Meaning: The Competitive Advantage of Purpose, Comprehension, and Significance
Future Competences for Leaders and Changemakers
Future Competencies for Leaders and Changemakers is a series designed to help you develop the critical skills needed to address today’s most pressing challenges, navigate complexity, inspire action, and drive meaningful change. It highlights essential skills and practical exercises to strengthen them—including those that are often overlooked or not yet fully recognised for their value.
Skill #1: Futures Literacy: The Art of Making Use of Tomorrow
Skill #2: Being: The Most Underrated Future Skill
Skill #3: Inner Development: The Bridge Between Business and Personal Growth
Skill #4: Deep Listening: The Future Demands an Ancient Skill
Skill #5: Breathing: Regulating Your Day with Simplicity
Skill #6: Creativity: Real-World Problem Solving
👉 Skill #7: Meaning: The Competitive Advantage of Creating Purpose
In a world where AI and automation take over the routine, the measurable, and the predictable, what remains uniquely and irreplaceably human?
Perhaps it's creativity—yet, AI is already generating art and music. It might be emotional intelligence. However, one meta-skill will define success in the coming decades, a simple and profound quality: our ability to create and experience meaning.
The Meaning of Crisis and the Meaning Economy
We're living through a curious paradox. Material abundance has never been greater in developed economies, yet studies show increasing rates of disengagement, burnout, and what some philosophers call "existential vacancy" – the gnawing sense that something essential is missing.
The statistics tell a compelling story: the average worker would willingly sacrifice 23% of their future earnings for work that feels consistently meaningful1. This isn't just idealism—it's practical economics.
When work lacks meaning, people deliver the minimum required effort. When work resonates with purpose, they voluntarily exceed expectations, producing levels of craftsmanship and innovation otherwise unattainable.
As Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, quoted: "Those who have a 'why' to live for can bear almost any 'how'2." This insight is becoming increasingly relevant to our economic future.
Why Meaning Matters More Now
For most of human history, survival and stability were enough. Work was primarily a means to secure food, shelter, and safety. However, as these basic needs have been met by growing segments of the population, we've collectively moved up Maslow's hierarchy. Self-actualisation isn't a luxury—it's becoming an economic imperative.
Think about it this way: AI and automation excel at optimisation, but they cannot determine what is worth optimising for. While machines can answer "how," they cannot tell us "why." This fundamentally human territory—deciding what matters and why—represents the new frontier of essential workplace skills.
As Daniel Pink articulates in his work on motivation, purpose (alongside autonomy and mastery3) drives peak performance in cognitive work. As routine cognitive tasks become automated, the remaining human contribution centres increasingly on purpose-driven innovation and meaning-creation.
Meaning as Competitive Advantage
Organisations that foster meaningful work enjoy measurable benefits:
Higher retention rates in an era of talent scarcity
Greater discretionary effort from employees
Increased innovation and craftsmanship
Better health outcomes and reduced absenteeism
Higher rates of promotion and advancement
Individuals who find meaning in their work demonstrate greater resilience during challenges and greater adaptability during change. They're also positioned to thrive as meaning-making becomes increasingly central to valuable human contribution.
The Three Dimensions of Meaning
Psychologist Michael Steger4 breaks down meaningfulness into three essential components:
Comprehension: This refers to the ability to make sense of our experiences and understand how they fit together. It involves creating a cognitive framework that helps us organise knowledge about the world and our place in it.
Purpose: This component involves having valued goals that drive our actions. Purpose is about having long-term aspirations that motivate us and give direction to our lives.
Significance: This is about perceiving our lives and contributions as valuable. It involves feeling that our existence matters and that we make a difference in some way.
These dimensions give us a framework for developing meaning as a skill rather than treating it as something we passively encounter or mysteriously lack.
From Meaning to "Mattering"
While "meaning" can feel abstract and philosophical, "mattering" offers a more concrete framework. Mattering is the feeling of making a difference in the world—of having an impact that others recognise and value.
This concept bridges the philosophical search for meaning with practical workplace concerns. Everyone intuitively understands that we need to feel our work matters, and often, organisations can help highlight this impact.
