway that people can bring home with them, Tamara, what would that be? 

Tamara Myles  51:22 

People want to feel like they matter and like what they do matters. And so whether you use one of the practices that we share today, or whether you have your own ideas on how to make people feel like they belong, like they matter and people understand, like, what they're doing every day matters. Go and show them. 

Marcel Schwantes  51:45 

Yeah, yeah. What about you? Wes, what's your key takeaway? 

Wes Adams  51:49 

I mean, I return to just say thank you. Just remember to do it. You know, it's, there's research from Gallup and work human that we like to cite that's recent that says one thank you once a week from a manager is enough to cut disengagement and burnout in half, which is such a small thing, and less than 40% of the people in that study felt adequately recognized for their work. So this is a huge opportunity. It's easy, and you should just go to it today, right now, as soon as you finish listening to this podcast, text someone or email someone thank you for something. 

Marcel Schwantes  52:21 

Well stated. Gang, this is a book that you must have in your library. Again, it's called a meaningful work, how to ignite passion and performance in every employee. If you're watching on YouTube, there is the cover of it. Get it wherever books are sold. And hey, I would love to send just a boatload of people to find out more about you. Where can they go? What, what websites and places can we find out more about you guys? 

Tamara Myles  52:50 

So our website is www.makeworkmeaningful.com, and on there, we have the free assessment you can take. We also have a ton of free resources. You can download worksheets and exercises. You can run with your team in your next meeting. And we're also both very active on both LinkedIn and Instagram. We're sharing the latest research or thinking some videos and fun stats so you can follow us there. 

Marcel Schwantes  53:21 

I was stoked before we got on. I'm even more stoked after the conversation. There's so many nuggets of great information and folks again, dig into this book. I mean, yes, listen to this, this episode, over and over again, but go find that book. Get it is so chock full of all kinds of tips and strategies and good advice. So I thank you both for being here and just for contributing to this conversation. Yeah, gang, you can keep the conversation going on social media, as you always do. It's #loveinaction podcast, and look for my show notes, plus the YouTube link to this very episode and all of that stuff you can find on my website. Marcel schwantes.com for tomorrow and Wes and yours truly remember in the end, loved ones, we'll see you next time.