The Search for Meaningful Work
Are we doomed to mundane drudgery in our working lives?
In conversation with a younger analyst, I was reminded of how pointless the day-to-day work of a consultant can be. This analyst was working on a workshop. This involved putting together a pre-read deck that included slides from different functions, making revisions and responding to multiple stakeholders. What’s the point of this workshop anyway? Are all the hours of work after dinner worth something? Nothing like squinting at and resizing shapes in PowerPoint for a couple of hours to make you question why you worked so hard to get into this line of work! Where’s all the glitz and glamor now?
We have lofty ideals and are on a quest for meaningful work. We want our time to be spent contributing towards a higher purpose, we want to point to something and say, “I made a real impact” and feel that our time and effort was worth the outcome. Those are valid desires. I’m not here to trot out some curmudgeonly line about how “work is hard/boring, suck it up” like my father would. I am here to tell you that you have to really recalibrate your expectations and shift your perspective to find the meaning written between the lines of your work.
When we say “work” we usually think of the day-to-day tasks. Take the everyday experience of a research scientist trying to isolate a gene that causes cancer. What do you think they do when they walk into the lab every day? In addition to a lot of waiting and writing, they have a lot of repetitive tasks they have to get through: breed mice, select mice, cull mice, breed more mice, for example. (Poor mice.) I’d argue disposing of mice deemed unfit for your specific line of research is not at all glamorous. It’s hardly meaningful; can you really imagine finding flow because you’re extinguishing life from this batch of animals you just spent weeks waiting to be born?
But wait - the greater purpose all these repetitive, boring and even mindless tasks add up to is truly great: if the research succeeds in identifying a gene that causes cancer, any cancer, it would save human lives! And herein we find our first lesson about meaningful work: the end goal and final impact of what you do could truly be worthwhile, but the steps you take to get there ain’t gonna be sexy.
Luckily for consultants, there’s an additional mindset shift to help with the pursuit of meaning through the activities that also pay the bills.
I recommend asking “What is this for?” of all your tasks and projects when you start out in consulting. (Or, frankly, at any point.) This question helps you contextualize what you’re doing. You will learn the industry and/or your client’s function by understanding how this task/project fits into the bigger picture of what your client’s organization is trying to accomplish. The answer to “What is this for?” isn’t going to give you capital-P Purpose; you’re not going to be asked to reformat some slides or build a Gantt chart that will “save the lives of thousands of people suffering from Disease X.” It’s tempting to want an immediate Purpose “payout” from our work at the end each day, but that’s not where the meaning of our labor lives.
Narrow your focus: your job as a consultant is to support your client and their goals. (Making them look good doesn’t hurt either!) Say your client is hosting a workshop. Why are they hosting a workshop? What is this workshop for? A workshop serves as a public and visible method of inviting collaboration and getting alignment. It’s a way of saying, “Hey, here’s your chance: speak now or forever hold your peace.” You might be looking for new ideas from the group during the workshop, but you’re just as likely looking for that elusive corporate “alignment.”
With that in mind, ask yourself: is your client trying to rally internal teams and get support for an initiative? To build a business case and get budget allocated? What does this initiative have the potential to achieve? If this initiative succeeds, what impact will it have? What doors would it open for other initiatives, and what impact would those potential future initiatives have? (We’re getting pretty hypothetical here, but stick with the exercise.) Hopefully, somewhere further down the chain of optimistic successes, you’ll find capital-P Purpose - with luck, it’ll even be one that truly resonates with your values. If so, wonderful! Keep your eye on the prize, because that’s what you’re working towards.
Lesson two: embrace the fact that there are layers of purpose, and true impact is not the first layer. You have to peel the onion to find capital-P Purpose (and the process might make you cry a little bit). Layer one: help your client succeed and make them look good. Layer two: their success brings more opportunities, both for your consulting business, and for their organization’s objectives. Layer three: what’s the significance of your client’s organization’s objectives?
To recap, in your search for meaning in your work:
Adjust your expectations: doing meaningful work in the corporate world is a far cry from waking up energized every morning, bounding to your computer, proclaiming, “I can’t wait to do…” Not looking forward to Monday morning isn’t a definitive sign that your work is not meaningful.
Think about how your immediate work is contributing to the bigger picture. It all adds up to a greater business and/or societal outcome. Keep that purpose in mind; it’s the difference you could be making to the world.
Last tip: if you need motivation in the present for why you do what you do, it helps to like (and dare I say, care about) your client. As a person. But even if you don’t, remember that your professional duty is still first and foremost to support them in whatever they have engaged your services for.
Once upon a time, an MBA classmate dropped what was supposed to be a comforting line when I had been invited back straight to the final round but failed to secure an offer with McKinsey: “No consultant has ever changed the world, Angela.”
I’m not so sure about that. Sure, consultants don’t often get credit for their work. If they’re successful, their clients do. If they’re horrendously unsuccessful, consultants might get the blame (but witness how McKinsey’s reputation can survive a lot of scandals). We can have a whole philosophical debate about how to really attribute credit for results, and how much direct versus indirect contribution should be credited. (But we won’t right now.)
Does this mean consulting has no real impact? That consultants cannot, through their direct labor output, “change the world”? I contend it’s a matter of philosophy and perspective, and that if you zoom out far enough to consider how your actions “ladder up” and contribute to a greater, coordinated effort to make something happen, you’ll find that your work does indeed have the ability to change the world. Upon that evaluation, I hope you would be satisfied with what you find as the ultimate purpose of your work, and find your day-to-day tasks more bearable with that meaning in mind.