Cultivating Meaning: A Practical Guide
Like any valuable capability, meaning can be cultivated through deliberate practice. Here's how to strengthen this critical future skill:
1. Practice Active Reflection
Set aside time regularly to consider your personal growth. What new understanding have you gained? Where have you developed new capabilities? How have you contributed value? The most common source of meaningful work is conscious awareness of personal development.
Try this: At the end of each week, write down three ways you grew or contributed that align with your values.
2. Connect to Impact
Identify how your work affects others—colleagues, customers, or the broader community. When we recognise how our efforts matter to someone else, our sense of purpose strengthens.
Try this: Follow your work downstream. Who ultimately benefits from what you do? How does your contribution, however small, improve someone's life?
3. Diversify Your Sources of Meaning
As Frankl noted, meaning comes through multiple channels: achievement, experience, and even our response to suffering and challenge. Don't rely exclusively on any single source.
Try this: Think of your career and life as a "meaning portfolio"—not just a mix of jobs, but an intentional blend of work, relationships, creative pursuits, and community involvement. Each piece contributes to your overall sense of fulfilment, ensuring that if one area shifts, others continue to provide a sense of purpose and stability.
4. Align Values and Activities
Regularly audit how your daily work connects to your core values. Where disconnects exist, look for opportunities to bring these into greater harmony—either by reframing your current role or by gradually shifting your responsibilities.
Try this: Identify your three to five core values and rate how well your current activities express each one. Look for smalladjustments that increase alignment.
5. Develop Meaning Literacy
Learn to recognise and articulate what makes experiences meaningful to you. This "meaning literacy" helps you design your work and life more intentionally around sources of significance.
Try this: Notice moments when you feel especially engaged and energised. What elements are present? Use these insights to engineer more meaningful experiences.
👉 My CoR Thrive Program deeply emphasises all five of these principles. If this resonates with you, keep an eye out for the Summer Cohort—applications open in May!
The Organizational Imperative
For leaders, fostering meaning isn't just good ethics—it's good business. Organisations can:
Create environments where all employees feel like knowledge workers with agency and growth
Emphasise service orientation by highlighting positive impact
Provide growth opportunities and learning pathways
Ensure transparent communication about organisational purpose
Recognise contributions visibly and specifically
The Future Belongs to Meaning-Makers
As we navigate economic uncertainty and technological transformation, meaning-making emerges as the meta-skill that enables all others. It fuels our motivation, directs our attention, and gives us the resilience to adapt.
The future workforce will be divided not between those who work with technology and those who don't, but between those who can create meaning and those who cannot. By deliberately cultivating this capacity now, we position ourselves to thrive in the economy of tomorrow—one where human flourishing and economic value become increasingly aligned.
After all, meaning isn't just what we want from work—increasingly, it's what work wants from us.
What practices help you find meaning in your work and life? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
If you know someone who would benefit from this article, please share it with them. I truly appreciate more people joining the conversation about what we need as a society to build a better future.
The average employee would be willing to sacrifice 23% of their future income in order to have a job that is consistently very meaningful to them. This statement is based on a 2018 study conducted by the authors' lab, in which two thousand full-time employees in the U.S. were surveyed. This result remained consistent across different income brackets, ranging from $40,000 per year to $200,000 per year. To illustrate this, the book points out that in 2018, Americans spent about 17.5% of their income on their mortgage, meaning they would be willing to spend more on meaningful work than on their own home.
Reece, A., Yaden, D., Kellerman, G., Robichaux, A., Goldstein, R., Schwartz, B., Seligman, M. and Baumeister, R. (2019). Mattering is an indicator of organizational health and employee success. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 16(2), pp.1–21. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1689416.
Viktor E. Frankl quoted the phrase "Those who have a 'why' to live for can bear almost any 'how'" in his book Man's Search for Meaning. However, this phrase is originally attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche. Frankl used it to illustrate his observations during his time in concentration camps, where he noted that individuals with a strong sense of purpose were better able to endure the hardships they faced.
Viktor Emil Frankl and Hse Lasch (1962). Man’s search for meaning : an introduction to logotheraphy. London: Hodder And Stoughton.
Pink, Daniel H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books.
Steger, M. (2009). 64 Meaning in Life. [online] Available at: http://www.michaelfsteger.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Steger-HOPP2-Chapter-in-press.pdf [Accessed 17 Jan. 2020].